Opera – Week 2. Handel in London

1. Opera – Week 2. Handel in London • Upbringing in Halle as organist composer, story of Handel’s father – then gave up job as cantor for opera. • First to Hamburg 1703 (Almira, 1705) – worked with and under Keiser and Mattheson. • Then to Italy 1706-10. Moved around fast and mixed with leading composers and patrons – Corelli, Caldara and both Scarlatti’s. Other operas – Nero, Florindo, Daphne, Rodrigo. Lots of composition (particularly dramatic cantatas) and the opera Agrippina (1709) a huge success in Italy and abroad.

2. Handel Biography • Handel internationally famous at 25, and appointed music director to Elector of Hanover in 1709 on return to Germany. • Immediately got permission for leave of absence to visit London for the season 1710-11. • Again returned to Germany only to leave in 1712 for another London season. This time Handel stayed on without permission. • Queen Anne died and Elector George became King of England in 1714. The embarrassed Handel however got around the King and become the favoured composer of the court and public.

3. Opera in London • Music in the theatre was expected – almost throughout, but opera (where music was the main thing) was rare. • System of theatre patents going back to Charles II was still in operation. By 1700 there was still two licensed theatres (Betterton’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields/Queen’s Theatre Haymarket, and Christopher Rich’s Drury Lane). • By 1705 the theatre was in decline and audiences wanted entr’acte/afterpiece type entertainment. • Drury Lane patent went to John Rich who opened the new Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1714.

4. Challenge to straight theatre • Afterpieces and operas perceived a great challenge to straight theatre. • Opera in the Italian style became the rage for the fashionable set. • The elaborate settings, public spectacle and famous and novel singers produced enormous interest. • Opera seen as a challenge to the spoken word. Some like Addison, Steele and Hogarth attacked opera as foreign, extravagant, absurd and silly, etc. John Dennis wrote An Essay on the Operas after the Italian Manner (1706) attacking opera • Opera seen as a humiliation to English stage and actors.

5. Aggrippina (1709) • Unusually good text – specially written by Cardinal Grimani for Handel. • In Venetian tradition and for Venetian taste. • It is not a farcial Opera Buffa but on a scale with Opera Seria in terms of emotional and dramatic range. However it is deeply ironic and satirical. • All characters (Otho excepted) are morally worthless and full of duplicity and devious machinations. • Story is from Annals of Tactitus and Seutonius’s Life of Claudius. • Put on 27 times for enthusiastic audiences.

6. Aggripina (1709) • Characters all pretty nasty – but played by great stars. • Diversity of vocal qualities – Nero was a castrati soprano, Otho a trouser role for an alto woman, Narciso a male alto, Juno a female alto, Palante a bass-baritone, Agrippina and Poppea both leading sopranos, and Claudius and Lesbo both basses. • Plot is about succession after Claudius. Agrippina wants her son (by another marriage) Nero to succeed. Claudius gives succession to Otho a leading general and hero. Othos cares less for the succession than he does for Poppea. After much duplicity involving the roman lady/courtesan Poppea who everyone wants to bed (Claudius, Otho, Palante and Narciso) Othos gets Poppea and Nero the succession.

7. Conventions • All the conventions of Italian opera are observed – no chorus or dance; lots of arias interspersed by secco recit; singers do not sing together but have their own arias after which they exit; elaborate sets and machinary; each singer gets the number of arias appropriate to his/her role and importance; drama resides in the recits and the musical importance in the arias - many of which have orchestral sections/interjections. • Lots of borrowing – normally in the case of Handel from his earlier works but also occasionally from other composers – though re-worked and up-dated for the context.

8. Rinaldo • The conception was Aaron Hill’s. Taking scenes from Tarquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata the libretist Giocomo Rossi developed a text to show off the new theatre, Handel’s music but above all magic and effects – birds, thunder and lightening, firewords, amazing scene changes. • Performed 15 times but the cost of mounting the production was huge. • Lots of Handel borrowings (only a third of the arias were completely new)

9. Multi media show • `When I approached tge bold undertakings of staging operas in this building, I decided that no trouble of penny should be spared in order that the production should be seen in their glory, and that at least the blame would not be laid at my door should this noble form of entertainment ever become lost to this city’. Aaron Hill.

10. Synopsis • Godfrey, General of the Christian Forces in the expedition against the Saracens, to engage the assistance of Rinaldo a famous hero of those times, promises to give him his daughter Almirena, when the city Jerusalem should fall into his hands. The Christians, with Rinaldo at their head, conquer Palestine, and beseige the King Argantes in that city. Armida, an Amazonian enchantress, in love with, and beloved by Argantes, contrives by magic to entrap Rinaldo in an enchanted castle, whence after much difficulty being delivered by Godfrey, he returns to the army, takes Jerusalem, converts Argantes and Armida, to the Christian faith, and marries Almirena, according to the promise of her father Godfrey.