3

Opera seria

When the first public opera house opened in Venice in 1637, those who attended the new art form had few expectations. Although some of the musical styles were familiar from other genres, operatic occasions up to that point had amounted to little more than a collection of court entertainments, their shape largely dictated by the events they celebrated. Just a few decades later, and opera boasted many of the traits it would retain over much of its 400-year history. Most important, it was established as a genre – a cultural product with a set of characteristics that its consumers would expect to see repeated. By 1650, these characteristics stretched beyond the emerging alternation of ‘recitative’ and ‘aria’ to embrace stock dramatic situations: the comic aria, the sleep scene, the invocation, the mad scene. Final love duets such as that in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) were a case in point. To hear two lovers singing at the end of an evening of alternating recitatives and solo arias became an expectation – something to look forward to, something that would bring a pair of principal voices together sensuously. And so such a duet closed Poppea: possibly written by Monteverdi, possibly by a younger composer preparing the opera for performance in far-off Naples; added, anyway, by someone who ignored the work’s integrity in favour of responding creatively to audience desires.¹

As opera expanded geographically, it almost always kept something of the public nature it had discovered in Venice. But in most places this relatively democratic aspect had to make accommodations with a prevailing court culture. In Florence the Medici family embraced the new genre but adapted it to their propagandistic purposes, using operatic performance to celebrate births and weddings in ways resembling the old intermedi; the Spanish viceroy in Naples did something similar; the Papal authorities in Rome were reluctant to allow public opera houses, but both comic and pastoral works were given privately in noble households. Many other places, though, contributed to the steady rise of public theatres. The later years of the seventeenth century saw larger and more diverse audiences, ones whose tastes often ran to lavishness rather than restraint. Not coincidentally, the period is also marked by the rise of professional virtuoso singers: star performers trained to beguile and amaze their auditors by singing at a level of difficulty unprecedented in previous centuries.

THE SINGING PROFESSION

The most successful of these singers consolidated the influence they had gathered in the late seventeenth century, continuing to earn more than any of the other participants, composers included. Some lamented this loud and long, but the gathering disparity in pay between singers and others was predictable. The presence of anything akin to an operatic repertory was still a long way in the future; it was not the norm for operas to be revived, and when such restagings happened (as with the Naples version of Monteverdi’s Poppea in the 1650s) they were often adapted to suit new conditions and changing tastes. The musical part of an opera was a disposable thing, easily replaced. Librettists tended to have a little more cachet. They were, after all, men of letters – a far more respectable profession than musician – and if successful could have their creations set to music a number of times. But the great operatic venues made themselves exceptional above all through their roster of star vocalists. Small surprise, then, that the phenomenon of singers with careers exclusively in the operatic market-place began in the later seventeenth century. The existence of this new professional class had at least one important social ramification: for perhaps the first time in history, working women were paid as much as or sometimes more than men for doing an equivalent task. It was possible for women to become independent and wealthy by means of their talent.

The way was not always easy. Close professional proximity to a predominantly male world brought continual problems, particularly as regards reputation. As one Naples official put it in 1740:

they [women singers] have never been held to be respectable, since the singing profession carries with it the harsh necessity of dealing with many men: composers, instrumentalists, poets and music-lovers; anyone who witnesses all this coming and going in and out of a woman’s house readily concludes that she is immoral, whether she actually is or not.²

But the rewards, particularly in a mixed economy where public theatres also enjoyed noble or royal backing, could be unprecedented. In the late seventeenth century, a star singer could earn for one carnival season in Venice the equivalent of an entire year’s salary in a church or ducal chapel; thirty years later, star court opera singers in Dresden could earn well over £1000 per season. This was serious wealth.³

The only group to come close to female soloists in terms of earning power were the castrati. The acceptance of castrati on the operatic stage was a central feature of the essential artificiality of opera in the early eighteenth century; it is also the reason why most operas of the period can never be performed today as they were performed then. The castrati have gone for ever. It is well, though, to bear in mind that relatively few of them made a living singing in opera. The principal occupation of most castrati was as singers in the Catholic church, where female voices were banned. In other words, the practice began and continued in the service of God rather than of operatic pleasure. However, and as we saw briefly in the last chapter, castrati were also a presence in opera from almost the start. A castrato sang the Prologue to Monteverdi’s Orfeo, and castrati were cast in two of the opera’s female roles. They frequently appeared in Venetian opera, playing both male and female characters. By the start of the eighteenth century they had become a flamboyant and even characteristic presence on the operatic stage, at least in serious opera, and were above all famous for playing the primo uomo, the heroic male lead.

The precise nature of the operation that created a castrato was for long shrouded in secrecy, but the basic process was as simple as it was brutal. Boys with promising musical abilities were operated on before their voices changed, their testicles either removed surgically or bound so tightly that they withered away from lack of blood supply. The voice thus preserved would remain high (although sometimes dropping to an alto range), and moreover could be uncommonly sustained – notes could be held for a long time through a single breath. The hormonal effects of the operation caused significant physical changes. Castrati could become abnormally tall, with expanded rib cages (hence the long held notes), spider-like fingers and other strange characteristics. As one horrified Frenchman wrote in 1739:

Most of them grow big, and as fat as capons, their hips, rump, arms, throat and neck as round and chubby as a woman’s. When you meet them at a gathering, it is astonishing when they speak, to hear a little child’s voice emerging from such a colossus.⁴

Although accepted on the stage and sometimes worshipped elaborately for their vocal powers, castrati were always thought exotic, even at the height of their operatic dissemination. Myths about them, particularly concerning their supposed sexual exploits, were commonplace in the eighteenth century. Many of these stories were bound up with the fact that the castrati became symbols of the extravagance of the art form generally, a neat demonstration of its fundamental irrationality. It was frequently rumoured – whether accurately or not is difficult to know, although modern medical testimony doubts it – that castrati could still indulge in sexual intercourse, and this suspicion caused consternation, in part because their sexual pleasures could plainly be pursued without fear of causing pregnancy. An anonymous pamphlet published in 1728 in London contains an invented verse epistle from Faustina Bordoni, one of the greatest operatic sopranos of her day, to Senesino, a renowned castrato. Bordoni succinctly outlines the advantages of a castrato lover:

Safely they give uninterrupted joys,

Without the genial Curse of Girls and Boys.

