Handel (5 page)

Hamburg's enthusiasm for its new composer was greeted with a second collaboration between Handel and Feustking, hurried into production on
Almira
's heels and ready for performance in February. The title followed the usual German Baroque practice of giving the theme first, in the ungainly form then favoured of article and noun split by an adjectival phrase, so that it reads, literally translated, ‘The Through Blood and Murder Acquired Love, or: Nero'. Handel's music has disappeared, but Feustking's text survives and we can note that the opera's subject is akin to that of
Agrippina
, with which the composer triumphantly concluded his Italian journey in 1709. Among characters common to both pieces are Nero and Poppea, while Agrippina, true to history, is instinct, in Hamburg as in Venice, with jealousy and cunning. Seneca and Octavia are also present, to remind us of Monteverdi's imperishable treatment of the theme nearly a century earlier. There are plenty of duets and choruses, and comedy is provided by Anicetus,
des Kaysers Mignon oder Liebling
, and Glaptus, Claudius's freedman, whose long mock-meditation on philosophy is followed by an aria in which he declares that he will be a
Stagiritisch
, a
Stoisch
, an
Epicurisch
and an
Eclectisch
.

Perhaps the total loss to us of Handel's music has something to do with the fact that
Nero
was a failure, withdrawn after one, or perhaps two performances. Discussing the libretto, one of the Hamburg poets who had earlier pitched into Feustking exclaimed, ‘How is a musician to create anything beautiful if he has no beautiful words?
Therefore, as in the case of the composition of the opera
Nero
, someone has not unjustly complained: “There is no spirit in the verse, and one feels vexation at setting such a thing to music.”'

The someone may have been Handel, who promptly vanished from the Gänsemarkt stage. A third opera,
Florindo
, ultimately divided into two by its librettist Heinrich Hinsch on grounds of length, was given two years later as
Der beglückte Florindo
and
Die verwandelte Daphne
, but of the score only a handful of fragments has survived. The two operas may indeed have existed as separate libretti.
^*(a)
He presumably went on playing in the opera band, and eked out his income by giving lessons to the children of Hamburg citizens. A sizeable amount of his keyboard music can be conjecturally dated to this period on stylistic and other grounds, and several voluminous chaconnes and pieces containing ideas figuring more solidly elsewhere may have been written as teaching exercises.

Handel was not temperamentally cast in the mould of a great teacher. Sir John Hawkins might be a little too partial in saying that he ‘disdained to teach his art to any but princes', but he was not one to dazzle his audience with musical science and was far too impatient and quick-tempered a man to suffer fools or slowcoaches gladly. Profoundly educative though it is to the spirit and the imagination, his music is notoriously resistant to textbook exemplification. Thus it is almost impossible to imagine him writing an
Orgelbüchlein
or an
Art of Fugue
or even compiling a notebook for some notional Anna Magdalena. Like Beethoven or Elgar, he took pupils because he needed the money. And in the autumn of 1706, when he had scraped enough of it together, he set off for Italy.

2

With Handel's Italian journey we enter on one of those periods of his career when conjecture is exasperatingly paramount. We can guess why he should have wanted to go to Italy since, as the nursery of established musical form, terminology and style during the period, it was the logical goal of young composers from all over Europe, but whether he was, as tradition has it, invited by Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, son of Grand Duke Cosimo of Tuscany, is altogether more questionable. Ferdinando was indeed out of Florence at some stage immediately before Handel's departure from Hamburg, could certainly have been visiting some of his German princely connexions, and might perhaps have met Handel on one such visit – but there is no proof that he did so.

Finances are a somewhat simpler issue. As a rule Baroque artists travelling in Italy were paid for by their patrons, who saw the tour as a species of talent investment, paying off in the resulting sophistications of style. Handel had no need of this. Money was forthcoming from his father's estate, friends and family connexions rallied round, and Handel was able to leave for Italy ‘on his own bottom', as Mainwaring has it. The word ‘bottom' has the English eighteenth-century sense of ‘initiative', ‘enterprise' or ‘substance'. Once in Italy itself, the necessary bottom would have to be provided by his own creative resources, directly linked to the network of patronage, cronyism and contact-forming hardly less essential to Italian life now than it was in those days.

