More Syndication, Day 1 – “Ombra mai fu” from Serse by George Frideric Handel

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 1 – “Ombra mai fu” from Serse by George Frideric Handel

 

Do you recognize these guys?

You may have seen them like this…

…or, this…

I’m positive that almost anyone reading this will have come across Tweedledee and Tweedledum, most likely in one of Lewis Carroll’s stories about Alice.  But these characters in Carroll’s stories are references, derived from nursery rhymes and other epigrams that circulated through the British culture of his time.  Here’s a common version of one of their rhymes:

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee

   Agreed to have a battle;

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

   Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

   As black as a tar-barrel;

Which frightened both the heroes so,

   They quite forgot their quarrel.”

Carroll, with his penchant for the absurd and whimsical, took great delight in incorporating such ridiculous and quasi-nonsensical characters and situations into his stories and poems.  And I suspect that he usually had some kind of good reason or commentary behind his sublimely strange choices.  Have you ever felt like Tweedledum or Tweedledee, so fixated on your agitation and itch for a fight that you may have forgotten to think straight?  Or maybe you know someone else like that…  It seems to me that Carroll was probably commenting on people who so love to perpetuate drama that they will fight and argue about the silliest things.  That’s more or less what Tweedledee and Tweedledum represent, isn’t it?

Here’s another, most fascinating poem about the silly, cantankerous twins:

“Some say, compar’d to Bononcini

That Mynheer Handel’s but a Ninny

Others aver, that he to Handel

Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle

Strange all this Difference should be

‘Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!”

Unexpected, no?  Some people just love to have something to argue about (but not me!).  And if you are fortunate enough to currently be occupied with the middle or upper levels of Maslow’s insightful hierarchy, then you may see fit to use your abundant free time to argue about books, movies, music, or some other accouterments of comfy life.  And so, the London opera-going folk of the eighteenth century just couldn’t let you go without expressing their allegiance.  Some preferred Handel’s art, and others, that of Giovanni Bononcini.

I probably don’t have to tell you which of those composers posterity has come to favor.  Simply ask yourself which of those names you have heard before, or most often if the answer is both.  And of course history is lived in the moment; you never see the future until it happens, so the Handelian Tweedle-dees never got their chance to gloat!  Too bad.  But not knowing how things turn out is part of the fun of life.  Well, you are probably happier if you think so anyway.

The reasons for Handel’s dominance in posterity over Bononcini are both historical and artistic.  Handel and Bononcini were similarly cosmopolitan, moving between major cities in Europe to make their careers, albeit different ones.  But once Handel made it to London in the 1710s he was able to stay there, becoming the darling of the British, and pivoting from Italian opera to English oratorio, which the English ADORED after the imported art form fell out of favor.  For more about that process see this post and this one.  Bononcini was a very accomplished opera composer, and met with similar success as Handel in London (he even has the dubious distinction of having written the opera during which a long-standing rivalry between competing superstar sopranos, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni came to blows on stage, a cat fight of cat fights, in 1727).  But his Catholicism and resulting Jacobite acquaintances somewhat stigmatized him from the London public and he eventually found it difficult to be hired to write operas, even by companies with which he had earlier scored major financial and critical successes.  Handel’s uncomplicated and uncontroversial Protestantism certainly helped to facilitate his social cohesion with the British and allowed him to more sensitively tailor the oratorios to their national and religious tastes.

But most historians acknowledge Handel to be the stronger composer also, more capable of filling the lengthening arias of their day with complex and propulsive musical textures.  Fortunately for us, we have the opportunity to compare the artistry of Handel and Bononcini in a very direct way.  There survive from both composers settings of a libretto called Xerxes, or Serse or Xerse at is is also sometimes spelled.  It was written by Nicolo Minato and first set by the Venetian opera composer Francesco Cavalli, Claudio Monteverdi’s most notable pupil, in 1654.  Through the magic of YouTube we can compare all three versions: Cavalli, Bononcini, and Handel:

Here is Cavalli:

What really impresses me about Cavalli’s setting is the superhuman grace and lyricism that pervades the texture.  It just flows and never stops.  You can hear the proto-tonality, almost fully developed in Cavalli’s language, but still with some remnants of the Renaissance harmonic language, which is almost a little exotic at times.  It does not quite fit our musical grammatical expectations, calibrated by the music of more than three intervening centuries, but it is lovely, isn’t it?  You can read about a contemporary of Cavalli’s with a similar style here. Cavalli is earlier than both Bononcini and Handel, is therefor a little hard to compare with either of them.  

