Handel (9 page)

The most serious assignment in the midst of all this may reflect the Marchese Ruspoli's growing political involvement. Late that summer the continuing squabbles between the Pope and the Austrians over the lagoon of Comacchio and the territory around Ferrara developed into open conflict and the Marchese raised an army of 1,200 men to defend the city for the papal cause.
He was not a particularly competent commander, but it seemed only right that the event should be celebrated in fine style with a Handel cantata on the grand scale.
O come chiare e belle
is, by its very nature, not among his most memorable examples of the genre, an occasional piece in which the spirit of the River Tiber, invoked by the shepherd Olinto (Pamphilj's Arcadian name) is urged by Glory (soprano) to shed his fears of Austrian arms, with promises of historical fame. Olinto, making an oblique reference to universal papal supremacy, prepares to change ‘the humble bagpipe into a trumpet', and the trio hail Ruspoli's favourable star. The music, a series of facile, short-breathed arias, has all the signs of having been put together in a considerable hurry.

Ruspoli's new regiment marched out of Rome on 9 September 1708. The parade was obviously a notable event in a city which, during the past year, had trembled at the likelihood of an assault by Austrian troops and the Marchese commissioned Alessandro Piazza, a painter of less than average talent, to capture what must have seemed like an auspicious moment for the embattled papacy. In the resulting panorama the more important figures in the Ruspoli entourage are shown gathered outside Palazzo Bonelli to watch the soldiers leaving. Among the group stand Margherita Durastanti, wearing the still fashionable
fontange
headdress of white lace over a tall comb, and Handel himself in a full-bottomed periwig and gold-trimmed gala suit, tricorne hat tucked under his arm, every inch the dapper young gentleman composer.

With Ruspoli away on campaign, Handel had no special reason for staying in Rome during the autumn of 1708. For nearly a year he disappears from view in the various written records through which it has been possible up until this point to trace his progress between the different Italian musical capitals. He may have returned to Halle or even gone back to Hamburg. In the new year, soon after Pope Clement and Emperor Joseph ‘came to a composition', in the contemporary phrase, over Comacchio and the Ferrarese, Ruspoli was given the title ‘Prince of Cerveteri'. When the new-made grandee came home to his cantatas and oratorios, it was not the prodigious Saxon he made
maestro di cappella
but Antonio Caldara, the master whose opera Handel had enjoyed during the Venetian carnival.
Given Handel's independent spirit, he is unlikely to have wanted to tie himself down by accepting the job, had he been offered it. We can understand how professional pique may have made him reluctant to hang around once a musician of Caldara's calibre was installed at Palazzo Bonelli.

He nevertheless continued to produce cantatas, of which ‘Panstufato' Angelini duly made copies for Ruspoli's collection, so the link between composer and patron was not irreparably broken. What one modern writer on Handel has called ‘a treasurehouse of musical invention' went on producing its inexhaustible riches, and the same writer's parallel with Schubert seems entirely appropriate. Works like
Dalla guerra amorosa
or
Lungi da me, pensier tiranno
, both probably dating from the summer of 1709, confirm what is already evident in Handel's cantatas from the previous two years, that the possibilities of the musical form, especially its expressive intimacy, were enticing enough to make the compositional process a creative adventure as well as a purely technical exercise.

Material from the cantatas found its way into
Agrippina
, the major operatic project on which Handel began work during the latter half of 1709. Cardinal Grimani, amid all his other interests, was noted for a love of the stage. His father and uncle had founded two of Venice's earliest opera houses. Vincenzo, with his brother Giovanni Carlo, had started a new theatre at San Giovanni Grisostomo in 1678 and during his years as envoy at Turin he had given practical advice on presenting operas to the Duke of Savoy. He also supplied the occasional texts to composers writing for his own theatre. Among his Venetian friends was Apostolo Zeno, most respected librettist of his generation, who would later be appointed Italian poet to the Austrian imperial court. Keen to raise the aesthetic tone of contemporary lyric drama and much influenced by French neoclassical tragedians, Zeno had founded an academy in Venice, the Animosi, whose members gathered in Grimani's palace. Though the opera with which the Cardinal now furnished Handel is not the kind of weighty Racinian affair that might have appealed to Zeno, its sleek outlines and elegant versification would surely have had his blessing. So too would the consistency in its sardonic portrayal of bad behaviour among ancient Rome's movers and shakers. Some doubt has been expressed as to Grimani's authorship – his name is not given on the earliest printed libretto – but it is difficult not to suppose that his wide experience as a diplomat and political agent contributed to the success of what is,
after all, one of the finest operatic texts Handel ever set.

