But Handel resembled the mythical Antaeus, who whenever he fell renewed his own powers by contact with Mother Earth. Before long he was turning out masterpieces in bewildering continuity. In 1723 he composed the superb “Ottone”, in 1724 “Tamerlano” and “Giulio Cesare” and the following season the sumptuous “Rodelinda”; in 1726 “Scipione”, and “Alessandro”, in 1727 “Admeto” and “Riccardo I”, in 1728 “Siroe” and “Tolomeo.” This period, incidentally, brings us to those excesses of singer worship and rivalry which stirred the public to white heat and turned the opera house into something between a wild prize fight and a three ring circus. Then, in 1722-23, the species prima donna suddenly invaded the scene, in the person of Francesca Cuzzoni, who was squat and ungainly, but had an astounding voice and an art of song that made high society overlook her bad temper and her worse style in dress. Handel had occasion to experience her tantrums at the rehearsals of “Ottone”, when she refused to sing an aria as the composer wanted it; whereupon he had recourse to real “Taming of the Shrew” tactics, seized her bodily and threatened to throw her out of the window, at the same time shouting to her in French: “Oh, Madame, I know full well that you are a real she-devil; but I intend to teach you that I am Beelzebub, the Chief of Devils!” Whereupon the humbled Cuzzoni sang her “Falsa imagine” exactly as Handel wanted. Possibly the incident did not end Handel’s difficulties with her but in her relations with him she became more tractable and if she could not subdue the insensitive master she did subdue her audiences. “Damme, she has a nest of nightingales in her belly!”, yelled one of the gallery gods on a certain occasion and the plebeian indelicacy seems to have won the approval of the boxes. Soon Anastasia Robinson, revolted by the turmoil over Cuzzoni, retired from stage life and married the Earl of Peterborough.

Cuzzoni, however, was only one obstacle of her kind. Soon afterwards the management, on the lookout for another sensation, secured the soprano’s most hated Continental rival, Faustina Bordoni, who was to become the wife of the composer Hasse. Handel brought the pair on the stage together in his opera “Alessandro”. Lady Pembroke was “protectress” of Cuzzoni, Lady Burlington of Faustina. Finally, in May, 1727, things culminated when the two jealous creatures came to blows during a performance of Bononcini’s “Astyanax”, tore each others hair and pummeled one another in full view of the spectators, who took sides and shrieked with delight as the coiffures of the combatants were ruined and faces scratched. The “fighting cats”, as the pair were called, later were made the subject of Colley Cibber’s farce, “The Rival Queens”.

In time Cuzzoni despite her lack of taste in dressing was to set fashions; and a brown and silver attire in which she appeared in “Rodelinda” so captivated the ladies that, with modish variations, it was to be the rage for years. The various castrati (notably the great Senesino) were in many ways as capricious and difficult to manage as the prima donnas. Senesino, having irritated the Earl of Peterborough by reason of some reflection on Anastasia Robinson was flogged by her husband. The scandal enchanted the drawing rooms and Society was even more delighted when the singer, appearing in “Giulio Cesare” was frightened out of his wits and burst into tears because a piece of scenery fell at his feet at the very moment when, as Julius Caesar, he had to sing words to the effect that “Caesar knows no fear!”

In time came the greatest castrato of them all, the incredible Farinelli, who earned so much in London that when he retired to Italy he built himself a palace there which he sarcastically named “English Folly”. People used to shout at the Opera that there was only “One God and one Farinelli!” And describing a London birthday party where this divinity was among the guests the Duchess of Portland wrote: “There were about forty gentlemen that had an entertainment, and Farinelli wore a magnificent suit of clothes, and charmed the company with his voice as Orpheus did (and so kept them from drinking).” On the other hand when this god was once so imprudent as to walk uninvited into a party at the Duke of Modena’s in St. James’s Street the infuriated host showed him the door with the words: “Get out, fellow! None but gentlemen come here!”