So, on to Bononcini:

Also lovely, and fully tonal.  This one completely satisfies our musical grammatical expectations.  It is charming and melodic, and fits the language quite well.

And here is Handel:

And that’s one of classical music’s greatest hits, famous as “Handel’s Largo”, played in countless instrumental combinations, even though the actual tempo marking is “Larghetto”.  But whatever.  Do you hear how much depth, propulsion and focus Handel’s setting brings?  It’s qualities like this, in addition to his historical serendipity, that have helped his music endure through history, overtaking composers like Bononcini, and so many of their now lesser-known contemporaries.

And Handel’s Serse was not well-received at the time of its premiere.  It is often surprising to modern day listeners, but that glowing, lyrical aria is actually a comic statement.  It features the noble, practically immortal Persian emperor in a moment of personal reflection, singing a heroic love song to a tree that has sheltered him after a wearisome battle.  It’s a bizarre, almost surreal image, and it fit better into Cavalli’s style of opera, in which comedy and tragedy were more or less equally mixed.  For more on another opera in which that was true, see this post.  By Handel’s time, the practice was to separate comedy and drama into completely different channels.  Touches like this, which happen often in Handel’s Serse, made the opera confusing and difficult for its first audiences to comprehend, even though most modern listeners acknowledge it for the masterwork of operatic characterization and pacing that it is.
It’s just another example of our human difficulty in comprehending the sweep of history while we are wrapped up in it, the same difficulty that caused a wry wit to write a few lines of satirical verse about the absurd nature of the argument between supporters of Handel and Bononcini, comparing them to ridiculous and childish characters in equally ridiculous and childish contemporary nursery rhymes.  The author probably thought the argument was just silly, but from our historically advantaged perspective we can see that fashion often obscures our perception of true artistic quality.  And so we’ll always have arguments like Tweedledee and Tweedledum and necessarily defer to future historians to see the truth clearly.

—

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Music About Fireworks, Day 5 – Music for the Royal Fireworks by George Frideric Handel

This week’s theme is…Music About Fireworks!  Is there anything more festive than colorful, explosive fireworks?  For centuries we have been celebrating with fireworks, and for just as long they have been inspiring equally colorful and explosive music.  This week we learn about some examples of this.

Music About Fireworks, Day 5 – Music for the Royal Fireworks by George Frideric Handel

Here’s a video that you may find rather interesting:

 

For the last thousand years the political borders of European nations have changed at a rate that most of us find hard to believe.  If you watch that video carefully you will notice that during most years of the past millennium at least one border changed, and during some years many of them did.  The peace and stability on the continent during the last couple decades have been the exception rather than the rule.  Would you find it disorienting to live through times such as these?  How would it feel not to know which political entity you would be a part of during any given year, who would be ruling over you, whose military you would support?  For centuries, that was the condition of many Europeans.

I am writing this several days after the “Brexit” was chosen, just barely, by the citizens of the United Kingdom.  In the aftermath of that vote, the Scottish prime minister announced her people’s displeasure with that decision, implying that the northern country may break away from the southern ones soon.  The future of that is still very much up in the air with new developments reported almost hourly, for now anyway, but I am struck by just how much this all feels like another frame in that video.  It makes me appreciate the stability of the American political borders, at least during my lifetime.  But perhaps this is an illusion caused by a limited view of time.  The borders of the United States have expanded steadily over the course of its brief lifetime, stabbing westward as the expression goes, and redrawing the political borders of Indian tribes (if political borders are even the right way to express that) and Latin American nations.  Also, the American map was almost redrawn in the conflict that led to the war between the states in the 1860s; had that turned out differently (see this post) a YouTube video of North America would look a bit more like that of Europe, and perhaps much more.