In the same pamphlet, an imagined love duet between the soprano and castrato is portrayed as stimulating a remarkable flowering of same-sex (or even solitary-sex) activity among both the females and males of the audience:

The Fair have wished their lovers warm as me,

The Men themselves caress’d instead of Thee.⁵

The horrified Frenchman quoted earlier had caught on to these rumours, and used them to peddle a rather cruel joke:

Some [castratos] are very pretty: with the fair ladies they are smug and conceited, and, if spiteful rumour is to be believed, much in demand for their talents, which are limitless; for they are very talented. It is even said that one of these demivirs presented a petition to Pope Innocent XI, asking for permission to get married on the grounds that the operation had not been entirely successful; the Pope wrote in the margin: Che si castri meglio [They need to castrate better].⁶

These lubricious stories suggest that the sex lives of castrati (whether imagined or real) were sometimes symbols of just the kind of hedonistic excess that opera itself seemed to represent. Those who strove to attack opera often made the connection explicit: opera’s vocal excesses – its strings of wordless notes, its reliance on trills and other ornaments – were in eighteenth-century terms symbols of luxury, of vital energy going to waste. What could be more grotesquely appropriate to the genre than a stage peopled by creatures who had a sinister ability to dally with the female sex without risk of reproduction – to indulge, that is, in the most dangerous and socially disruptive form of luxury one could imagine?⁷

Perhaps not surprisingly, the historical afterlife of castrati has been extraordinarily rich. They continued in church choirs through much of the nineteenth century in some parts of Italy, and not until 1903 did the Sistine Chapel Choir in Rome finally ban them by means of a motu proprio. Their operatic vogue came to an end around 1830. For an era in which gender roles became increasingly differentiated, and transgression of the boundaries increasingly policed, they produced a sense of revulsion rather than excitement. We have already cited Honoré de Balzac’s novella Sarrasine (1830), in which the hero, a young artist, falls in love with an operatic soprano called La Zambinella, only to discover to his horror that his idealized woman is in fact a castrato. Much nearer our own time is Gérard Corbiau’s film Farinelli il castrato (1994), a fanciful biopic of the most famous castrato of all, Carlo Broschi (nicknamed ‘Farinelli’, 1705–82). Here cinematic opulence is combined with an unusual feat of modern sound technology to create an illusion of the castrato’s lost voice, since Farinelli’s singing was computer-generated by melding together a soprano and a male falsettist, a counter-tenor.

Chronologically between these two examples, in 1902 and 1904, come the extraordinary recordings of Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922), sometimes billed as ‘the last castrato’, who sang in the Sistine Chapel Choir from 1883 until the early years of the twentieth century and who by a series of strange chances made a number of sound recordings. Moreschi was only in his mid-forties at the time he was recorded. He sang not with what we imagine as eighteenth-century restraint, but in the vocal style of his time, which means with an attack, declamation and use of the so-called ‘chest voice’ that we associate more with singers of the Puccini and Mascagni era. High male voice, sacred music, verismo-style delivery – this is a bizarre mélange for which we have no good name. The fundamental impression for us today is of a prematurely old, quavering but still piercing, sexless, frighteningly unclassifiable voice.⁸ Rational anxiety always surrounded them. Even as early as the eighteenth century, each castrato had to furnish himself with a convenient story of the youthful misfortune that had necessitated his operation. The great Farinelli sometimes allowed that he had fallen from a horse; others favoured the bite of a wild pig as the cause of their mutilation. By the mid nineteenth century such excuses had become a kind of ritual. One scholarly authority tells us, on impeccable documentary evidence, that during that period ‘the surviving castrati of the Sistine Chapel had apparently all fallen victim to pigs’.⁹

OPERATIC REFORMERS

Around the time the castrati were coming to operatic prominence in the last decades of the seventeenth century, Italian opera underwent one of its periodic reforms. There were attempts to domesticate its exoticism and irrationality; in particular to bring it into greater conformity with the rules that had governed spoken drama in the later sixteenth century, and that were now being reasserted. The history of opera is punctuated by such polemics, many of which, when looked at from a distance, seem remarkably similar. Almost always the ‘reform’ comes about because a perception emerges (usually among men of letters) that opera has got out of hand: that its perennial extravagances have become too extravagant; that the sober literary and aesthetic values of spoken drama have been ignored too flagrantly; that music, and often scenic spectacle, have become too important and risk drowning out the drama; that singers have become too powerful. Such criticisms of opera have existed throughout its history, and will exist for as long as the art form flourishes. But at certain moments the polemics have taken on a peculiar force, and led to material changes – usually an ostensible return to what are declared to be ‘classical’ values.

