‘Agrippina,’ the opera mentioned above, did service in furnishing melodies for an oratorio, La Resurrezione, at once an outstanding instance of Handel’s transition from opera to oratorio and of his somewhat ruthless practice of using musical material for widely varying purposes. The use of Agrippina’s air, both words and music, for the character of Mary Magdalen is little calculated to recommend Handel’s early works for devotional expression. But it surpassed in dramatic intensity anything in that form produced so far, for with the Italian melodic suavity Handel combined from the first the rich harmonic sonority peculiar to the Germans, so happily fusing the old polyphonic and new monodic ideals that many of his early works already ‘bear,’ as Riemann says, ‘the stamp of classicism.’ It is interesting to note, however, that in Resurrezione Handel makes such scant use of his contrapuntal powers that we find but two brief choruses in the entire work. It is an open question whether this oratorio was originally intended for presentation in a theatre, or, minus all action, in a church; nor is it known whether or not it was ever publicly performed.
After a stay of almost five years Handel prepared to return to Germany, for, through the good offices of Steffani, who held the post of kapellmeister to the Duke of Hanover, Handel secured that position as Steffani’s successor in 1710. As he had, however, already had several invitations to go to London, then the great stronghold of Italian opera, he accepted his new post only on condition that he might visit that metropolis. He did so in the same year and was so occupied and so carried away with success that he remained six months. As this is practically the beginning of Handel’s English period, we may preface it by a few remarks upon the state of music in England at that time.
III
Following the death of Henry Purcell (in 1695), who had produced thirty-nine English operas, or ‘half-operas,’ as Chrysander calls them, since they consisted of drama interspersed with ‘musical scenes’—music in England had for several years been confined to vocal and instrumental concerts and comic singing and dancing entertainments. Thus the beautiful seed of Purcell’s genius had fallen upon barren ground; the promise of an English school of opera which seemed to lie in his work remained unfulfilled. Taste had degenerated to such a degree that the time was ripe for the successful introduction of Italian opera, the ‘exotic and irrational entertainment’ which Johnson made the subject of his caustic censure. Beginning with 1705 the Drury Lane Theatre and later the Haymarket became the scenes of triumph for Italian singers displaying their art in the degenerate works of their countrymen. With the production of ‘Thamyris, Queen of Scythia,’ in which airs of Scarlatti and Bononcini were used in arrangements by John Pepusch[143] there came into vogue that confusion of tongues which Addison ridiculed in the Spectator. After commenting upon the rhetorical absurdities of the erstwhile translations, he says: ‘The next step to our refinement was the introducing of Italian actors into our opera who sung their parts in their own language at the same time that our countrymen performed theirs in our native tongue. The king or hero of the play generally spoke in Italian and his slaves answered him in English. The lover frequently made his court and gained the heart of his princess in a language which she did not understand. One would have thought it very difficult to have carried on dialogues after this manner without an interpreter between the persons that conversed together, but this was the state of the English stage for about three years. At length the audience grew tired of understanding half the opera and, therefore, to ease themselves entirely of the fatigue of thinking, have so ordered it at present that the whole opera is performed in an unknown tongue. We no longer understand the language of our own stage, insomuch that I have often been afraid when I have seen our Italian performers chattering in the vehemence of action, that they have been calling us names and abusing us among themselves....’ A little further on he says, ‘At present our notions of music are so very uncertain that we do not know what it is we like, only, in general, we are transported with anything that is not English, so it be of a foreign growth, let it be Italian, French, or High Dutch, it is the same thing. In short, our English music is quite rooted out and nothing yet planted in its stead.’
This was indeed the state of things when Handel settled in London. No wonder, then, that ‘Rinaldo,’ composed by him in the space of two weeks to the words of Aaron Hill, the director of the Haymarket Theatre, was a tremendous success. The popularity of the music was such that the stirring march occurring in the score was adapted by the Life Guards as their regimental march to be used for nearly half a century thereafter. But we are prone to think that the public’s enthusiasm was at least equally due to the vocal pyrotechnics of Niccolini Grimaldi, who, as Rinaldo, electrified his hearers in Cara sposa and many other splendid arias, and the gorgeous staging, which presented, among other things, a garden filled with live birds. ‘Rinaldo’ held the boards of the Haymarket for fifteen consecutive nights and was afterward revived in Hamburg and Naples. When Handel returned to Hanover at the close of the opera season his taste for the duties of kapellmeister had evidently been spoiled by his English experience, for he soon applied for and received permission for a second visit, on condition that he return within a reasonable time. He went there in November, 1712, and produced another opera, Il pastor fido, which was not so successful.[144] He was as much admired in other directions, however, as, for instance, when he would play the closing voluntaries at St. Paul’s Cathedral upon the invitation of the organist, Maurice Greene, who, it is said, even volunteered to blow the organ so that he might hear Handel play.