It is easy to forget that 100% of Western Classical music was written within the scope of that video of Europe’s ever-morphing borders.  It was all written in Europe and it was all written within the boundaries just a few centuries of the centuries covered.  If you expand into the past (still part of that video) you can include the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  Sometimes it baffles my mind that artists like those working in Europe were able to refine their craft so beautifully even as such turmoil and uncertainty roiled about them.  But they did, and I don’t think any of the great composers were really immune to or insulated from the political conflicts, struggles for succession, religious wars or imperial expansion that characterized so much of the history of the European continent.  They all found their own ways to engage with these struggles.  Some served.  Others provided music for the homefront, often enriching festivities related to military victories or treaties with their superbly crafted music, much of which survives to please our ears today.

Toward the end of his life, having put down his roots in England decades earlier, Handel found his music conscripted into the service of the King George II of the House of Hanover who ruled Britannia from 1727 to 1760.  Handel’s music shares several points of confluence with his Majesty’s political agenda.  Most of them deal with the Jacobite uprising, which culminated in the Battle of Culloden, and the War of Austrian Succession.  The war was a much larger conflict, with the Jacobite uprising playing out simultaneously but on a much smaller scale.  As Britain entered the continent-wide War of Austrian Succession it scored an early victory over enemies France and Prussia at Dettingen.  For that occasion Handel composed choral works, the Dettingen Te Deum and the lovely anthem The King Shall Rejoice:

 

 

As the 1740s played out with Handel busily composing oratorios (see this post), the Jacobite rebellion erupted in the north.  The latest in a series of such uprisings, all of which sought to overturn the House of Hanover from the British throne, replacing it with rulers from the Catholic House of Stuart, this short conflict elicited several notable, and sometimes interesting, works from Handel’s pen.  The first is a short, jingoistic song, “Stand Round My Brave Boys”, subtitled A song made for the Gentlemen Volunteers of the City of London, which must have inspired national pride in all who heard it performed on Drury Lane:

 

When the Jacobites were thoroughly routed less than a year later, in spite of help from Scottish Highlanders, and largely because the French failed to assist as they had promised, at the Battle of Culloden, Handel celebrated by writing what may be his second most famous oratorio (after Messiah), Judas Maccabaeus, with its famous chorus, “See the conquering hero comes”:

 

And when the War of Austrian Succession finally ended in 1748, with the House of Hanover on the winning team, Handel contributed one of his most enduring hits to the celebration, the Music for the Royal Fireworks.

The road to that premiere was anything but straight.  A great pavilion had begun to be constructed in London at the time of the treaty’s signing in October of 1748 as the site of a great pyrotechnic display.  It was completed half a year later, ready to be deployed in April of 1749.  During its construction Handel was contracted by the royal house to compose a suite of festive music to accompany the display.  He went back and forth with King George a number of times in an effort to agree on the orchestration (the king did not want any “fidles”).  Eventually a compromise was reached with a heavy battery of horns and trumpets, woodwinds, and a few string players.  The result is a forceful and colorful score, rich in wind and brass sonority, but also exhibiting the grace and charm that only strings can provide.  

The performance was attended by 12,000 Londoners, and perhaps you have heard that the great pavilion caught fire?  Fortunately, no one was hurt, except for all those who died in the War of Austrian Succession, of course.  I have long admired the overture of the suite; Handel really nails it – the slow, solemn opening heralds the grandeur of the event and it is so natural to imagine the fireworks popping off with kinetic abandon during the fast section that follows.  Handel was an occasional composer par excellence.  That very year also saw the premiere of Handel’s superb oratorio Solomon, an allegory for the satisfied Hanover King (see this post).
I can’t relate to the times which incubated Europe’s great music, times during which one could count on the surrounding political borders to change every year, and not on the neighboring village to remain intact until then.  Amazingly, the greatest art comes from this time, in spite of the uncertainty which pervaded everything.  Indeed, so much of this art was created in response to the very conflicts that changed the borders every year.  We lose out on much of the meaning of this art without understanding its motivation, for the lows become lower and the highs dizzying with the jubilation of victory, as Handel demonstrated in the scores he produced to bolster nationalistic and imperial pride during the 1740s.  Times may have been uncertain, but Handel seemed to understand that it was his job to ease this and celebrate the victories of the monarch which supported him.

—

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Classic Haikus, Day 3 – Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah by George Frideric Handel

This week’s theme is…Classic Haikus!

Folks, I’m on Spring Break.

Enjoy these concise poems

On great classic hits…

Classic Haikus, Day 3 – Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah by George Frideric Handel

Overcome by awe,

George rose out of reverence?

No, to stretch his legs.