These polemics have often been about a lost elitism: about fears that opera was becoming too popular. In the 1680s Cristoforo Ivanovich, whom we heard in the last chapter complaining about the fees paid to singers, was above all concerned about opera’s decline into popularity, about a special, refined taste that had been invaded:

At the beginning, two exquisite voices, a small number of delightful arias and a few scene changes sufficed to satisfy curiosity. Now we object if we hear a voice that is not up to European standards; we expect every scene to be accompanied by a change of setting and the machines to be brought in from another world.¹⁰

Two decades later, another critic, Giovanni Crescimbeni, went into even greater detail. Crescimbeni was a great lover of Cavalli’s Giasone (Venice, 1648), but saw it as the beginning of a sad decline. We will hear such language and tone often in the history of opera:

To stimulate to a greater degree with novelty the jaded taste of the spectators, equally nauseated by the vileness of comic things and the seriousness of tragic ones, the inventor of drama united them, mixing kings and heroes and other illustrious personages with buffoons and servants and the lowest men with unheard of monstrousness. This concoction of characters was the reason for the complete ruin of the rules of poetry, which went so far into disuse that not even locution was considered, which, forced to serve music, lost its purity and became filled with idiocies. The careful deployment of figures that ennoble oratory was neglected and language was restricted to terms found in common speech, which is more appropriate for music; and finally the series of those short metres, commonly called ariette, which with a generous hand are sprinkled over the scenes, and the overwhelming impropriety of having characters speak in song, completely removed from the compositions the power of the affections and the means of moving them in the listeners.¹¹

There we have it. Opera is simply too extravagant. It won’t obey the ‘rules of poetry’; it is a dangerous social leveller, allowing those of all classes to mingle freely in song. Music, the cause of all these ills, is destroying a noble art form.

Before the end of the seventeenth century, Italian opera had become an important artistic export, but, as poetry or drama, it was a frail reed. Already in the 1670s, a venerated literary figure such as Charles de Saint-Évremond was complaining that he had never seen an Italian opera ‘which appear’d not to be despicable both as to the Contrivance of the subject and the Poetry’.¹² Italian poets, for whom libretto writing had become a major occupation, suffered widespread contempt for their efforts. In response to this and many other polemics, a reform did indeed take place, one over which the so-called Arcadian academy in Rome (a group formed around 1690) had much influence. The Arcadians’ patron, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, had also tried his hand at reforming libretti, and their project was a purification and rationalization of all the arts, with opera of the anarchic Venetian kind clearly a prime target. The basic notion of sung drama was now generally accepted. So was a division between simple recitative, musically rudimentary and word-dominated, and aria, more complex musically. In arias, words were less important or even disappeared entirely underneath the weight of musical ornament. But the Arcadians wanted a rebalancing, an opera that would be more under the control of librettists than of musicians or scene designers. These men of letters also tried to insist that the subject matter should be suitable as a carrier of ideal moral statements, typically from Roman or Greek antiquity. Unsettling comic characters should disappear. A reduced number of characters should then confine themselves to endless examination of the complexities of human emotion, often through experiencing conflicts between personal feeling and public duty, in a balanced and classically poised manner. Even die-hard critics admitted that the musically luxuriant aria was here to stay; but it needed, they said, to be more controlled and carefully structured. There was, in this and all subsequent reforms, an element of compromise: everyone understood that opera’s basic extravagance and lack of verisimilitude had become its crowning glory, and had to be retained; but its essential elements could, they thought, be restrained and ordered more logically.

THE NEW OPERA: OPERA SERIA

The judgement of history has not, at least until very recently, been generous to this new kind of opera, which is often referred to under the loose generic term opera seria (serious opera). True, the Arcadian reformers’ sentiments and aims, particularly those that lamented and strove to restrict the influence of singers, have sometimes been applauded. But the music that came in their wake has mostly stayed in the history books, a stranger to the modern stage. Joseph Kerman’s famous Opera as Drama, first published in 1956, went so far as to label the entire period between the passing of Monteverdi and the emergence of Mozart as ‘the dark ages’.¹³ It is still just possible to take such a view. Consider the operatic milieu so meticulously reconstructed in Farinelli il castrato. The theatre is dimly lit by candles, the spectators primarily pay attention to each other – flirting, signalling, eating – anything but attending to the drama onstage, which unfolds amid acres of musically uninteresting recitative. The only moments of relative attention are those in which a virtuoso singer comes to the footlights to beguile everyone with a beautiful aria.

Yes, by twentieth-century standards, such contempt for the art-work is benighted. Then there is the typical opera seria plot, a potpourri set in ancient somewhere, peopled by a small number of characters who spend much of their time trying either to murder or seduce one another (in the recitatives), and who then periodically lapse into moments of prolonged anguish (in the arias) as they bemoan the fact that their noble ideals are thus compromised. The only certainty, apart from the fact that they will express their conflicting emotions with many virtuoso roulades and trills, is that in the last scene they will all be improbably forgiven by an erstwhile despot, a figure often openly modelled on the real-life despot sponsoring and presiding over the operatic performance. And then, as if all those monstrous castrati were not enough, there is opera seria’s inveterate fondness for plots in which men dress up as women, or (even more frequently) women dress up as men. Almost all the principal roles were written for high voices, soprano or alto singers, female or castrato. Either a woman or a man could be cast in any given high-voiced part, regardless of the fictional character’s actual gender.

