Not sleep to toil so easing,
As these dear smiles to me.”
“Help! Galatea! Help, ye parent gods!
And take me dying to your deep abodes.”
Alexander’s Feast.
Handel composed the music for Dryden’s immortal ode in 1736. In the original score the close of the first part is dated January 5, and the end of the work January 17, showing rapid composition. Three years before this time he had had a violent quarrel with Senesino, his principal singer at the opera-house in the Haymarket, which led to his abandonment of the theatre and its occupancy by his rival, Porpora. After an unsuccessful attempt to compete with the latter, which nearly bankrupted him in health and purse, he decided to quit opera altogether. He sought relief for his physical ailments at Aix-la-Chapelle, and upon his return to London in October, 1735, publicly announced that “Mr. Handel will perform Oratorios and have Concerts of Musick this Winter at Covent Garden Theatre.” One of the first works for these concerts was “Alexander’s Feast,” completed, as stated above, Jan. 17, 1736. The poem was prepared by Newburgh Hamilton, who says in his preface:—
“I determined not to take any unwarrantable liberty with the poem, which has long done honor to the nation, and which no man can add to or abridge in anything material without injuring it. I therefore confined myself to a plain division of it into airs, recitatives or choruses, looking upon the words in general so sacred as scarcely to violate one in the order of its first place. How I have succeeded the world is to judge, and whether I have preserved that beautiful description of the passions, so exquisitely drawn, at the same time I strove to reduce them to the present taste in sounds. I confess my principal view was, not to lose this favorable opportunity of its being set to music by that great master who has with pleasure undertaken the task, and who only is capable of doing it justice; whose compositions have long shown that they can conquer even the most obstinate partiality, and inspire life into the most senseless words. If this entertainment can in the least degree give satisfaction to the real judges of poetry or music, I shall think myself happy in having promoted it; being persuaded that it is next to an improbability to offer the world anything in those arts more perfect than the united labors and utmost efforts of a Dryden and a Handel.”
In addition to the preface Hamilton appended a poem “To Mr. Handel on his setting to Musick Mr. Dryden’s Feast of Alexander,” in which he enthusiastically sings:—
“Two glowing sparks of that celestial flame