TY - JOUR
AU - Smith,, Ruth
AB - This third volume of the projected five contains some of Handel’s highest and lowest career points. His statue by Roubiliac—the first full-length sculpture portrait of a living composer—is erected with much fanfare in Vauxhall Gardens, a principal London leisure venue, and his Alexander’s Feast is published in full score in stately folio with an impressive list of subscribers. On the other hand, he endures incapacitating illness, damaging hostility from potential patrons, and financial drain. For readers with the stamina to read from start to finish, the narrative has thriller elements. Will the Opera of the Nobility terminate Handel’s opera composition and performance? Will Handel’s career failure mean he has to go back to Germany? Will Handel’s ‘palsy’ prevent his ever playing again?—his ever composing again? Will 1737–8 be the last ever season of Italian opera in London? Yes, think many living through those times. Actually, no, in each case, thanks in part to Handel’s great resilience and ambition, but also to his (and the London elite’s) sense of his obligation to provide music for the capital and the nation. During these years the commitment that Handel described (to Mattheson, p.89) as ‘une continuelle application au service de cette Cour & Noblesse’ entailed perhaps the greatest challenges he ever faced about what to write, and for whom, and how to balance his books. Though the so-called Opera of the Nobility, which looked likely to extinguish his opera provision in 1733, itself collapsed in 1738, he compromised so far as to be its composer for hire with Faramondo and Serse, and he was later to complicate his life by entering into (and withdrawing from) negotiations with another aristocratic attempt to keep Italian opera going (Lord Middlesex’s company, 1739–48). As in previous volumes, the continuing opposition to, alongside patronage of, Italian opera and opera singers, and opera companies’ feuds and fluctuating fortunes, are admirably sourced and explicated by the editors; Sir John Buckworth’s letter to the Earl of Essex about the Nobility opera (pp.159–60) is a gem. The demands of Handel’s relationships with his patrons—including the royal family—as well as with his competitors, and his varying responses (for example, his intention in 1739 ‘to please the Town with something of a gayer Turn’ than a scriptural oratorio, p.550), provide a strong theme to this volume, which serves to modify the image of his independence propagated by, for example, T. C. W. Blanning in his enlightening The culture of power and the power of culture (Oxford, 2002). Another major aspect of Handel’s activity that this volume clarifies is the immense labour and intensity which he devoted to revising his operas for revivals; similar intensity and devotion characterize the editors’ attention to his revisions, which reflects the new valuation accorded to their results by scholarship of the last half century—fostered by the work of recent Hallische Händel Ausgabe editors. A third, more contextual, theme is the powerful association of music and philanthropy in England and Dublin, standout instances being the newly formed Fund for Decay’d Musicians, the Feasts of the Sons of the Clergy, and the first performances of Messiah. Particular to this volume by way of illuminating source material are the letters between Charles Jennens and Edward Holdsworth, and between members of James Harris’s family; though previously published, their value is enhanced here by their appearance in the chronological sequence amongst other contemporary documents, and by the vigilant and as-ever luxuriously extensive commentary. Three themes that they interestingly foreground are the competitive collecting of copies of Handel’s music (a thorough study of Handel’s copyists is much needed); the relationship of Handel and his English librettists (for L’allegro); and appreciative evaluation of the actual music, not just its executants (notably, but not only, by Handel’s principal supporter, the 4th Earl of Shaftesbury). Friends’ appreciation is a welcome complement to the caustic comments of Handel’s competitors and hostile social superiors. In 18th-century England, it becomes apparent, a c’leb, however able, who wished to retain supporters, needed to display a consistently charming demeanour; witness (among many examples) a letter to the press (p.165) instancing ‘the Rage expressed by a party which has been formed against Mr. Handel, though allowed, even by that Party themselves, to be one of the finest Composers the World ever