 

—

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Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

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Music About Trees, Day 2 – “Ombra mai fu” from Serse by George Frideric Handel

This week’s theme is…Music about Trees!  Trees are noble, beautiful, helpful when we need them, and otherwise on the periphery of human drama.  Still, they are always there, forming our landscape, and providing poetic inspiration for artists and musicians.

Music About Trees, Day 2 – “Ombra mai fu” from Serse by George Frideric Handel

Do you recognize these guys?

You may have seen them like this…

…or, this…

I’m positive that almost anyone reading this will have come across Tweedledee and Tweedledum, most likely in one of Lewis Carroll’s stories about Alice.  But these characters in Carroll’s stories are references, derived from nursery rhymes and other epigrams that circulated through the British culture of his time.  Here’s a common version of one of their rhymes:

 

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee

   Agreed to have a battle;

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

   Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

   As black as a tar-barrel;

Which frightened both the heroes so,

   They quite forgot their quarrel.”

 

Carroll, with his penchant for the absurd and whimsical, took great delight in incorporating such ridiculous and quasi-nonsensical characters and situations into his stories and poems.  And I suspect that he usually had some kind of good reason or commentary behind his sublimely strange choices.  Have you ever felt like Tweedledum or Tweedledee, so fixated on your agitation and itch for a fight that you may have forgotten to think straight?  Or maybe you know someone else like that…  It seems to me that Carroll was probably commenting on people who so love to perpetuate drama that they will fight and argue about the silliest things.  That’s more or less what Tweedledee and Tweedledum represent, isn’t it?

Here’s another, most fascinating poem about the silly, cantankerous twins:

 

“Some say, compar’d to Bononcini

That Mynheer Handel’s but a Ninny

Others aver, that he to Handel

Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle

Strange all this Difference should be

‘Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!”

 

Unexpected, no?  Some people just love to have something to argue about (but not me!).  And if you are fortunate enough to currently be occupied with the middle or upper levels of Maslow’s insightful hierarchy, then you may see fit to use your abundant free time to argue about books, movies, music, or some other accouterments of comfy life.  And so, the London opera-going folk of the eighteenth century just couldn’t let you go without expressing their allegiance.  Some preferred Handel’s art, and others, that of Giovanni Bononcini.

I probably don’t have to tell you which of those composers posterity has come to favor.  Simply ask yourself which of those names you have heard before, or most often if the answer is both.  And of course history is lived in the moment; you never see the future until it happens, so the Handelian Tweedle-dees never got their chance to gloat!  Too bad.  But not knowing how things turn out is part of the fun of life.  Well, you are probably happier if you think so anyway.

The reasons for Handel’s dominance in posterity over Bononcini are both historical and artistic.  Handel and Bononcini were similarly cosmopolitan, moving between major cities in Europe to make their careers, albeit different ones.  But once Handel made it to London in the 1710s he was able to stay there, becoming the darling of the British, and pivoting from Italian opera to English oratorio, which the English ADORED after the imported art form fell out of favor.  For more about that process see this post and this one.  Bononcini was a very accomplished opera composer, and met with similar success as Handel in London (he even has the dubious distinction of having written the opera during which a long-standing rivalry between competing superstar sopranos, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni came to blows on stage, a cat fight of cat fights, in 1727).  But his Catholicism and resulting Jacobite acquaintances somewhat stigmatized him from the London public and he eventually found it difficult to be hired to write operas, even by companies with which he had earlier scored major financial and critical successes.  Handel’s uncomplicated and uncontroversial Protestantism certainly helped to facilitate his social cohesion with the British and allowed him to more sensitively tailor the oratorios to their national and religious tastes.

But most historians acknowledge Handel to be the stronger composer also, more capable of filling the lengthening arias of their day with complex and propulsive musical textures.  Fortunately for us, we have the opportunity to compare the artistry of Handel and Bononcini in a very direct way.  There survive from both composers settings of a libretto called Xerxes, or Serse or Xerse at is is also sometimes spelled.  It was written by Nicolo Minato and first set by the Venetian opera composer Francesco Cavalli, Claudio Monteverdi’s most notable pupil, in 1654.  Through the magic of YouTube we can compare all three versions: Cavalli, Bononcini, and Handel:

Here is Cavalli:

 

What really impresses me about Cavalli’s setting is the superhuman grace and lyricism that pervades the texture.  It just flows and never stops.  You can hear the proto-tonality, almost fully developed in Cavalli’s language, but still with some remnants of the Renaissance harmonic language, which is almost a little exotic at times.  It does not quite fit our musical grammatical expectations, calibrated by the music of more than three intervening centuries, but it is lovely, isn’t it?  You can read about a contemporary of Cavalli’s with a similar style here. Cavalli is earlier than both Bononcini and Handel, is therefor a little hard to compare with either of them.  