Reformed opera seria of the early eighteenth century, though offering up cross-dressing in great profusion, nonetheless had far fewer characters, and less variety of musical forms, than Poppea and later Venetian opera. Minor characters had fallen away, and with them disappeared the comic aspects of the plot. The ‘carnival’ undercutting of the serious action, which was such a feature of Venetian opera, had been replaced by unremitting moralizing and seriousness of purpose. Comic opera, as we shall see in Chapter 5, took on a form of its own, one that eventually came to rival the serious genre. So far as music was concerned, there was yet more rationalization: the rich profusion of forms jostling in seventeenth-century Venice was reduced to two basic types of operatic communication, recitative and aria. Recitative became much simpler and more formulaic than the recitar cantando of early opera. Called recitativo semplice or recitativo secco, it was usually accompanied only by a string bass instrument and a harpsichord, became very close to spoken declamation and was the medium in which almost all stage action would unfold. The aria, however, became an increasingly prolonged, musically elaborate, frozen moment of reflection on the part of one of the characters. Early eighteenth-century operas unremittingly alternated recitative and aria; duets or other ensembles were rare; the chorus was often banished altogether.

The endless recitative/aria alternation may seem more formulaic, more predictable and above all less flamboyant than the variety flourishing in mid-seventeenth-century Venice. But it was nevertheless this type of opera that proved the most prestigious and durable in the eighteenth century, and that spearheaded the genre’s extraordinary dissemination. Around 1690, when reform began, opera outside Italy could be seen in about twenty central European courts; a hundred years later opera seria was all over Europe – both in courts and in cities, from Spain and Portugal in the west to Russia in the east. Why was it so successful?

One point to bear in mind was that opera seria, in spite of its tendency towards restraint, showed little enthusiasm for curbing the audience’s visual pleasure. An important reform librettist, Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750), admitted in a letter of 1701 that ‘as for the dramatic content of opera, many years of experience have led me to appreciate that you need to be fairly heavy-handed if you are to achieve your essential goal, which is pleasure’.¹⁴ Zeno’s libretti were also notable in featuring new artistic enthusiasms such as Orientalism and exoticism, with historical architecture other than that of Greece and Rome (China, Persia and India featured among his settings). Opera seria had two further advantages. While the wild anarchy of Monteverdi’s Poppea made any political meaning ambiguous at best, the new, simpler plots could deliver straightforward moral and political messages, in keeping with an age in which art was thought of as didactic and improving. What’s more, those moral and political messages overwhelmingly congratulated and flattered the ruling classes, displaying their rationality and beneficence but also demonstrating that they had a human side and could experience feelings as intense as those of lesser mortals. The other advantage was that this kind of opera allowed for a more complicated musical argument. The musical glory of the drama, the solo aria, developed to a point where music bestowed greater complexity on the characters, and provided the star singers with vehicles of ever-greater elaboration to dazzle the audience.

The roster of composers during this period is largely obscure: who has heard these days of Gasparini, Pollarolo or Ziani, all of whom made ‘premiere’ settings of Zeno libretti? Most of the works disappeared soon after they were first performed (as did almost all operas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), and hardly any have so far been granted significant modern revivals. The most famous name is Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725), who lived right through the period of reform and whose more than sixty operas changed with the times, in particular by an expansion in the complexity of the arias and a corresponding reduction in their number. Scarlatti was born and raised in Rome, a city in which opera always had a rather difficult time because of Papal disapproval and interference; but he made a decisive impact in Naples, which for much of this period vied with Venice as the pre-eminent Italian operatic centre. In part this came about by making typical arrangements with the ruling classes: operas were performed in public theatres, but also received special showings in the vice-regal palace of the city’s Spanish rulers. Perhaps equally important, though, was the presence in Naples of a number of thriving conservatories, institutions in which operatic style soon became a staple part of the education, and which produced a steady stream of composers and star singers who made operatic Naples respected throughout the peninsula and beyond. But the composer of opera seria who means most to us today was not from Naples, indeed was not even Italian.

HANDEL AND LONDON

George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) was born in Halle in Germany, and at the age of eighteen moved to Hamburg, which had the only public (i.e. not court-sponsored) opera house in regular use in Germany. From there he went on a prolonged trip to Italy, and in 1711 arrived in London, where he was based for the rest of his life. Handel, by then in his mid-twenties, had already gained some operatic experience in Germany and Italy. One of his operas (Agrippina) had been a great success in the Venetian carnival season of 1709–10. Handel thus came to Italian opera with a varied musical background – as well as Italian influences, he had elaborate experience of German counterpoint and instrumental forms, and his overtures tell us that he also knew something about French dance idioms. With Handel, opera seria became decisively international; his musical eclecticism must surely have contributed to his enormous (if precarious) success in London.

The reasons Handel arrived in London in 1711 are unclear. Although it was then the largest and richest city in Europe, London’s attractions as a place for a composer to make his living with Italian opera were by no means obvious: in spite of a few attempts over the previous decade, the genre had made hardly any inroads into metropolitan life. As mentioned in the last chapter, England’s rich tradition of spoken drama was an obstacle, as was the reduced position of the English crown after the mid-seventeenth-century civil war. However, not long into the eighteenth century, Italian opera at last entered London’s musical scene. London theatres typically operated in a mixed economy: because they had limited support from royal and noble patrons, they needed to be financed by joint stock companies. When these enterprises ran well, the revenue they generated could compete with any on the international market: London could, and for a time did, hire the most expensive singers and scene painters, becoming the musical capital of Europe so far as performers were concerned. But producing operas in this way was extremely fragile financially: financial bubbles could be created and then burst, often with catastrophic results.

