7 
Oratorio
Jennens had barely reached adulthood by the time the Royal Academy of Music was founded, but after his brother’s suicide he became one of Handel’s most loyal subscribers. A few years later, in the summer of 1733, he might have met Handel for the first time when both men happened to be visiting Oxford. Before long, he stood out as something close to a fanatic. “I shall rejoice to hear of your good health, & of the good success of the Prodigious,” Holdsworth wrote to him, “which I doubt not will keep you in big spirits.” Jennens would later state his devotion in the clearest possible terms. “Every thing that has been united with Handel’s Composition becomes sacred by such a union in my eyes; unless it be profane in [its] own nature.”
Each autumn Jennens would arrive in London from Leicestershire and chart his stay by the performances he was able to attend, like a sailor reckoning a course toward a safe port. The town house in Queen Square, where he was living at the time, shared with his brother-in-law, was northeast of Covent Garden and the Haymarket and within easy reach of the theaters. Handel’s house, too, was only a short ride away, and by the mid-1730s visits to Brook Street seem to have become a regular part of Jennens’s annual stay in London. Over time he came to feel a testy sense of investment in whatever the Prodigious happened to be creating there. He would report to Holdsworth on each new work that he heard or saw in manuscript form, accompanied by biting reviews of any compositions he found unworthy of Handel’s genius. Whenever the maestro had failed in his eyes, with a hackneyed melody, say, or a wobbly pairing of notes and words, Jennens felt the disappointment to be deeply personal, even an insult. The sentiment would only grow as he came to know Handel better.
Each summer, though, as he made the return journey from London over rutted roads and into the muddy fields of the Midlands, Jennens’s heart inevitably sank. The landscape around Gopsall could seem gloomy and forbidding, so much so that villagers would later think it the perfect place to erect a gibbet, a post for hanging the bodies of the executed. It was one of the last landmarks future visitors would pass before the manor house came into view. There would be no more chance of “delight,” as Holdsworth put it, until the next opera season, and even that depended on whether Handel was offering fresh compositions or merely reviving older work. “I hope that will raise your spirits another winter,” Holdsworth said after a spare season, “as I fear his silence contributed to sink them this.” The problem was that just as Jennens was coming to rely on his annual pilgrimage south, Handel’s own fortunes were beginning to darken.
The same year as Robert Jennens’s death, in 1728, London newspapers announced the opening of a new work conceived by John Gay, the poet and a friend of Swift’s. Gay was among the smart set of artists and literary men whom Handel had met not long after coming to London. But while Gay was known as a sharp-tongued raconteur within this elevated circle, he had so far achieved little in the way of public fame. That all changed with his script for a stage performance that premiered at a theater run by the producer John Rich in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a rival to Handel’s Haymarket. Gay called the work The Beggar’s Opera—probably from an idea originally suggested to him by Swift—and the name gave away the joke up front. How would the stylized conventions of Italian opera look, Gay proposed, if they were set not in a fantasy kingdom or Eastern empire but in the world that audiences knew lay not far from their theater seats, in London’s cutpurse alleys and rat-ruled prisons?
Gay’s plotline was a hilarious mess. Polly Peachum, the daughter of a corrupt thief catcher, marries a highway robber, Macheath, who is at first imprisoned, then briefly set free by the jailer’s daughter, then recaptured and condemned to the gallows, where he receives a last-minute pardon from the king. The music was supplied by an acquaintance of Handel’s, the German composer Johann Christoph Pepusch, who borrowed widely from popular ballads as well as from Handel’s own catalog. Discerning listeners could pick out bits from Rinaldo and the Water Music. The songs were interspersed with witty banter and veiled references to public figures, from celebrity criminals to prominent Whigs. Most remarkable of all, ticket holders arriving at the theater door could expect to understand everything that happened onstage, since the entire production was sung and acted in English.
The response was overwhelming. The show continued for sixty-two performances. No stage production had enjoyed a longer initial engagement, with revivals in future years assured. By the end of the second season, The Beggar’s Opera had earned a little more than five thousand pounds in profit, the equivalent of a decade’s worth of income for a reasonably situated gentleman.
It was also the first stage production to develop its own line of merchandise. Sitting in the audience one night was a young artist named William Hogarth, the son of an impoverished Latin teacher. He had grown up near Grub Street and made his living as a painter and engraver, taking his subjects from current events and society happenings such as Gay’s raucous new production, for which he made sure to secure a ticket. From his seat, he turned the action onstage into sketches—he had brought along large sheets of paper, tinted dark blue so as not to disturb anyone with any glare—and then, back in his studio, the sketches into full-scale paintings.