Meantime Handel showed no intention to return to Hanover. Upon the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht, March 31, 1713, he was commanded to write music for its celebration by Queen Anne, for whom he had already written a birthday ode in February of the same year. The Te Deum and Jubilate, largely based on Purcell’s composition of that name, which is still being annually performed at St. Paul’s, was the result, and he was rewarded by the queen with a life annuity of £200. He had not yet made up his mind to end his somewhat prolonged leave of absence when his patron appeared in London as George I of England, for, in the meantime, Queen Anne had died and the Hanoverian dynasty was brought in by the Whigs, to whom the Peace of Utrecht and Queen Anne, both sources of Handel’s favor, were most obnoxious. Naturally Handel was now in disfavor at court, but, through the good offices of his friend, the Baron Kielmannsegge, matters were adjusted in this wise. Handel was persuaded to compose a series of short instrumental pieces to be played in a barge following the king during a nocturnal excursion upon the Thames. This ‘Water Music’ so pleased the king that he inquired as to its composer, and, finding that he was none other than his former kapellmeister, demanded him into his presence to bestow upon him a pension equal to that which he had received from Queen Anne. His engagement as music master to the daughter of the prince of Wales soon brought his income up to £600. In 1716 he accompanied the king on a visit to Hanover and there composed his famous Brockes’ passion Der für die Sünden der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus.
Further impetus for the composition of sacred music came to Handel through his appointment as chapel-master to the wealthy duke of Chandos, who lived in extraordinarily magnificent style at his palace, Cannons, in Edgeware, where he had built a private chapel after the Italian manner. With a splendid organ, good singers, and competent orchestra at his command Handel was in a position to furnish fittingly magnificent music. Here he composed two Te Deums and the twelve Chandos Anthems set for chorus and solos after the style developed since Purcell, in which we may see the root form of the English oratorio soon to follow. The first of these, indeed, followed soon after. It was a setting of a text by Humphrey arranged from Racine’s ‘Esther.’ Much of the music was taken from his earlier Passion, though its former use was radically different. After its original performance at Cannons in August, 1720, when the duke made Handel a present of £1,000 as a token of his appreciation, ‘Esther’ was performed several times in public. The serenata ‘Acis and Galatea’ also belongs to the Chandos period, which was the stepping-stone to Handel’s final and greatest mission, the creation of oratorio. First, however, we must briefly review the remainder of his operatic career.
The Royal Academy of Music, formed for the production of Italian opera, engaged Handel’s services in 1719, as well as those of the celebrated Bononcini, who now also took up his residence in London.[145] As impresario Handel visited Dresden, where Italian opera flourished,[146] in order to secure a first-class company of singers, among whom were the famous male sopranos Senesino and Berselli, and Signora Salvai. ‘Radamisto’ was the first opera of Handel’s to be performed. It created a sensation which was without precedent in England. It is difficult for us to comprehend the success of this work, dead as it is to-day. Nevertheless, the applause was tremendous, the theatre was packed to the doors, and persons were finally allowed to sit on the stage. The critics considered it superior to anything yet seen on an English stage, and Handel himself considered one of its arias, Ombra cara, the best he had ever composed. Whatever our opinion to-day, there is no question that many of the forty-odd operas of which ‘Radamisto’ was the first were far superior to those of any of his contemporaries. Indeed, his star shone so brightly that it dimmed the light of every other upon the operatic firmament of Europe. Two of the operas, ‘Rinaldo’ and ‘Radamisto,’ deserve special mention for breadth of conception as well as intrinsic musical value. In these two Handel has reached at least a degree of dramatic power. He has treated with consummate skill the various sources and degrees of human passion and led his audience into a carefully woven web in which they became partakers in the subtleties of anxiety, joy, anger, and pathos. The remaining forty or so we may dismiss with a mere mention. Floridante (1721), Ottone (1723), Flavio (1723), Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano (1724), Alessandro (1726), Riccardo, Primo, Re d’Inghilterra (1727), all produced at the Royal Academy, are simply names to us. They have to-day not even a historical significance.
Of interest because of the story connected with it is Muzio szevola, in which the third act was written by Handel, the other two being supplied by his rivals, Ariosti and Bononcini. Ariosti, naturally, was out of the running, but the acts by Bononcini and Handel, both of whom had hosts of partisans, now became the subjects of a heated and general controversy which caught the entire English society in its whirl. The affair reminds of the war of Gluckists and Piccinists which at a later period set all Paris a-flutter, but, while in that case a general principle was at stake, the personal merits of the two composers were the only issue here. The triviality of the discussion is reflected in the contemporary verse of John Byron, the Lancashire poet:
‘Some say, compar’d to Bononcini,
That Mynherr Handel’s but a ninny;
Others aver that he to Handel
Is merely fit to hold a candle—
Strange, all this Difference should be
’Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.’