Handel’s first London opera, Rinaldo (1711), entered directly into this world. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, the architect and playwright Sir John Vanbrugh enlisted the help of noble patrons and many stockholders to build a venue for opera, the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. This was at base a money-making proposition. By means that are unclear, Vanbrugh negotiated a deal with the government, prompting legislation that guaranteed his theatre a monopoly on operatic events. He thus gained a decisive advantage over his main rival, the theatre at Drury Lane. Although this monopoly did not last long, there were some years in which the King’s Theatre flourished, helped by a series of Handel operas and a roster of star international singers.

Opera in London always had to feel its way through a dense thicket of early capitalism. William Hogarth’s engraving Masquerades and Operas (or the Bad Taste of the Town), dating from 1724, is a wonderfully economical depiction of the opposition some Englishmen felt towards the new genre (see Figure 6). On the left is the King’s Theatre, with the impresario in an upper window inviting in the crowds. Beneath, the audience is herded in by a devil and a fool. Above them is a poster supposedly depicting a typical operatic scene: a soprano and two enormous singers are in costume (the latter are castrati, as usual caricatured as grossly oversized); to the right are three noble patrons on their knees, saying, ‘Pray accept £8000’ – the enormous sums that singers could earn thus being parodied. In the foreground of the main picture are a couple of ‘plain men’ from the country, untouched by the urban madness surrounding them, one scratching his head in confusion. There is also a forlorn figure with a wheelbarrow, carting away the pearls of the English dramatic tradition (now deemed useless and unfashionable), Shakespeare, Congreve, Dryden and Ben Jonson; the sign over the barrow says ‘waste paper for shops’ (shades here of Dryden’s satirical poem MacFlecknoe: ‘From dusty shops neglected authors come, / Martyrs of pies, and relics of the bum’). On the right another crowd mills around a cheap pantomime version of Dr Faustus. In the background are three aristocratic patrons, posturing and idly admiring the new cultural scene and its fancy Italian architecture. We may think of this picture as a scenic backdrop to the debates that have always raged around opera, debates made all the more intense in Handel’s London by the fact that opera was so flagrantly a foreign import.

RINALDO AND THE SPARROWS

Follow the milling crowd into that building on the left and we find ourselves in the operatic world of Rinaldo, which premiered at the King’s Theatre on 24 February 1711. For Handel’s London debut, the manager of the theatre, Aaron Hill, planned something exceptional. This would be the first Italian opera especially composed for the London stage (the few previous efforts having been makeshift dramas cobbled together from the music of pre-existing works); no expense would be spared. Hill wrote a canny Preface to the printed libretto, making clear the failings of past operatic attempts in comparison with his own new production:

As I ventur’d on an Undertaking so hazardous as the Direction of OPERA’s in their present Establishment, I resolv’d to spare no Pains or Cost, that might be requisite to make those Entertainments flourish in their proper Grandeur, that so at least it might not be my Fault, if the Town should hereafter miss so noble a Diversion.

The Deficiencies I found, or thought I found, in such ITALIAN OPERA’S as have hitherto been introduc’d among us were, First, That they had been compos’d for Tastes and Voices, different from those who were to sing and hear them on the English Stage; And Secondly, That wanting the Machines and Decorations, which bestow so great a Beauty on their Appearance, they have been heard and seen to very considerable Disadvantage.

At once to remedy both these Misfortunes, I resolv’d to frame some Dramma, that, by different Incidents and Passions, might afford the Musick Scope to vary and display its Excellence, and fill the Eye with more delightful Prospects, so at once to give Two Senses equal Pleasure.¹⁵

Here the priorities are neatly laid out. Despite the air of operatic reform circulating in Italy, which to some extent informed the shape of Handel’s opera, Hill claimed to know exactly what the public would like, and boasted of how he would cater for it. The star singers would have music written especially for them, and thus would dazzle with their virtuosity all the more completely. Their effect would be enhanced by scenic marvels to outdo anything before on the British operatic stage. This was indeed a bold vision for the future, and Hill was right to make the most of it. The published libretto contained the complete text of the opera, in both Italian and English. Given that most of the audience would have understood little Italian, such an aid was important. Audience members might buy the libretto in the streets around the theatre and then, equipped with individual candles in the dimly lit theatre, could follow it during the performance.

The main characters of Rinaldo form a constellation typical of opera at this period, all of them boasting that tangle of conflicting emotions and loyalties needed to stimulate multiple anguished soliloquies. The action is set during the First Crusade in the eleventh century; the Christians are laying siege to Jerusalem and on their team are Goffredo (female contralto), the commander of the army, his brother Eustazio (alto castrato) and his daughter Almirena (soprano). Almirena is engaged to a young warrior called Rinaldo (soprano castrato). The opposition comprises Argante (bass), the king of Jerusalem, who loves a sorceress called Armida (yet another soprano). A vastly simplified account of the intricacies of the plot would be that in Act 1 everyone gets introduced and has an aria or two, laying out her or his motivations and passions. At the end of the act, Argante and Armida try to weaken the Christian cause by kidnapping Almirena. In Act 2, Rinaldo comes looking for his beloved and is captured. Here the plot thickens, because Argante falls in love with Almirena, and Armida falls in love with Rinaldo. Argante finds out about Armida’s new affection and is not pleased. In fact, at this stage not a single character is happy. In Act 3 all these difficulties are rapidly resolved. Rinaldo and Almirena are released through the application of Christian magic; battle is joined and the Christians win. All ends happily. In true enlightened manner, Argante and Armida convert to Christianity and are forgiven.