produced’. It is cheering to read eventually of Handel’s humour and social success in Dublin (p.844). It is in the correspondence of others that Handel himself comes most vividly to life, rather than in his own: this volume contains only seven of his letters, of which five fill little more than 30 lines in all, and the one substantial letter, to Jennens from Dublin (a page, pp.758–9), Handel then cuts and pastes for another recipient (a recent and telling discovery, pp.767–8). As so often, his motivation is largely a matter for speculation, and the editors do not refrain from speculating, for example on the genesis of Messiah (p.720) where ‘may’ and analogues appear seven times in 14 lines, or on the non-arrival of Handel’s organ in Dublin and the timing of his first performances there (pp.745–6). At its best, the commentary combines zealous truffling for detail with thorough knowledge of the music to give a lively actualité to the narrative. So, for instance (p.738), the Chester bass who could not sing ‘at first sight’ in a try-out of ‘And with his stripes’ is partly exonerated with the comment that ‘The first bass-voice entry in the chorus involves a falling diminished 7th and a rising chromatic scale’, while Handel’s own movement, from Parkgate to Dublin, is explained: ‘Sailings were not possible from Chester itself because of sand deposits: a Navigation Bill had been prepared for Parliament in 1733 to correct this, but it was opposed by Parkgate and Liverpool (The Chester Weekly Journal, 30 May 1733)’. Along the way we learn about his interest in novelty instruments and instruments’ capacity (pp.190–91, 503, 641–2), and in keyboard developments (pp.427, 616); and the publication of his music, in which, as one of the four index subheads attests, Walsh is now dominant, is as hitherto tracked with forensic detail (see, for example, p.531). The music with which Handel obliged his fickle publics during 1734–42 includes such masterpiece Italian operas as Ariodante and Alcina, and the so-called ‘turn to oratorio’—or rather, as is clear from the invaluable calendars prefacing the detail of every season, a gradual surrender on his part of Italian opera to English word-settings, including such variously pioneering pinnacles as Alexander’s Feast, Saul, L’allegro and Messiah. The condition of the arts is regarded in this period as an index of national integrity, and a more overt nationalism is demanded, the setting of English words becoming more desirable, in particular of esteemed national and nationalist verse. Encouraged by his English literary friends and collaborators, Handel aims for premiership in that arena as previously in Italian opera. The competition with native composers generated something of a golden period of settings of great English poetry, by others as well as Handel, a theme that is evident in reproduced programmes (for example, of Arne’s popular Shakespeare settings), though reports of works by Handel’s chief English rivals, Greene and Arne, and of the evergreen Beggar’s Opera, seem rather randomly chosen and scantily explained. The eight years which in Deutsch’s Documentary Biography fill 186 pages occupy over 850 pages here. As in the previous volumes, lacunae in previous source studies are filled, errors of previous readers and errors in the documents themselves are corrected. No source stone is left unturned; for example, the Dead March in Saul is discovered in a small-format music volume whose title begins The Comic Tunes in the celebrated Entertainment of Orpheus and Euridice, as perform’d at the Theatre-Royal in Covent Garden (p.594). Nuggets new to this reviewer include La Francesina—the soprano who created Penseroso—performing dances ‘to the intire Satisfaction of the Court’ (p.204), the remark by Toussaint Rémond de Saint-Mard in 1741 that ‘on entend tous les jours en France avec admiration les Ariettes [arias] d’Handelle’ (in France Handel’s arias are listened to and admired every day; p.717), and a prior setting of Alexander’s Feast besides Clayton’s (p.125; by Musgrave Heighington, 1726, more information from Charles Cudworth in Grove). Protocols for inclusion of material, revised since the previous volume, are still unclear (see Introduction). Relevance seems somewhat tenuous rather often. One might question the criteria for including, for example, horn players ‘who may have played for Handel’ (p.284), an unidentified lady who ‘detests Handels Oratorios’ (p.603), a royal visit to Vauxhall with no mention of Handel (p.290), or a concert advertisement mentioning double bassoons (p.506; because