“Mr. Handel” visited Hanover, Düsseldorf, Dresden and Halle, where he went to his birthplace “Am Schlamm”, saw his old mother, who was going blind, and her aging spinster sister. And at this point occurred one of the most poignant incidents of musical history—that meeting of Handel and Bach, thwarted by an inscrutable destiny. Bach learned that his contemporary was in Halle, went there on foot from Coethen to seek him out and—missed him by a day! Even Bach’s subsequent dispatch of his son, Wilhelm Friedemann, to invite Handel to visit him misfired and the two were destined forever to remain personal strangers.
Handel secured some extraordinary singers in Dresden, where the Italian opera was blooming. In addition to Boschi, the bass, who had sung in “Rinaldo”, he bagged the great Signora Durastanti and the castrato Senesino, who until the subsequent coming of the mighty Farinelli, was perhaps the artificial soprano whom London most worshipped at a time when castrati were completely the rage. Senesino played incredible havoc with the hearts of deluded women. Handel, in addition to the countless duties of a music-director had also operas to compose, and in due season he was somehow turning out three a year. Nicola Francesco Haym supplied him with a libretto adapted from Tacitus, “Radamisto”, and this work, produced on April 27, 1720, was a triumph such as even Handel had never experienced. It ran till the season ended late in June; “crowds flocked to ‘Radamisto’ like a modern mob to a notorious prize-fight.” (Newman Flower)
The first season of the Royal Academy finished in a flourish, aided by the circumstance that the metropolis was in the throes of an orgy of financial speculation. We can read of incredible schemes and “bubbles” with the help of which money was to be lured from private pocket-books. Newman Flower tells of “one for trading in hair, another for the universal supply of funerals in Great Britain, one for a wheel of perpetual motion, one ‘for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is’.” Still another project contemplated “breeding silkworms in Chelsea Park.” By the time things were ready for the opening of the Academy’s second season Lord Burlington imported from Rome the composer Giovanni Battista Bononcini, possibly not dreaming that he was introducing a dangerous rival to Handel. In his little way Bononcini had talent and charm, as well as a conceit out of all proportion to his pleasant gifts. An opera of his was produced at the Academy with Senesino in the cast and enjoyed a good run, while a composite work, called “Muzio Scevola”, with one act by Handel, another by Bononcini and a third by a mediocrity, Filippo Mattei, followed. The results of the increasingly complicated situation were to precipitate a contest that split London’s high society into factions. The cynical John Byrom compressed it into an epigram, part of which has entered the English language:
“Some say, compared to Bononcini,
That Mynherr Handel’s but a ninny;
Others aver that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.
Strange, all this difference should be
’Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”
Be all of which as it may, Handel presently had the mortification of seeing his own new “Floridante” fail while Bononcini’s pretty “Griselda” packed the theatre like nothing since “Radamisto!”