Why, one might ask, is the plot so complicated? This is not just a problem for today’s audiences. People at the time complained about it as well. But the plot confusions are a direct result of the larger musical structure. All the major characters must be given a series of arias spaced out across the opera, so there are between three and eight per character in Rinaldo. These arias must be contrasting in mood, thus giving a sense of order and balance to each character’s profile but also allowing the singers an opportunity to display various emotions. By following these rules, at the end of the opera one could have a sense of what (somewhat anachronistically) might be called a ‘composite’ character. There was also the convention – already well-developed in later seventeenth-century Venice – that singers tended to exit after their arias, thus garnering maximum effect. These musical imperatives were the engine that manipulated the plot into its various twists and turns. It was the singers around whom the plot was constructed, not the plot around which the singers were arranged. And this situation calls into question the idea that librettists and other men of letters were the driving force in operatic reforms at the turn of the eighteenth century. Looked at from the singers’ point of view, the libretto was in no sense confusing, since it furnished exactly what they required: an orderly progression of contrasting arias, spaced out across the evening’s entertainment.

As soon as we examine any of these arias in detail, it becomes clear that their internal structure was also formed primarily with the singer in mind. Almost all are in ‘da capo’ form: an initial ‘A’ section outlines the basic mood; this is followed by a ‘B’ section, likely to be different in some way, often contrasting in musical mood; finally there is a repeat of the ‘A’ section, with the singer expected to improvise elaborate ornamentation the second time around. It was that surplus, the unpredictable and virtuosic addition to something already heard, that lent high drama and suspense to the event. A good example of the da capo aria at its simplest is the very first number in Rinaldo. The stage set shows the besieged city of Jerusalem, with soldiers about to do battle. To one side are the encampments of the Christian army. In a brief opening recitativo Goffredo tells his clan that they can look forward to victory, then comes the aria:

GOFFREDO

Delle nostre fatiche

Siam prossimi alla meta, o gran Rinaldo!

Là in quel campo di palme

Omai solo ne resta

Coglier l’estrema messe.

E già da’ lidi eoi

Spunta più chiaro il sole,

Per illustrar co’ rai d'eterna gloria

L’ultima di Sion nostra vittoria.

[aria: ‘A’ section]

Sovra balze scoscesi e pungenti

Il suo tempio la gloria sol ha.

[‘B’ section]

Né fra gioie, piaceri e contenti

I bei voti ad apprender si va.

[‘A’ section repeated]

Sovra balze, etc.

[Great Rinaldo, our efforts / mean we are close to our goal! / What remains to us / is to gather the final harvest / of palms on the battlefield. / From the shores of the east / the sun shines more brightly, / illuminating with glorious rays / our final victory over Sion.

Only on steep and jagged cliffs / does glory build its temple. / It is not with joys and pleasures / that it can be conquered.]

The recitative lays out the narrative premises and is, as always, in the Italian equivalent of ‘blank verse’, that mixture of seven- and eleven-syllable lines that we discussed in the opening chapter. The aria text is typical in its more regular, predictable verse metre and rhyme scheme (the lines are of ten syllables each, the rhyme scheme is abab). The sentiments are also characteristic, and can tell us something important about opera seria’s basic mode of operation. Like the libretto as a whole, the poetry is at base sententious and moralizing. We are informed in a highly complicated way that the road to glory is hard, but that this difficulty adds lustre to the goal. The abstract moral message is expressed in the ‘A’ section, in the first two lines by means of an elaborate metaphor that uses the natural world as its stage. Vivid images of the cliffs (balze) that are steep (scoscesi) and jagged (pungenti) lead us to the temple (tempio) and its glory (gloria). This is very direct, even naïve in its message, and the directness is echoed in the musical setting, which does everything to make the pictorial images musically manifest, thus communicating them as vividly as possible to the audience. There are sharp, jagged rhythms and melodic lines for those steep, jagged rocks; and then long held notes, stubbornly repeated pitches and elaborate passage-work for the temple and its glory – ‘tempio’ and ‘gloria’ are expanded and elongated in order to stress their importance. The text of the ‘B’ section provides the obligatory contrast. It stresses that pleasure won’t get you to glory. Handel here changes the key for musical variation, but those jagged rhythms still echo in the orchestra, reminding us of the broad didactic purpose. Then come the reprise of ‘A’, and a chance to admire the singer’s ornaments and enjoy again those word-painting gestures.

The orchestration of this first aria is schematic, just cello, bass and harpsichord (the so-called ‘continuo’ group) for the recitative, then strings and oboes for the aria. As in most Handel arias there’s little sense of orchestral ingenuity, of shifting instrumental sounds furthering the musical message on a bar-by-bar basis. This is a more mechanical process, in which the strings and oboes either play together or simply alternate. There are, of course, unusual orchestral sounds in Handel’s operas, but they make their effect from being exceptional. Orchestration, like the aria’s formal design, is geared towards elevating the solo singer as the most important part of the fabric. Duplicating the text’s poetic conceit, the aria’s music strives to imitate nature, and thus control it. Handelian opera is in this way irremediably triumphalist: it reminds us again and again, in aria after aria, of man’s superiority over the natural world he inhabits.

Given their fundamental similarity in form, the expressive range of the arias in Rinaldo is remarkable. When the other side of the cast appears (those opposing the Christian army), they are accompanied by scenic splendours, those ‘machines and decorations’ of which Aaron Hill was boastful:

Argante from the City, drawn through the Gate in a Triumphal Chariot, the Horses white and led in by arm’d Blackmoors. He comes forward attended by a great Number of Horse and Foot Guards, and descending from his Chariot addresses himself to Goffredo.