So, on to Bononcini:

Also lovely, and fully tonal.  This one completely satisfies our musical grammatical expectations.  It is charming and melodic, and fits the language quite well.

And here is Handel:

 

And that’s one of classical music’s greatest hits, famous as “Handel’s Largo”, played in countless instrumental combinations, even though the actual tempo marking is “Larghetto”.  But whatever.  Do you hear how much depth, propulsion and focus Handel’s setting brings?  It’s qualities like this, in addition to his historical serendipity, that have helped his music endure through history, overtaking composers like Bononcini, and so many of their now lesser-known contemporaries.

And Handel’s Serse was not well-received at the time of its premiere.  It is often surprising to modern day listeners, but that glowing, lyrical aria is actually a comic statement.  It features the noble, practically immortal Persian emperor in a moment of personal reflection, singing a heroic love song to a tree that has sheltered him after a wearisome battle.  It’s a bizarre, almost surreal image, and it fit better into Cavalli’s style of opera, in which comedy and tragedy were more or less equally mixed.  For more on another opera in which that was true, see this post.  By Handel’s time, the practice was to separate comedy and drama into completely different channels.  Touches like this, which happen often in Handel’s Serse, made the opera confusing and difficult for its first audiences to comprehend, even though most modern listeners acknowledge it for the masterwork of operatic characterization and pacing that it is.
It’s just another example of our human difficulty in comprehending the sweep of history while we are wrapped up in it, the same difficulty that caused a wry wit to write a few lines of satirical verse about the absurd nature of the argument between supporters of Handel and Bononcini, comparing them to ridiculous and childish characters in equally ridiculous and childish contemporary nursery rhymes.  The author probably thought the argument was just silly, but from our historically advantaged perspective we can see that fashion often obscures our perception of true artistic quality.  And so we’ll always have arguments like Tweedledee and Tweedledum and necessarily defer to future historians to see the truth clearly.

—

Would you like Aaron to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

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All That Glitters, Day 3 – “Golden Columns” from Solomon by George Frideric Handel

This week’s theme is…All That Glitters!  Gold has been attractive to humankind and symbolic of opulent wealth through all of recorded history.  It has shaped human civilization and provided an evocative poetic metaphor.  This week we explore music that was influenced by gold as it altered the course of history and provided poetic inspiration.

All That Glitters, Day 3 – “Golden Columns” from Solomon by George Frideric Handel

It is a not terribly well-known fact that the greater part of George Frideric Handel’s career was devoted to composing Italian operas for the stages of London in the 1720s and 1730s.  Handel had emigrated from his native Germany to London, by way of Italy in order to learn the craft of Italian opera from its source, and settled in the English capital early in the 1710s to keep busy and make his fortune writing opera after opera for the hungry audiences there, out-Italianing the Italians at their own game.  Packed with vocal fireworks from beginning to end, Handel’s operas, and those of his contemporaries, staffed by native Italian singers (including many star castrati – see this post for more on that), satisfied the public hunger which eventually reached fever pitch and inevitably declined.  The 1730s must have been stressful for Handel and other composers of Italian opera in London as they sensed the receding of interest in the art form that had fed them so well for the past two decades- see this post for more about that.  Handel, being the resourceful impresario that he was, pivoted and found even greater success, especially when one considers the weight of their legacy, in a more or less invented genre, the English language oratorio.

Everyone knows Messiah, of course, from 1742, distinguished for, among other reasons, boasting an uninterrupted tradition of annual performances that can be traced back to its premiere, almost 300 years by now.  But, if that is the only Handelian biblical oratorio that you know, I encourage you to make friends with a new one, like Saul, Samson, Jephtha, or Solomon.