One of them showed the cast during a crucial scene when the imprisoned Macheath, awaiting execution, sees his luck begin to turn. Hogarth peppered the painting with insider knowledge, such as the fawning attention paid by Charles Powlett, Duke of Bolton, to Lavinia Fenton, a player who everyone knew was also his mistress. Widely available as a print, the work would turn out to be Hogarth’s first major sales success—the earliest of many viciously observant paintings that, over the next decade, would make him the essential visual chronicler of his time.
Hogarth had shown The Beggar’s Opera as audiences experienced it: clever, biting, and oddly hopeful. For decades to come, there would never be a London theater season without it. In an era that prized satire on the page, the playwright and the producer had excelled at putting it on the stage. And with a souvenir to collect, theatergoers who had been doubled over in the stalls could laugh once again whenever they looked up at a Hogarth print on their drawing room walls. The astounding triumph, people quipped, had made Gay rich and Rich gay. In the process, what had been thrilling a few years earlier—the imaginative settings, predictable storylines, and sheer spectacle of Italian opera—now became an object of parody. The Beggar’s Opera “gave such a turn to the Town,” remembered a prominent patron and philanthropist, the Earl of Shaftesbury, “that Opera’s were generally neglected.”
In taking aim at the most fashionable entertainment of the moment, Gay and Rich had also targeted its leading practitioner—Handel himself. Audiences began to fall off for the Royal Academy’s performances. Investors, seeing their capital withering away, made no plans for renewing the joint-stock company that had underwritten the academy’s work. Handel quickly pivoted, as he had done before, and launched a new partnership at the King’s Theatre, again with a royal subsidy but without secure investor backing. At the end of 1730, word came from Halle that Handel’s mother had died. He arranged to pay the funeral expenses but, with new openings needing his attention more than ever, decided not to attend in person. “Ich kan nicht umhin allhier meine Thränen fliessen zu lassen,” he wrote to his brother-in-law later that winter. “I cannot help but let my tears flow here.”
In an odd way, The Beggar’s Opera was as much a work of homage as ridicule. Gay and Rich had shown the power of English words adapted to the conventions of opera, even if their aim was to play them for laughs. In fact, Handel had experimented with something similar a decade earlier. He had first tried setting English texts while residing at Cannons, the home of a patron, James Brydges, later Duke of Chandos. His earliest attempt at a dramatic work in English, Acis and Galatea, based on a story of tragic love by the Roman poet Ovid—and with a text devised, ironically as it would turn out, in part by John Gay—dated from this period. Gradually Handel had developed greater skill in marrying melodic lines with the natural rhythms of the language, an ability he would hone with biblical anthems such as “Zadok the Priest.” While at Cannons he had also explored something rather different: the idea that a story drawn from the Bible need not be just a pious tale or a collection of poetic phrases, but a complex narrative, with scope for the kind of romance and heroism typically seen on an opera stage. The year after his mother’s death, Handel returned to the stacks of compositions from his Cannons days and pulled out a set of pages that he believed might be given new life.
Esther took its plot from the biblical story of a Jewish orphan who became queen of Persia and saved the Jews of the kingdom from destruction. The idea was lifted from a play by the French dramatist Jean Racine, and the English text was likely supplied by the men in the Cannons orbit, such as Handel’s old friend John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, or perhaps even, once again, Gay. Its appeal lay in its unusual stock of drama: an unlikely queen, a villainous courtier, an appeal to the heart of a besotted king, and a nation saved, all through Esther’s revealing her true identity as a member of a persecuted people. The result was a work that built tension and sympathy by placing at the center of the action a woman with a choice to make: acquiesce to injustice or expose a secret, using her intelligence and quiet power to forestall a massacre.
In May 1732, Handel launched a new, extended version of Esther at the King’s Theatre. It was billed as “an oratorio, or sacred drama,” and the announcement supplied advance instructions for anyone who might not know what exactly an oratorio was supposed to be. “N.B.,” warned an advertisement in the Daily Journal newspaper: “There will be no Action on the Stage, but the House will be fitted up in a decent Manner, for the Audience. The Musick to be disposed after the Manner of the Coronation Service”—that is, as a concert with several soloists and a chorus but no costumes, stage effects, or running about.
In Italy an oratorio was a way of skirting the Roman Catholic Church’s prohibition on dramatic performances during Lent. The term itself had come from the place where music of that type was first performed, in a lay community of pious brothers, or Oratorians, of St. Philip Neri in Florence. It was a musical form that Handel knew well—and had already turned his hand to composing—as a young man in Tuscany. But as a working artist and effective stage producer, he would also have understood that oratorio had a financial advantage. With no tailors or set carpenters to pay, producing an oratorio was far less expensive than mounting an opera, a fact that promised to elevate his own bottom line.
