A MAN OF GENIUS
Spirited history is insightful about Handel’s music, but less so the person
“There is no question,” declared The Spectator in 1710, soon after Italian opera arrived in Britain, “but our great grandchildren will be very curious to know the reason why their forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own country, and to hear whole plays acted before them in a tongue which they did not understand.”
The author perhaps hoped that something so patently absurd would soon pass. He hadn’t reckoned on an ambitious German, who would transform the fashion of a few seasons into a permanent feature of British culture. Georg Friedrich Handel had already had sensational successes in Hamburg and in Italy, where he was known as “the divine Saxon.” (His connection to the Court of the Elector of Saxony would prove handy when that Elector later became Britain’s King George I.)
Handel was a fantastically hardworking, shrewd entrepreneur, with the tough skin one needs to compete in a field filled with jealous rivals and spiteful critics. And he was a composer of genius, who could imbue the mythical creatures of 18th-century opera with a believable human psychology.
Of course, Handel didn’t establish the taste for opera in Italian single-handedly. The craze for Italian singers, particularly the star castrati, was already established, and audiences were already bewitched by the genre’s elaborate stage spectacle (a scene in Handel’s first London opera Rinaldo featured a black cloud, “all filled with dreadful Monsters spitting Fire and Smoke on every side. The Cloud covers Almirena and Armida, and carries them swiftly into the Air ...”).
But Italian opera was always the butt of satire and dislike, and there was always a countervailing trend for a more popular, often comic opera in the vernacular. That alternative model might have taken root, had there not been such a towering genius on hand in London, to make the case for Italian opera.
But it was never easy to make opera a going concern, even for Handel. The stars demanded to be paid even more than they earned back in Naples or Rome. Unforeseen events — a Jacobite rebellion, the bursting of the South Sea Bubble (which ruined quite a few of Handel’s backers) — could force the closure of theatres for months. When a rival company appeared in 1733, the resources and audiences available, always precarious, became even more so.
The story of how Handel triumphed, was knocked back repeatedly and triumphed again is a gripping one, and has often been told. This latest telling comes from Jane Glover, a successful conductor and scholar, and it’s her insightful comments on the music that make her book valuable. She’s especially good on the way Handel managed his stars, repeating the story told by Handel’s first biographer John Mainwaring that he had a fight with the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni, declaring: “I see you are a real devil: but I would have you know that I am Beelzebub, the Chief Devil.”
He threatened to throw her out of the window. But he was kind to the English singer Anastasia Robinson, who pleaded that she couldn’t summon up the necessary spitting fury for an aria because, “I am a woman and cannot scold,” so Handel composed a gentler aria for her.
Glover is also good on Handel’s sensitivity to words — a remarkable enough feat in Italian, which was not his first language, but even more so in English, his third language (or fourth, if one counts Latin).
In the late 1730s, when Handel realized the game was up for Italian opera, he turned his attention to a new genre in which his triumphs were if anything even greater — English-language oratorio. Once again, he had to face opposition — his Messiah was not generally liked at first, partly because some were outraged at the idea of the life of Christ being presented in a theatre. Unperturbed, Handel produced masterpiece after masterpiece, until blindness finally brought an end to his astonishingly productive career.
As for the man behind the music, Glover doesn’t get us any closer. Handel was notoriously private, wrote few letters and seems not to have had any love affairs, apart from a brief liaison with an Italian singer.
Glover reminds us of the few things we know: that he was hottempered and stubborn — he defied the king ’s instructions on the scoring for the Water Music — that he was charitable and in later years devout. She doesn’t mention the suggestion, still supported by some scholars, that Handel might have been gay, given his alleged (but not proven), long-time residence with Richard Boyle, Third Earl of Burlington.
Glover sticks to a few wellknown sources, which leads to a certain thinness in the historical background. We learn a lot about the Duke of Cumberland’s military successes and we get a blow-byblow account of the endless operatic intrigues, to the point where it’s sometimes hard to spot the forest for the trees.
But there’s little about the texture of Handel’s daily life or the life around him.
How did theatre, politics, high society, journalism, trade and opera intersect in London? How much did Handel’s house in Mayfair cost him and where did owning such a house place him in English society? What did it cost to mount an opera, and what proportion of that went on paying those moody Italian stars?
Anyone coming to this book in the hope of such insights will be disappointed. But for its impassioned discussion of the music, it deserves a place on any operalover’s shelf.