His journey may have taken him through such musical centres as Munich, Turin and Milan, all of them with resident composers and flourishing operatic traditions, but he is first supposed to have halted for any length of time at Florence. The capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under the rule of Cosimo III,
obsessively religious and increasingly preoccupied with the issue of a likely successor among his brood of wayward children, was not the culturally vibrant city it had been during the Renaissance, but music of all kinds gained enthusiastic support from the Grand Duke's eldest surviving son Ferdinando. The prince had received a broad education, including practical courses on the violin and harpsichord from the Genoese composer Giovanni Maria Pagliardi. An anonymous contemporary notes that

he also sang most gracefully . . . he liked operas, sad and serious ones for preference . . . he had his amusements for each season: in the spring he went to Poggio a Caiano, where he kept a troupe of comedians on purpose to act for him. Then he went to Villa Imperiale, where . . . the pages and courtiers improvised entertainments . . . In the autumn he went to his favourite villa at Pratolino . . . there he went hunting and there he had a musical drama acted by the choicest singers, with a great crowd of spectators. Other operas under his patronage were given at Leghorn, where he ‘gently obliged' the richest merchants to buy all the tickets, lending his own orchestra, led by the virtuoso Martino Bitti. Besides this he was active in encouraging special performances of music for Holy Week in the Florentine churches, featuring new commissions. No wonder that when he died it was said of him that ‘the most musical prince in all the world is dead'.

Nothing Handel composed on this first visit to Florence has survived and in the last days of 1706 we find him already in Rome. On 14 January 1707 the diarist Francesco Valesio noted that ‘there has arrived in this city a Saxon, a most excellent player on the harpsichord and composer, who today gave a flourish of his skill by playing the organ in the church of S. Giovanni
^*(b)
to the amazement of everyone present'.

It must have been at this time as well that he first heard the music of the
pifferari
, the Abruzzi shepherds whose tradition it was to play their bagpipes in the Roman streets during December and January. The simple tunes over their drone clearly made a deep impression: though this kind of one-note bass is a cliché of Baroque musical rusticity, the merest mention of sheep or shepherds,
whether in ‘Quanto voi felici siete' in
Ezio
or ‘But as for his people' in
Israel in Egypt
, is enough to set the pastoral Handel going and a symphony labelled
pifa
duly introduces the shepherds of
Messiah.

From a musical point of view Handel could not have chosen a more interesting moment at which to visit Italy. From a political aspect he could scarcely have hit on a worse. Popular historical awareness tends all too readily to forget that the War of the Spanish Succession involved more diffuse theatres of activity than the plains of Flanders and the Danube on which Marlborough gained his famous victories. Bourbon and Habsburg armies were heavily engaged not only on France's eastern borders but also in Spain and throughout the entire length of Italy. Handel's arrival was on the heels of a huge imperial push made possible by the brilliant operations of Prince Eugene, culminating in his victory at Turin and the surrender of Milan, both during the September of 1706. With the exception of Venice, which adopted its by now customary position astride the diplomatic fence, all the Italian states were heavily committed, either through enforced levies as imperial fiefs, or through direct political and military involvement.

In terms of prestige the severest losses were suffered by the dominions of the Pope, whose support of the Bourbon cause in Spain and of the family of the exiled James II of England outweighed his efforts towards peace as far as Austria and her allies were concerned. Raised to the papacy in 1700, as Clement XI, Gianfrancesco Albani was destined to a term of office as miserable as it was long. Unlike his immediate predecessors, who had interpreted their responsibilities in a spirit of self-seeking worldliness, Clement was a worthy and conscientious pontiff, whose idealistic attempts to do right were perpetually frustrated by the cynical turn of European great-power politics.

Early in his reign he had seen his capital devastated by a succession of natural disasters. The Tiber flooded the city three times in as many years, and on 14 January 1703 there began a series of violent earth tremors, which lasted with a more or less consistent intensity for nearly two months. Special prayers, fasts and processions took place to ward off what was seen as a fitting punishment for the decadent luxury of Roman society: ‘Faith is not dead in Rome,' said an eyewitness, ‘the earthquake, in fact, has been a great preacher.'
Terrible cracks appeared in the Vatican and the Colosseum, and the pillars of Bernini's great baldacchino in St Peter's were seen to tremble. Perhaps the most amazing scenes took place on the night of 2 February, when a rumour spread that the city was to be destroyed within two hours. Streets, squares and gardens quickly filled with people, many of them half dressed, flinging themselves on their knees, making public confession and embracing each other as if for the last time, and it was almost morning before a relative calm was restored.