A functioning chariot, complete with white horses, seems lavish indeed; but a contemporary critic mentioned that Argante actually came in on foot, so perhaps economies had been imposed.¹⁶ Whatever the case, to accompany this splendid stage picture we get a sudden injection of musical colour: trumpets and drums appear for the first time in the opera. Again the aria text, ‘Sibillar gli angui d’Aletto’, is a collection of vivid images, this time the hissing of Alecto’s serpents and the hungry barking of the six-headed Scylla. And again the music does its illustrative duty, the hissing translated into upwardly sweeping violin scales, the barking into the bass’s angular leaping line. A further example of this scenic music comes shortly afterwards, when Armida makes her appearance. The scene description reads, ‘Armida in the Air, in a Chariot drawn by two huge Dragons, out of whose Mouths issue Fire and Smoke’ (the critic cited above mentioned that the fire and smoke were produced by a boy hidden inside the dragons’ mouths, who could sometimes be seen by the audience).¹⁷ Again there’s obvious musical imitation in the aria ‘Furie terribili’: the encircling furies are depicted by an insistently repeated octave leap in the voice and the strings; a thunder machine works overtime.

These blood-and-(literally-)thunder moments are skilfully placed in the opera, and always alternate with gentler inspirations. But the central idea of musical imitation of nature is always there. After the huffing and puffing of Argante and Armida, and clearly in contrast to them, comes an aria for the Christian general’s daughter, Almirena. It takes place in ‘a delightful Grove in which the Birds are heard to sing, and seen flying up and down among the Trees’. We begin with familiar pastoral imagery:

Augelletti, che cantate,

Zeffiretti che spirate

Aure dolci intorno a me,

Il mio ben dite dov’è!

[Little birds that sing, / gentle breezes that waft / sweet drafts around me, / tell me where is my beloved!]

The little birds and gentle breezes all dutifully combine to help frame a simple question. They also remind us that the eighteenth century was a great age of landscape – of attempts to fashion nature into a coherent order. The delight in symmetry, with gently rolling hills, tastefully arranged sheep and murmuring streams, contains nature every bit as firmly as Rinaldo’s other arias with their images of roiling seas, or jagged cliffs, which have been domesticated by musical control.

Aaron Hill was not content for this aria to have a scenic backdrop of obedient fountains, purposeful paths and tidy aviaries. He decided that nature could be made theatrical in a more immediate way. Joseph Addison, in a contemporary article in The Spectator, takes up the tale:

As I was walking in the Streets about a Fortnight ago, I saw an ordinary Fellow carrying a Cage full of little Birds upon his Shoulder; and, as I was wondering with myself what Use he would put them to, he was met very luckily by an Acquaintance, who had the same Curiosity. Upon his asking him what he had upon his Shoulder, he told him that he had been buying Sparrows for the Opera. Sparrows for the Opera, says my Friend, licking his lips, what? are they to be roasted? No, no, says the other, they are to enter towards the end of the first Act, and to fly about the Stage.¹⁸

A paradise indeed, in which the outdoors would be transported into the theatre, and in which beautiful singing would vie with nature for ascendancy. Handel did his best to join in the project, and called for imitation birdsong courtesy of two flutes and piccolo. As if to emphasize the naturalness, this aria is not a ‘da capo’, but seems rather to obey the whims of nature. However, real birds released into the real theatre constituted a dream too far. A later commentator in The Spectator made all too plain that untamed nature could still have the power to disrupt the most carefully planned Arcadian fantasies:

There have been so many Flights … let loose in this Opera, that it is feared the House will never get rid of them; and that in other Plays they may make their Entrance in very wrong and improper Scenes … besides the Inconveniences which the Heads of the Audience may sometimes suffer from them.¹⁹

Rinaldo was revived four times in the next six years of London seasons, and also appeared in German translation in Hamburg (1715), one of relatively few foreign outings for Handel’s operas. As new London singers appeared, so Handel adapted the work to suit them. When, in a 1717 revival, the formerly bass role of Argante was given to an alto castrato, Handel duly wrote three new arias for him. When the opera came back in the early 1730s, he made further substantial revisions to suit new cast members and also reacted to newly straitened circumstances by reducing the scenic spectacle. There is, in short, no definitive version of Rinaldo (nor indeed of almost any opera of the period); every score was work-in-progress, awaiting new performance conditions to stimulate fresh configurations.

THE HANDELIAN AFTERLIFE

Rinaldo was a crucial moment in the history of opera in London – an event whose success changed the course of operatic life in the city for twenty years or so, and altered Handel’s career with it. But the path was never easy, with financial crises endemic. To survive, opera needed the very best Italian singers. But, then as now, these stars knew their worth. Nicolini, the castrato for whom the title role in Rinaldo was written, was paid 800 guineas a season (not the £8000 that Hogarth suggested in his engraving, but still an astonishing sum). Patrons paid half a guinea a ticket – a steep price by the standards of the day. The heyday was in the 1720s, when the so-called Royal Academy (again, a joint-stock company, under royal charter and financed by a mix of royal patrons and stock-holders) allowed Handel to produce a steady stream of operas. His style changed little over these years. He and his audience remained faithful to the ideal of opera seria he had inherited; he was content to continue finding new music to clothe the basic format of the da capo aria.