While the operas were essentially interchangeable, filled with overly dramatic plots of love triangles, austere and legendary heroes, and stiff mythology and magic, where any plot was essentially as good as any other and the story of the hour mattered little, the oratorios afforded Handel’s librettists the opportunity to reference and allegorize current political and military events in a way the operas did not.  Plots for the mostly biblical oratorios were carefully chosen to reflect themes of current geopolitics and military conflicts.  In this sense they are more akin to Lully’s tragedies-lyrique, in which the prologues especially, extended cantatas which preceded the proper drama, populated by characters representing mythological figures and corporeal virtues like fame and wisdom, sung glowing praise to their “hero”, a thinly-veiled allusion to Sun King, Louis XIV, making particular reference to events of his personal and political life (read more about that here).  While the libretti to Handel’s oratorios did not work quite in that effusive way, they were often written in response to similar events and generally inspired the Brits to take pride in their kingdom which was seen to be analogous to the nation of Israel, constantly under the hand of God’s protection, even in the midst of strife.

1749 was indeed a high time for the monarchy and its subjects.  The British crown was recently vindicated for having chosen the right side of the War of Austrian Succession, a decade-long series of conflicts scattered across the Western world, and yet another post-Reformation conflict which pitted Catholics against Protestants in the interest of temporal power, in this case over whom should rightly head the house of Hapsburg in Austrian regions.  Having routed the Jacobists loyal to Charles of the Holy Roman Empire the alliance which asserted Maria Theresa’s ascension to the House of Habsburg, which included Britain, had prevailed, sealed by 1748’s peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.  Handel had written the famous Fireworks music in honor of this event, and his glorious English language oratorio Solomon can be seen as a continuation of the sentiments of British pride which shaped the pyrotechnical celebration of the previous year.  If you don’t know the festive and colorful Music for the Royal Fireworks, one of Handel’s greatest hits, check it out here:

 

Handelian oratorios are dramatic, like operas.  With the strange exception of Messiah, they all contain sung operatic roles, characterized by a specific singer over the course of the performance.  The orchestra sometimes paints scenic pictures in instrumental movements, and the distinctive choruses function much like their ancient Greek counterparts, representing whichever group of Israelites is appropriate to comment on the situation at hand.  

Solomon is a curious choice for a drama as it is essentially free of it.  There is no central conflict to speak of, no violence, little to resolve.  The story all but violates Shakespeare’s adage about drama being “life with the boring parts removed”.  Musically it is luminous, dramatically it is rather inert.  The most furious drama is found in the central act, which dramatizes the famous story of Solomon’s judgement regarding the two mothers who claim to have born the same infant.  But the first and third acts depict scenes that are not exactly packed with problems to solve.  The first act begins with a vigorous celebration of the brand new Temple in Jerusalem, and proceeds to depict Solomon’s marriage (not really biblical – Solomon was anything but monogamous), while the third act depicts a happy state visit from the Queen of Sheba who is suitably impressed by the splendor and prosperity Israel has reached under the wise king (the widely-known instrumental movement Arrival of the Queen of Sheba is the prelude to the third act).  Not exactly thrilling drama, but full of splendorous spectacle that is clothed in glorious music through and through.  The British subjects who consumed Solomon around the time of its premiere would have easily and inevitably associated the titular monarch with their reigning King George II, given the peace and prosperity enjoyed by the Empire.

The third act of Solomon is a masque, a show-within-a-show, much like a Lullian divertissement, staged for the entertainment and impression of the Queen of Sheba.  Just before the masque concludes and the Queen is seen off, Zadok, the first high priest of Solomon’s new temple, sings his praises of Solomon’s pious vision in an enraptured love song to the imposing center of Israelite worship:

 

“Golden columns, fair and bright,

Catch the mortals’ ravish’d sight;

Round their sides ambitious twine

Tendrils of the clasping vine;

Cherubims stand there display’d,

O’er the ark their wings are laid:

Ev’ry object swells with state,

All is pious, all is great.”

