Handel (47 page)

The audience response was lukewarm at most. James Harris's brother Thomas, attending the first night of ‘Mr Handel's operetta' and reporting the presence of King George ‘and all the St James's royall family and a very good house', noted ‘a great many good songs' but acknowledged that ‘some of us wish again for oratorio's'. Charles Jennens thought it ‘the worst of all Handel's Compositions'.
Imeneo
failed, as Handel must have guessed it might. The appearance of a new castrato, Andreoni, and of the English soprano, Miss Edwards, was no sort of a draw, and the single repeat performance following the première on 22 November had to be postponed because Francesina was ill. Nothing daunted, Handel pressed ahead with a new opera,
Deidamia
, finished in November and brought on in the new year of 1741. Given only three performances, this too was a flop and with it the composer took his leave of the stage for good.

Ironically the work reunited him with Paolo Antonio Rolli, presumably willing to bury his dislike of ‘
l'Uomo
' and to make an honest penny by turning out a passable
melodramma
with comically equivocal overtones from the story of the youthful Achilles concealed on Scyros in female disguise by his anxious mother, Thetis.
The element of sexual ambiguity in the tale, with the fledgling hero's masculinity declaring itself
malgré tout
when shown some weapons by the wily Ulysses, made it a favourite with Baroque painters and poets. Several librettists, including Metastasio, had already produced versions of the Grecian legend by the time Rolli set his hand to it, but the text of
Deidamia
is more pointedly witty than any of these and seems to catch fire from Stampiglia. Perhaps this is how Handel wanted it: at any rate it is interesting that his last three operas all show a trend towards a lighter manner, and that
Deidamia
sometimes seems like an amused rejection of the grandiose postures of the Senesino and Cuzzoni era.

The plot and characters, among them a wonderfully brash and innocent Achilles (sung, it should be noted, by a woman), a contrasted pair of heroines, the ingénue Deidamia and a soubrette part for Nerea, and the skilfully drawn castrato role of Ulysses, ought to have made this one of Handel's liveliest dramatic works. Yet a glance at the score suggests that
Deidamia
is not an especially notable farewell to the lyric theatre and that the public verdict on it, whatever the causes, may for once have been justified. Much of the writing is sub-standard and indicative of hurry and fatigue. What are we to make, for instance, of an air like Ulisse's ‘No, quella bella non amo', which might decently pass muster in any jobbing Italian opera of the day, but will scarcely answer our expectations of the mature Handel in its mechanical semi-quaver sequences? In certain numbers he seems almost to be guying the modern style by underlining its direst trivialities, while others, like Deidamia's ‘Se il timore', are a case of the-mixture-as-before, shamelessly dusting down well-tried clichés. No wonder Burney thought the whole thing ‘languid and antique'.

Perhaps Handel, returning after so momentous a break, was browned off with opera, but the sparkle of
Imeneo
gives the lie to that. We can never know precisely why he abandoned the struggle for good, though there were plenty of contributory reasons. It is easy to imagine his exasperation at the public's indifference, during what was probably the least successful season of his entire London career.
Had there, perhaps, been a fresh Senesino or Caffarelli or a young Faustina in the offing, had Sallé danced or Mr Worman contrived a few special firework effects, the takings might have kept
Deidamia
in being. As it was, the new soprano, Monza, failed to please even the charitable Mrs Delany: ‘Her voice is between Cuzzoni's and Strada's – strong, but not harsh, her person
miserably bad
, being very low, and
excessively crooked
.'