Handel scored for double bassoon in two compositions). Venues which programme Handel—concert rooms, pleasure gardens—appear when he and his music do not (for example, p.706). An example of the level of comprehensiveness, which will delight some readers, is John Robartes to James Harris (both Handel supporters), 12 April 1740 (pp.600–601): ‘Dear Sir, I can send you no news at present. I fear musick is over for this season’. The comment subjoins: ‘By “musick”, Robartes must have been referring to Handel’s performances, since the “Middlesex” company were still performing at the Haymarket Theatre. He may have believed that Israel in Egypt on 1 April (“for this Day only this Season”) would be the last night of Handel’s season. However, there was one more performance from Handel, L’Allegro (23 April), which Robartes attended (see 22 April).’ The level of detail is not uniform. Rather, it reflects the editors’ principal interests, which gives refreshing variety. Donald Burrows’s work as editor of Handel’s music is informative everywhere and especially so for Alexander’s Feast, of which there is no modern critical edition, and which is so fully accounted for here as to make it appear a more pivotal work in Handel’s output even than Messiah, and perhaps it is. Burrows’s study of Handel’s relationship to the Chapel Royal and the royal family yields expansive coverage of any royal event, for example the page given to the order of Princess Mary’s wedding (for which Handel recycled previous music into an anthem, covered by a page of its own). By the same token of an editor’s (John Greenacombe’s) expertise, the built fabric of Handel’s surroundings is finely evoked; a visitor to London wanting a tour of Handel associations could benefit from the column and a half of index entries, by street name, of ‘other residences’ (pp.915–16). Other arts are less well served. Maybe The Choice of Hercules (p.548) has to wait for its appearance in the chronological sequence for an informed account of its visual sources. But even Wikipedia does better with Hogarth’s The Enraged Musician (p.744). As in previous volumes, political awareness seems undernourished; for example, the connection, explicated in secondary literature, between the banned patriotic play The Deliverer of his Country and Handel’s Israel in Egypt (p.478) is left completely opaque by the absence of any comment. In general, however, the reader is continually grateful for the editors’ summary essays illuminating individuals, institutions, sources and works, for their attention to detail and detailed provision of knowledge (quotations are identified, and Latin tags not only translated but sourced), for their signalling of markers in Handel’s career, for their making of thematic connections, for their placing of Handel’s seasons vis à vis his competitors’, for their tireless unearthing of sources, and for their staggering command and connection of the whole gamut of documents. Extensive and detailed though they are, the commentaries have some lacunae. By way of supplementary footnotes: Hoadly’s text for Greene’s Choice [Judgment] of Hercules (p.548) is in A Miscellany of Lyric Poems, the greatest part written for, and performed in the Academy of Music, held in the Apollo (London, 1740); the OED defines a lappet (p.826) as ‘An appendage or pendant to head-gear of any kind; esp. one of the streamers attached to a lady’s head-dress’; ‘bear the Bell’ (p.601, unexplained) alludes to the practice of giving the leader of a flock a bell, so, manly singers are to be foremost, but also, audiences are mere following animals; Joseph Sandford of Balliol was Jennens’s tutor (pp.780, 816); Newburgh Hamilton was Strafford’s steward, not his sons’ tutor (pp.125, 222, 446); ‘Waters’ was not just a ‘forwarding address’ but the Jacobites’ Paris banker; Hickford’s (new) Room was 50 × 30 feet (Berta Harrison, ‘A forgotten concert room’, Musical Times, xlvii/763 (1906), pp.602–05); ‘first Copy of a Paper’ means a newly drafted paper, not a newly printed newspaper (p.291). As in previous volumes there is a tendency to literalism which sometimes raises needless fogs. There is no mystery about Jennens’s remark that Handel is flush with cash when in fact he has cleaned out his savings account (pp.428–9, 472): Jennens is being characteristically sardonic, it’s a joke by someone in the know. Such observations do not diminish the value of the unprecedented amassing of documents, which is doubly impressive and welcome in an era of unprecedented squeeze on arts and humanities research resources. Given the scale