Among his forty or so operas, there are peaks and valleys. Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar, 1725) has been much revived and appreciated, not least because its portrayal of Cleopatra has proved popular with star sopranos. In the 1730s, Handel was freer in his choice of libretti, and produced a series of more innovative works. Orlando (1733), based on Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and written for the famous castrato Senesino, has supernatural elements and a tremendous mad scene. The hero imagines an Orpheus-like journey into the underworld to rescue his lost beloved, and as he does so his musical discourse fragments, pieces of recitative and da capo aria succeed each other in an anarchic mix. In Alcina (1735) the supernatural has even greater play, and the usual musical forms are enlivened by a series of dances and by elaborate choral movements, clearly showing that Handel, ever the cosmopolitan, had been influenced by French models. And yet, impressive as these departures are, it would be a mistake to concentrate too much on occasional breaks with convention. Every one of Handel’s operas is cast more or less as a continual succession of da capo arias, and thus of numbers in which, formally at least, he obeyed the rules – in which he used formal conventions rather than tried to evade them.

In London in the 1730s, making a living through operatic composition suddenly became a lot harder. Handel’s theatre suffered from disastrous competition with a rival Italian company, the so-called Opera of the Nobility, based initially in a theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. More serious still, theatres that performed English-language musical entertainments were siphoning audiences away. In 1728 John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera scored a huge success, in part through its Hogarth-like lampoon of the extravagances of opera seria. It is sad to read a contemporary account of an Orlando performance at which ‘the Audience was very thin, so that I believe they get not enough to pay the Instruments of the Orchestra’.²⁰ As ever, public opera existed on the financial edge; in this case the entertainments on offer were simply too numerous for the limited patrons. By the early 1740s Handel gave up opera altogether, concentrating his prodigious energies on oratorios in English. He became in the process a national monument, but his very success in the new, more popular genre made Italian opera all the more precarious.

An intriguing question today concerns Handel’s afterlife. When he stopped composing operas in the 1740s his works very soon left the stage and were plunged into dense obscurity. Although some of his oratorios (Messiah above all) became a permanent part of the musical universe, surviving all sorts of changes of musical fashion, the operas were rapidly judged outmoded and unacceptable. They remained unperformed (apart from a few arias that survived as recital pieces) for most of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries: a 200-year silence. When revivals did eventually take place (first, as historical curiosities, in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Germany), the revivers felt it necessary to change the works in quite fundamental ways, so strange and alienating had their dramatic language become. Baritones and basses took the castrato roles (and struggled vainly with ornamental writing that was now unknown to their voice ranges); the recitativo semplice was spiced up with orchestral interjections; the ubiquitous da capo arias were often shorn of their repeats (judged undramatic by generations brought up on Wagner). But such drastic musical adjustments eventually became unnecessary; audiences began to accept the works on something nearer their own terms. Now, 300 years after their first performances, the Handel operatic revival is in full flood, ever more of his operas have a place in the current repertory. They are fuelled by the new stylistic awareness of the ‘historical performance’ movement; by a generation of singers (male and female) who are at ease with Handelian virtuosity; and (most surprising of all) by a new generation of audiences who are no longer uncomfortable with Handelian operatic shapes and modes of expression.

It’s easy to see how his operas became out of date: even to late eighteenth-century audiences the unremitting succession of solo arias seemed artificial; regular performances in the nineteenth century became impossible, in spite of Handel’s continuing popularity in oratorio. What has happened to occasion his meteoric operatic ascendance over the last few decades? Partly there are practical reasons. The historical performance movement’s insistence on lighter, faster interpretations of eighteenth-century music allows the drama to move more quickly; recitatives can gallop along, arias likewise; and a new generation of singers has embraced this new performing aesthetic. Also, as mentioned in Chapter 1, the virtual absence of new works joining our repertory has necessitated ever-deeper excavations of the past in search of novelty. In this sense, Handel has been a great beneficiary of the collapse of late twentieth-century opera, as were, a little earlier, Italian opera composers of the early nineteenth century such as Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini.

Perhaps as important is that directors have learned how to cope with the succession of da capo arias, with the ‘portrait gallery’ that is Handelian opera seria. Frequently they have done so by ignoring aspects of the underlying aesthetic, by injecting directorial energy that keeps the stage action moving even when the musical form is repetitive. The spectacle is made to seem hyper-alert and eventful by working against the music. Some have loudly lamented this practice (by no means restricted to Handel, but perhaps most commonly applied to his operas), but modern-day audiences are unlikely to prefer an ‘authentic’ Handel staging, in which almost the only large movements on stage would be the exits of characters as they concluded their arias. A related issue concerns casting. We are still cautious about replicating the remarkable gender indifference of Handel’s opera seria. Although we no longer require baritones to struggle through castrato roles, we typically now use counter-tenors, the presence of their male bodies seemingly more important than the fact that their voices (however virtuosic) are unsuited to parts fashioned for castrati – particularly in the lower register, where the castrati were typically strong and where counter-tenors are typically weak.

But these performance choices are changing all the time, and as more Handel operas come into the repertory they will continue to evolve. What is more, some of Handel’s contemporaries are now appearing, newly refurbished; Alessandro Scarlatti’s sixty-odd operas are, admittedly, mostly waiting in the wings, but those of Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) are showing signs of life, and there are (according to the composer’s – possibly exaggerated – count) ninety-four of them to choose from. One thing is certain: in our current operatic universe Mozart’s comic operas are no longer the watershed – what we called in the last chapter the dividing line between the distant and accessible past. Handel’s operas can, we now know, deliver new meanings after centuries of neglect – so long, that is, as there are singers to turn the already-heard into a daredevil feat of vocal elaboration, astonishing us with their courage.