There were always enemies to bring him down. Ever since his Haymarket ascendancy in the 1720s he had known opposition, and his famously short temper and peremptory manner with singers and instrumentalists cannot have endeared him to those who preferred wheedling and flattery to an insistence on solid musical standards. Unfortunately, despite the various examples of his having given offence during his London career, we know practically nothing of the actual nature of the quarrel. Who, for example, were the writer and the objects of the unsigned letter to Catherine Collingwood, dated 27 December 1734, among the Throckmorton papers, which says, ‘I don't pity Handell in the least, for I hope this mortification will make him a human creature; for I am sure before he was no better than a brute, when he could treat civilized people with so much brutality as I know he has done'? And what was the mysterious ‘single Disgust . . . a
faux Pas
made, but not meant', referred to by ‘J.B.' in the
London Daily Post
for 4 April 1741? This extended defence of Handel constitutes a magnificent appeal to our sense of national honour in according better treatment to the great man in our midst. ‘If we are not careful for him,' says J.B., ‘let us be for our own long-possessed Credit and Character in the polite World . . . if even such a Pride has offended, let us take it as the natural Foible of the great Genius, and let us overlook them like Spots upon the Sun . . . ' Those who had taken umbrage apparently sought to sabotage his concert nights even by ripping his advertisements off the walls. The letter closes with a heartfelt plea to Londoners not to turn their backs on him and voices the fear that he was preparing to leave England for good.

No one seemed to know exactly what he planned to do. Lord Egmont, who went to
Allegro e Penseroso
on the last night of the season, thought he was ‘intending to go to Spa in Germany', but in July Dr Dampier, bear-leader to milords on the Continent and an acquaintance of Handel's, wrote to friends in Geneva, not long after
returning to England, indicating that the composer was still in London. In the summer Handel had taken up writing Italian duets, as in Hanover days, though it is not clear whether these were merely musical exercises or written for some specific singers and occasions. But Dampier's letter also implies that he had refused offers of participation in Lord Middlesex's new opera venture, set on foot at the King's Theatre during the autumn and clearly, to Handel's practised eye, destined to the kind of expensive disaster recipe familiar from the 1730s: ‘the men of penetration give hints that his Lordship's sole aim is to make his mistress, the Muscovita, appear to great advantage on the stage.' Horace Walpole was an interested party, through his amorous penchant for Henry Seymour Conway, one of the directors, and wrote anxiously to Sir Horace Mann about ‘the improbability of eight young thoughtless men of fashion understanding economy'. Handel went to the opening night on 31 October, a pasticcio
Alessandro in Persia
, arranged from the latest Italian successes by Hasse, Pescetti, Lampugnani and others which, as he afterwards told Jennens, ‘made me very merry all along my journey'. A few days later he set off for Ireland.

His invitation to Dublin came from William, third Duke of Devonshire, who had succeeded Lord Middlesex's father, the Duke of Dorset, as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in 1737. Horace Walpole described him and his son the Marquis of Hartington as ‘the fashionable models of goodness, though if it were necessary for the good man to be perfect like the Stoic's wise man, their want of sense and generosity would have rendered their titles disputable . . . The Duke's outside was unpolished, his inside unpolishable. He loved gaming, drinking, and the ugliest woman in England, his Duchess . . .' Seeing him taking office under Sir Robert Walpole in 1731, Lord Egmont was reminded of Caligula's horse being made a consul. But his viceroyalty, continuing Dorset's benign and sensitive administration of the kingdom, showed him to be far from coarse or stupid. One historian called him ‘the most magnificent of the viceroys of this kingdom since the time of the great Ormond; for he expended his private revenue not only in a splendid stile of living, but also in works of public utility'. The request made to Handel, whom he may have met at Aachen or Tunbridge as a fellow spa-fancier, touched on both aspects. It was a feather in Dublin's cap to acquire one of the leading masters of the age and it was a distinct asset to the wealth of charitable enterprises which characterized the life of the city.

Handel's route to the coast took him through Cheshire, where he may have visited his friend Charles Legh, at Adlington, whose splendid timber-framed mansion between Wilmslow and Prestbury still contains the organ in the gallery on which the composer is said to have played. Legh, an ardent Handelian, later published a hunting song, ‘The morning is charming,' in the
Gentleman's Magazine
, which included the lines:

originally set by Ridley, the Prestbury parish organist. Handel presented his own setting to Legh in 1751 and it was subsequently incorporated in Stanley's dramatic pastoral
Arcadia
. Did Handel recall that other occasion, forty years before at Rome, when he had put his own name to music in the ‘old fool' Cardinal Pamphilj's cantata?