of CUP’s investment, and the nature of the content, it is regrettable that the volumes’ usefulness continues to be undercut by the indexing; the editors and the publisher are simply not on the same page. (The editors themselves are not always on the same page: for example, The song ‘I like the am’rous youth that’s free’ has (index, p.866) and does not have (p.691) an autograph by Handel.) Perhaps, for any volume still in progress, the publisher could increase the sophistication of the index design beyond a single style of indentation and a single kind of font (bar a bold heading, used inconsistently and only four times), so that it can illuminate, rather than further muddle, the editorial ambition of over 60 double-column pages in very small type. Sadly, the indexes being almost exclusively of names, it is only by reading through the volumes that their riches of reception evidence can be gathered and assessed. That said, the generosity of cross-reference within the text renders indexes almost needless for those willing to read from cover to cover, the editors’ phenomenal capacity to keep the whole material under their eye reaching stellar proportions on pp.638–9 (a total of 52 cross-references). The indexing issues would be immaterial, were the volumes made available online—as reviewers have repeatedly recommended. The bibliography, which by comparison with the indexes is vestigial, is hard to fathom, being inconsistent. For example, Prévost has an entry under his own name and under that of his editor, whereas Lord Hervey has no entry under his own name but separate ones, neither mentioning his name, under the names of two of his editors. In the years during which the volume has been in the press the Handel industry, despite the funding squeeze, has not been idle, and several valuable studies have appeared since its commentaries were completed that clarify, interestingly supplement, or suggest amendments to them. For Saul: Natassa Varka, ‘“Departed ghosts in living forms appear”: Abiathar, Doeg, and Jennens’s conception of Saul’, Early Music, xlv/4 (2017), pp.629–39; for the singer Mrs Catherine Clive: Berta Joncus, Kitty Clive, or, The Fair Songster (Woodbridge, 2019); for musical philanthropy in London and Dublin: essays by Matthew Gardner and Tríona O’Hanlon in Music and the benefit performance in eighteenth-century Britain, ed. Matthew Gardner and Alison de Simone (Cambridge, 2020); for Handel and the organ: Peter Holman, Before the baton: musical direction and conducting in Stuart and Georgian Britain (Woodbridge, 2020); for Handel’s income sources: Ellen T. Harris, ‘“Master of the Orchester with a Salary”: Handel at the Bank of England’, Music & Letters, forthcoming. (See also the references, and comments, in the review by Berta Joncus, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, xliii/1 (2020).) The ‘arguments’ of Handel’s operas, omitted from this volume, can now be consulted in the online version of Ellen Harris’s collection of his librettos, at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001098579. Horace Walpole’s correspondence can also be freely accessed online, on Yale’s website. The London Stage is also online. The most valuable of all Handel online resources is not referenced: his autograph scores in the Royal Collection, digitized on the British Library’s website. Looking at them online, however, is not the same as being able to interpret them (they are the record of work-in-progress), and this benefit is bestowed time and again in Handel Documents. To take just one example, the vivid note (p.321) to Handel’s record of his completion of Faramondo, Act 2: ‘For the first time Handel gives not only the day of the week (see 15 November), but also the time of completion [10pm]; he had probably been determined to finish Act II of the opera that session, late on Sunday evening, so that he could begin the anthem for Queen Caroline’s funeral the next day (see 12 December)’. It is impossible to review adequately a volume, far less a work, of such scale and detail, which future generations will find hard to believe was achieved by such a very small team. Until an online version becomes available the five volumes will be the prime resource, other than the music itself, for any serious Handel scholar, and will give endless pleasure to any Handel enthusiast. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - More Handel documents
JF - Early Music
DO - 10.1093/em/caaa005
DA - 2020-06-26
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/more-handel-documents-XRIfgI9Pyy
DP - DeepDyve
ER -