All these scandals, spectacular squabbles and silly exhibitions did not, in the long run, enhance the credit of the Academy. Handel, who had been naturalized on February 13, 1726 and at the same time been appointed Composer to the Court and to the Chapel Royal, was together with the rest of London, shocked in the early summer of 1727, to learn of the death of George I on a trip to Germany. On October 11 of the same year George II was crowned and, though less favorably disposed to the composer than his father, continued the pensions Handel held from the late sovereign and from Queen Anne and contributed to them another large sum for music lessons to the young princesses. Handel, for his part, wrote for the new King four Coronation Anthems which added to his glory. The Academy, after losing an appalling amount of money presently received its death blow, the production at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields of “The Beggar’s Opera”, by the clever satirist, John Gay, with music compiled by Dr. Pepusch, Handel’s predecessor in the employ of the Duke of Chandos. This “ballad opera”, that “made Gay rich and Rich, the manager, gay”, which still leads a lusty existence, and has been at various times a landmark in English and American theatrical history, proved an earthy and bawdy entertainment, against the barbed shafts of whose ridicule the artifices of Italian opera could not prevail for long.

Yet Handel remained incorrigible. Once again he entered into partnership with Heidegger, planned another opera season, secured Senesino again and went abroad to engage other singers. On that occasion he traveled again to Italy, went to Hamburg and made a last visit to his aged mother in Halle. She was now paralyzed, and shortly afterwards she died. The new London opera season got off to a bad start, one failure succeeding another. Politics aggravated the situation, the more so as George II and the Prince of Wales were at odds and the supporters of the latter, determined to set up a rival opera company to ruin Handel.

But the story of Handel’s pertinacious efforts to float new operatic enterprises for almost another ten years is too long, involved and too honeycombed with intrigue, contending influences and low tactics of one sort or another to be examined here. The composer’s Hanoverian origin stirred many parties against him. Moreover, he was a self-willed, imperious person, who, like Richard Wagner more than a century later, had the gift of stimulating antagonism. He was, wrote W. McNaught, “a pervading presence, a busybody forever intruding upon public affairs. He had taken to ordering the amusements of the town in his own interests; and he belonged to the wrong party.” One almost fancies oneself confronted with a chapter from the life of the creator of “Die Meistersinger!”

Yet what a treasury of glorious music Handel was pouring out with incalculable lavishness during these agitated years! Let us mention in passing a few of the new operas as they came and went: “Ezio”, “Orlando”, “Il Pastor Fido”, “Ariodante”, “Alcina”, “Arminio”, “Berenice”, “Faramondo”, “Serse”. The last-named calls for a word by itself. “Xerxes” has nothing to do with the Persian ruler of antiquity. It is a comic opera, Handel’s first and only one, which stands up extraordinarily well under modern stylized conditions of revival, apart from which it contains possibly one of the most universally beloved melodies that Handel ever wrote. This melody, heard at the very opening of the piece, appears in the score as a larghetto to the words “Ombra mai fu”, a song of gratitude to a plane tree for its beneficent shade. But for generations it has been slowed from the pace originally prescribed to a solemn, swelling hymn known to uncounted millions as “Handel’s Largo.” And far more know it as a churchly canticle than its lightly moving operatic context. Almost every one of this mass of operas, furthermore, is charged with grand arias of all the emotional varieties common to its epoch—gems enshrined in practically every one of the great anthologies of the 18th Century song.

It was not till 1741 that Handel concluded his period of operatic creativity with “Deidamia”, written to a libretto by Paolo Rolli. London’s taste for opera had, during more than a decade shown continued fluctuation. But in 1731 a new situation brought about an event that was to provoke a development of capital importance for Handel’s future. The children of the Chapel Royal presented in a private performance his masque, “Esther”, on the composer’s birthday. The success of the performance was such that it resulted in others, one of which was given without Handel’s consent by one of his rivals. The master was equal to the occasion. He added some numbers to the score and gave half a dozen representations at the King’s Theatre; but as a Biblical subject could not be acted on the stage the masque was given in concert form, in the presence of the royal family and of High Society. The Handelian oratorio had more or less come into being!

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