It was customary to board the Irish packet boats at Parkgate on the Dee, then still navigable though silting up apace. A new quay allowed ships of up to 350 tons to anchor alongside and the place was developing as a fashionable seaside resort. Dr and Mrs Delany, taking ship in 1754, found it so crowded that they only just managed to get the last bed, but they, like everyone else, had to await a favourable wind. So, of course, did Handel, who now found himself delayed for several days and spent them profitably at Chester, where he stayed at the Falcon in Northgate Street. Someone who saw him for the first time here was the young Charles Burney. ‘I was at the Public-school,' he later recalled, ‘. . . and very well remember seeing him smoke a pipe, over a dish of coffee, at the Exchange-Coffee-house; for being extremely curious to see so extraordinary a man, I watched him narrowly as long as he remained in Chester . . .' Burney's music master Edmund Baker, the cathedral organist, rustled up a scratch choir to try out some of Handel's new choruses for him, but one of them, a printer named Janson, proved sadly inadequate to the task. ‘Handel let loose his great bear upon him; and after swearing in four or five languages, cried out in broken English: “You shcauntrel! Tit you not dell me dat you could sing at sight?” “Yes, sir,” says the printer, “and so I can, but not
at first sight
.”'

The Parkgate-to-Dublin crossing, taking fourteen hours with a fair wind, was notoriously perilous and the four weekly packets were manned by an exiguous crew of a master, three sailors and a boy. Handel reached Ireland safely, however, on 18 November 1741, the event being duly chronicled in the
Dublin Journal
. The paper pointed out that he was ‘known . . . particularly for his
Te Deum
,
Jubilate
,
Anthems
, and other Compositions in Church Musick of which for some years past have principally consisted the Entertainments in the Round Church'. This was St Andrew's, scene of the annual concerts in aid of Mercer's Hospital, who announced in the same issue that divine service would be performed at the church on 10 December, with Handel's music and a sermon by Dr Delany. Minutes of a meeting by the hospital governors on the same day noted that ‘Mr Putland, Dean Owen, & Docr Wynne be & are hereby desir'd to wait on Mr Handel & ask the favour of him to play on the Organ at the Musical Performance . . .'

There were several charitable societies in the city, and their concerts formed part of a lively and sophisticated musical scene, supported by an aristocracy many of whom were enthusiastic amateur performers. Master of the State Music in Ireland until 1727 had been Johann Sigismund Kusser, whom Handel had known both in Hamburg and in London, and he was followed by the violinist Matthew Dubourg. It was Dubourg's job to provide the royal birthday ode for the Lord-Lieutenant at the Castle, but he was generally better known as a soloist than a composer. Once he visited an Irish country fair at Dunboyne, disguised as a wandering fiddler, but all his attempts at rough playing could not conceal his sweetness of tone ‘and the audience crowded so about him, that he was glad to make his escape'. Francesco Geminiani too, though ultimately passed over as Kusser's successor on the grounds that he was a Catholic, visited Dublin in 1737 and later returned to spend the last years of his life there.

From his lodgings in Abbey Street Handel now took subscriptions for six concerts to be given ‘in the New Musick-Hall in Fishamble street' first opened two months earlier.
Allegro e Penseroso
was given with three concertos on 23 December, and the
Dublin Journal
reported ‘a more numerous and polite Audience than ever was seen upon the like Occasion.
The Performance was superior to any Thing of the Kind in this Kingdom before; and our Nobility and Gentry to show their Taste for all Kinds of Genius, expressed their great Satisfaction, and have already given all imaginable Encouragement to this grand Musick.'

The season had begun auspiciously, and Handel was able to write exultantly to Jennens that the subscription scheme was a triumph ‘so that I needed not sell one single Ticket at the Door . . . the Musick sound delightfully in this charming Room, which puts me in such Spirits (and my Health being so good) that I exert my self on my Organ with more than usual Success . . . I cannot sufficiently express the kind treatment I receive here, but the Politeness of this generous Nation cannot be unknown to You, so I let You judge of the satisfaction I enjoy, passing my time with Honour, profit, and pleasure.' The Duke of Devonshire attended all the performances with his family and was prepared to ask the King to extend the royal permission apparently necessary for Handel's stay in Ireland so that more concerts could be given.