The advance notice seemed to work. Virtually any listener would have remembered the basic plotline from childhood Bible lessons, although it might have seemed odd to see biblical Persia transposed to a secular theater, with a cast made up almost entirely of Italians. Even Senesino, the famous castrato, appeared onstage as Assuerus, the king. But the simple fact of being able to make sense of the words being sung by the company—now in English rather than Italian—was arrestingly fresh. George II and Queen Caroline were in attendance on opening night, where they might have recognized at one point in the music a recycled version of “Zadok the Priest.” “This being a new Thing set the whole World a Madding,” a contemporary account reported. “Han’t you been at the Oratorio, says one? Oh! If you don’t see the Oratorio you see nothing, says t’other; so away goes I to the Oratorio, where I saw indeed the finest Assembly of People I ever beheld in my Life”—even if the Italians tended to garble the words. “But for the Name of English,” the reviewer felt, “it might as well have been Hebrew.”
Unlike The Beggar’s Opera, Esther was the kind of performance one could leave feeling not just entertained but educated, even edified, since listeners knew that the storyline was inspired by true events, as later scriptwriters might put it. The glow from opening night did not last long, however. Another group of musicians, perhaps getting wind of Handel’s plans, had already offered their own patched-together Esther story more than a week before Handel’s premiere—and even giving Alexander Pope top billing as the supposed author of the sung text. Near the end of the run, an upstart theater just across the street in the Haymarket announced that it would stage a “pastoral opera,” which turned out to be a pirated version of Acis and Galatea. In the months that followed, however, Handel had bigger worries than policing his own creations.
The field was now crowded with producers, composers, and performers seeking to capitalize on Handel’s innovations, as well as to exploit whatever enthusiasm yet remained for Italian opera. One of them was Senesino, whose career in Britain Handel had helped to launch. He soon emerged as the headliner of a company later called the Opera of the Nobility. In addition to the star power of Senesino himself, the company was able to contract Farinelli, the most sought-after of the great Italian castrati. In due course the Opera of the Nobility stole away almost the entirety of Handel’s singers and orchestra, in the same manner that Handel had earlier lured away performers for his academy.
Senesino’s company enjoyed the added advantage of its own high-level patronage. Just as George II had staked out his position in English society by opposing his father, so too his own son Frederick used the partisanship of music and theater as a lever against whatever his father had endorsed. Living debt-ridden and debauched in Hanover, Frederick had been effectively kidnapped and dragged to Britain to take up his duties as Prince of Wales. “If I was to see him in hell,” his mother, Queen Caroline, once said, “I should feel no more for him than I should for any other rogue that ever went there.” Now in his early twenties, the prince aligned himself with Senesino’s company as patron, providing a royal endorsement to counter the one the king had provided to Handel.
A few years later, in 1734, the King’s Theatre refused to renew Handel’s position as resident composer, ending a relationship that stretched back two decades. He soon found another venue, in Covent Garden, but Grub Street writers had already begun to circle, sometimes using Handel as a foil for attacking foreign singers, Whig politicians, or anyone who came in a commentator’s sights. “Let it suffice to say that he was grown so insolent upon the sudden and undeserved Increase of [power and fortune], that he thought nothing ought to oppose his imperious and extravagant Will,” complained The Craftsman, the leading opposition newspaper. “This Excess and Abuse of Power soon disgusted the Town; his Government grew odious; and his Opera’s grew empty. However, this Degree of Unpopularity and general Hatred, instead of humbling him, only made him more furious and more desperate.”
Handel could be found in “a deep Melancholy, interrupted sometimes by raving Fits [and] frantick, incoherent Speeches,” The Craftsman reported. The claim was probably more allegorical than factual—a commentary on the sorry state of public life delivered as a swipe against a prominent artist—but still an example of the stories eagerly circulated by Handel’s growing set of detractors. His compositions had once “pleased our Ears and touched our Hearts,” reported another newspaper in early 1735, but “this Winter [he] sometimes performed to an almost empty Pitt.” His friends, too, had started to sense that something had changed, if not in Handel himself, then in the world around him. “I am sorry to hear of the ill success of the Prodigious,” Holdsworth wrote to Jennens consolingly.
As Handel was beginning to worry more intensely about how to fill seats in future performances, an anonymous pamphleteer carried news of one of his unlikely rivals: the small company across the street that would soon offer a cut-rate Acis and Galatea. “I left the Italian Opera, the House was so thin, and cross’d over the way to the English one, which was so full I was forc’d to croud in upon the Stage, and even that was throng’d.” The really surprising thing was to find “an English Tradesman’s Daughter [spring] up all of a suddain, and rival the selected Singers of Italy.” She was “very young, and very pretty,” with a voice that was “exceeding small, but exceeding sweet.”
Few people in London society knew the performer’s name, but she would soon take up residence a short walk from Jennens’s town house in an alleyway called Wild Court. Before long anyone who read a newspaper or frequented a bookseller would feel more intimately acquainted with Susannah Arne, or “Mrs. Cibber” as she would come to be known, than with any other public entertainer of the time—just not in the way she might have hoped.