Clement was instrumental, not only in sustaining Roman morale during such periods of intense crisis, but in reaffirming the city's metropolitan character through his extensive restoration of its older basilicas and his reconstruction of walls, aqueducts and fountains. The Rome in which Handel arrived was thus in one of its signal moments of renewal, even though its population was decreasing and in area it was little more than a magnificent market town among a scatter of impressive ruins.

Roman society was naturally dominated by ecclesiastics and by the noble families from whose ranks many of them were recruited. The machinery of patronage was controlled by these two heavily interlinked groups, and the city's flourishing artistic life depended exclusively upon their support. Alone among the major Italian cities, however, Rome boasted no opera house. The puritanical zeal of Innocent XII had closed the Teatro Tor di Nona in 1697 and no new theatrical enterprise was to be set on foot until the opening of the Teatro Capranica in 1709. Musicians nevertheless continued to flock to the city. Besides the inevitable demand for new music to accompany church celebrations of every kind, there was enough continuing impetus from wealthy and distinguished amateurs among the cardinals and their noble relatives to promote an exciting musical culture, whose influence was to condition Handel's style more strongly than any other he had encountered before or was to meet again.

Several of the leading ecclesiastics maintained their own domestic bands and, if not actually composing themselves, wrote texts for the musicians they patronized. Pietro Ottoboni, for example, appointed a cardinal at the age of twenty-two by his great-uncle Pope Alexander VIII, seems to have laid out most of an enormous income in indulging a passion for music. Before Innocent's ban on theatres, Ottoboni had staged operas by promising young composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti,
Giovanni Bononcini and Francesco Pollarolo, in his huge Palazzo della Cancelleria, which also had a little stage for marionette operas.
^*(c)

None of Handel's works was specifically written for Ottoboni, but the Cardinal's Wednesday music meetings offered Handel a chance to make valuable contacts with some of Italy's leading musical masters. The atmosphere is well summed up for us by the French traveller Blainville, who was in Rome at the same time. ‘His Eminence keeps in his pay the best musicians and performers in Rome . . . so that every Wednesday he has an excellent concert in his palace. We were there served with ices and other delicate liquors . . . but the greatest inconveniency in all these concerts is that one is pestered with swarms of trifling little Abbés, who come thither on purpose to fill their bellies with these liquors, and to carry off the crystal bottles with the napkins into the bargain.' The Ottoboni connexion in fact bound together many of the musical Italians who later made their way to London while Handel was there. Nicola Haym (already in England) and Paolo Antonio Rolli, later to become his librettists, for example, had both been part of the cardinal's circle, as had the violinist Pietro Castrucci, leader of the opera band, and Filippo Amadei, a brilliant cellist who later collaborated as a composer with Handel and Giovanni Bononcini on
Muzio Scevola
.

Handel's most significant encounter at the Cancelleria was with the orchestra's leader, Arcangelo Corelli. Corelli is one of those artistic figures whose effect on their contemporaries is out of all proportion to the volume of their output. He wrote and published a relatively small amount, six instrumental collections in all, but in so doing he profoundly altered and deepened the whole character of European music. His influence pervaded everything from a tiny trio sonata to a full-blown opera, and with those of Vivaldi and the elder Scarlatti his musical personality dominates the central phases of the Italian Baroque. Domenico Scarlatti once told the violinist Francesco Geminiani that he was especially struck by Corelli's ‘nice management of his band, the uncommon accuracy of whose performance gave the concertos an amazing effect . . . for Corelli regarded it as essential to the
ensemble
of a band,
that their bows should all move exactly together, all up, or all down; so that at his rehearsals, which constantly preceded every public performance of one of his concertos, he would immediately stop the band if he discovered one irregular bow'. The example was surely not lost on the young Handel, consolidating on what he had already learned as a member of the Gänsemarkt orchestra.