The first performance of
Agrippina
at the San Giovanni Grisostomo theatre was scheduled for the winter season of 1709–10. All the Venetian theatres belonged to patrician families and the Grimanis' was among the newest and grandest, standing next to the church of the same name north of the Rialto and close to the house where the explorer Marco Polo was supposed to have lived. The French
Mercure Galant
described it as ‘the finest and richest in the city. The room for the spectators is surrounded with five rows of boxes one above the other, thirty-one to a row, enriched with sculptured decorations.' The ceiling showed the Grimani arms cradled among garlands held by cherubs in a
trompe-l'oeil
gallery. There was a drop curtain painted with Venus and Cupid, raised an hour before the overture, when a big chandelier and four candle brackets came down to illuminate the audience. Thanks to a barely legible inventory of the family effects made in 1714 we know something of the stage and the sets, from details such as ‘perspective backcloths', ‘sky-borders' and ‘a tin moon' (
Ariodante
, incidentally, features a stage moonrise) and the six wings on either side. All of this has now disappeared; the theatre, much rebuilt, and fitted out in the ‘Liberty' style in the early twentieth century, is now the Teatro Malibran, but its back view from the bridge across the canal on to which it abuts can have altered little since Handel's day.

That season was an especially good one, with new operas by Gasparini and Albinoni at San Cassiano, and two by Lotti scheduled for San Giovanni Grisostomo on either side of
Agrippina.
Handel's cast, what is more, was one of the best he ever mustered: Durastanti was there as Agrippina herself, Valeriano Pellegrini sang Nerone and Poppea was the outstanding Diamante Maria Scarabelli. Even the smaller roles carried distinction, if the presence of the bass Giuseppe Maria Boschi as Pallante is anything to go by. Success, of a sort Handel was hardly ever to know again, was inevitable and richly deserved. There were apparently twenty-seven performances, and we may surely believe Mainwaring when he says that ‘the audience was so enchanted with this performance, that a stranger who should have seen the manner in which they were affected, would have imagined they were all distracted. The theatre, at almost every pause, resounded with shouts and acclamations of
viva il caro Sassone
and other expressions of approbation too extravagant to be mentioned.
They were thunderstruck with the gravity and sublimity of his stile . . .'

They were just as likely to have been impressed by its wit, for so far from being grave and sublime
Agrippina
is a wickedly satirical comedy of sex, politics and female ambition, in which hardly a single character escapes Grimani's barbed pen. The story uses the same protagonists as Monteverdi's more familiar
L'Incoronazione di Poppea
(Seneca is a conspicuous absentee, though maybe the Cardinal had turned over Busenello's libretto) in dealing with the machinations of Agrippina to secure the imperial succession for her son Nero and to thwart the amorous designs of her husband Claudius on Poppea, who is loved by Otho. Throughout the libretto Grimani stresses the atmosphere of conspiracy and intrigue with which he himself was so familiar. Several of the dramatic situations, requiring characters to overhear secrets or to deliver a series of asides, show clear debts to spoken drama, but a genuine consistency governs the management of plot and participants to the extent that the piece could almost be given independently of its music.

It is to Handel's credit, of course, that this should not be allowed finally to obtrude. The integration of aria and recitative is ideally complete, so that a self-generating momentum is set up from the start. Many of the numbers, besides, are very short and each is perfectly shaped to fulfil a dramatic function. The tiny trio ‘E quando mai', which follows on Lesbo's announcement to the startled Claudio and Poppea of Agrippina's impending arrival, is farce par excellence and marvellously economical in doing no more than is necessary to create an air of total confusion. Equally just in their positioning are the brief bursts of song, scarcely more than vocal dances, with which Agrippina, Poppea and Nerone reject the unfortunate Ottone, destined to wander through the opera in an atmosphere of misunderstanding and foiled good intentions.

He is given, in compensation, some of the score's truly eloquent moments, when Handel pauses to dwell upon his integrity, and asks us to do the same as we listen to the flutes and muted violins of ‘Vaghe fonti' (Keiser's ‘Ruhig sein' again) or the poignant G minor of ‘Pur ch'io ti stringa'. Yet it is Agrippina who dominates her own opera, a complete study in power, on whom all the other characters depend, but, for all her resourcefulness,
gnawed by continuing doubts. Obsessively enjoining everyone to ‘follow my advice and you shall prosper', she is revealed as essentially vulnerable in ‘Pensieri voi, mi tormentate', an almost textbook demonstration of the inherent flexibility underlying Baroque recitative and aria forms.

Everything in
Agrippina
counts, and we catch, for the first time in Handel's work, that skill in mingling musical idioms of all kinds, from the pompous French overture to the infectious rhythms of ‘Ogni vento', which was to become a trademark of his style. Nevertheless, practically every number is a re-creation of something he had written before, so that the entire opera sounds like a guide to Handel's singular memory. His technique of self-borrowing is not the result of a lack of originality. There were some thirty-five operas yet to spring from his pen, all of them crammed with new melodies. It is rather that he appears to have seen composition in terms of appropriate solutions to the demands of a given circumstance, and to have worked continuously at the fresh application of his initial ideas. Old beginnings and old endings (and one or two of the latter turn up everywhere in his work) do not necessarily enclose the same old in-fillings, and the effect of
Agrippina
on those who have grown familiar with his earlier pieces must inevitably be like that of rereading a much-loved novel of which we already know the story and can now appreciate the finer touches.

His Venetian triumph did not serve to keep him in Italy, but by any standards it was unforgettable, and must often have consoled him in some of the years to follow. As for Vincenzo Grimani, he was almost certainly not present at any of the
Agrippina
performances. His valuable work as viceroy of Naples was cut short when, during the summer of 1710, he fell ill with bladder cancer. As if in sympathy, the blood of the city's patron saint Januarius (San Gennaro), which traditionally liquefies inside its reliquary on his feast day, 19 September, failed to do so and a week later the Cardinal died, aged fifty-five. On his deathbed he had asked Pope Clement to pardon any offence he might have given. The pontiff's decidedly un-Christian reply demanded public recognition of Grimani's ‘many errors' and ‘the damages inflicted on Holy Church'.

3

Soon after the première of
Agrippina
Handel left Venice. The impact of his Italian journey was permanent, the experience mediated in later years through his habit of continually recycling melodic ideas or remodelling entire numbers from the works he composed during this period to adapt them to a new context, with the nonchalant skill of a couturier fitting a dress with the help of swatches, shears and pins. He was ready now to begin a professional career among the courts of Germany and, operating with his customary shrewdness, had gained various useful contacts and introductions from noblemen and diplomats encountered during his travels.

Ferdinando de' Medici was one of these, apparently ready to bury any differences between them as rivals for the favour of Vittoria Tarquini. In a letter of recommendation addressed to Prince Karl of Pfalz Neuburg, governor of the Austrian province of Tyrol, dated 9 November 1709, Ferdinando wrote, ‘During his stay here, Georg Friedrich Handel, native of Saxony, has shown himself so endowed with honourable sentiments, civil behaviour, a great gift of languages and a more than ordinary talent for music, that since he has striven to earn my good will, I cannot refrain from trying to procure, on his behalf, the most useful support for him on his return to Germany. More especially, your Highness's favour, destined by the promptings of your lofty genius to honour merit and virtue . . .' Handel arrived at Innsbruck in March 1710, but did not stay to court the patronage of Prince Karl, who replied to Ferdinando that though the composer had presented his introduction, ‘the aforementioned had no need of my assistance'.