 

The tone of the text may strike us as obsequious and excessively worshipful, but the message is clear: the best of piety and statecraft commingle in the figure of Solomon and, by extension, King George II, Britain’s topical and most worthy equivalent.  The lyrical and ecstatic aria, with its swooping string accompaniment, demonstrates a brand of writing, uniquely suited to the setting of the English language, which finds its roots in the elder English master Henry Purcell, whom Handel was known to have acknowledged as a superior composer to himself.  The hearty corpus of orchestral sound here would have overwhelmed the daintier melismas of the Italian language, which is why the style is not to be found in Handel’s Italian vocal works.  The sonically impressive chorus that follows Zadok’s aria is another feature that would simply not have fit into his Italian operas, but in the unstaged oratorios became a most effective tool with which to enhance the scope and splendour that would otherwise have been created by operatic scenery and stagecraft.  You can listen to it, one of Handel’s most impressive choruses, here:

The 1730s must have been a stressful time for Handel as he struggled to come to terms with the declining viability of Italian opera production in London, but thanks to this turn of fortune, and especially his great resourcefulness, we have the much different, and equally gratifying, experience of his great English language oratorios, top-notch musical dramas which open a fascinating window into the English view of European history and politics.  While it probably would have surprised him to hear it in the 1710s, as he set about to take London by storm with Italian operas, the English oratorios have became Handel’s greatest legacy, and perhaps that of all of English music.

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Music for Going to Sleep, Day 3 – “Gia l’ebro mio ciglio” from Orlando by George Frideric Handel

This week’s theme is…Music for going to sleep!  We undergo the nearly mystical process of going to sleep every single day, even though we never truly understand the experience.  In spite of recent scientific methods of illuminating the activity it remains incomprehensible to us.  This has made fertile ground for musicians who attempt to represent or otherwise comment on the mysterious transformation from waking to sleep.  This week we explore some of these works by composers who saw fit to represent our daily, universal journey across the veil of consciousness.

Music for Going to Sleep, Day 3 – “Gia l’ebro mio ciglio” from Orlando by George Frideric Handel

The year 1733 was just one among nine others which formed the 1730s, a most pivotal decade for Handel.  It was during this decade that his lucrative career of composing Italian operas for the once hungry audiences of London came to an end and he pivoted to a new form, English language oratorio, which was to seal his legacy in England and all of Western history.  While the 1720s were heavy with successful Italian operas, and the 1740s were heavy with successful English oratorios, it was during the 1730s that Handel realized the days of opera were numbered and began experimenting with the forms that eventually crystallized into his mature oratorios.  It must have been an uncomfortably uncertain time for Handel, but without discomfort there is no invention and had Italian opera, Handel’s bread and most creamy butter for more than a decade, lost its hold in London, we would not have 1742’s Messiah and its companion works, with their stirring and stocky English choruses.  Handel’s English oratorios set the standard for English language works more than a century after his death.  And all of that goes back to the pivotal 1730s, and perhaps 1733 in particular, which was the year of an eccentric but, particularly in hindsight, brilliant operatic work called Orlando.

Handel was the cosmopolitan of cosmopolitans, and is often contrasted to his exact contemporary J.S. Bach in this respect.  Bach lived his fertile 65 years entirely upon German soil.  He wrote copiously and devoured the music outside of Germany.  His son, Johann Christian, settled in London, but papa Johann never left his native Germany, even to travel.  Handel, on the other hand, merely began his life in small town northern Germany, and did not see fit to stay for long.  His taste for excitement brought him to the operatic center of Hamburg in his late teens.  His taste for opera brought him to Italy in his early twenties, and his taste for success brought him to London shortly after that.  There, his first Italian operas delighted English audiences who were stunned that this young Saxon could so deftly out-Italian the Italian composers at their own game.

During the 1720s Handel must have made a fortune writing new operas each year for the hot Italian superstar singers, and flexing his growing entrepreneurial muscles as he directed the activities of his company, the Royal Academy of Music, which operated on capital provided by aristocrats with a keen interest to supply their city and its adoring audiences with new Italian operas, from Handel’s pen and others, and the native Italian vocal talent to necessary to perform them as authentically and impressively as possible.

The Royal Academy of Music swam along for years, keeping Handel busy, until the waters were troubled in 1733 with the formation of the Opera of the Nobility, a rival company bankrolled by the Prince of Wales in order to shake Handel’s monopoly on Italian opera in London.  Both companies limped along late into the 1730s and failed in tandem due to the fact that the waning public taste for their product did not provide sufficient receipts to pay the salaries of the expensive imported singers.  Never one to sit still, Handel was steadily exploring his options during the turbulent decade which saw the decline of Italian opera in London.  The major successes he scored with a couple English language works paved the way for his committed shift to producing the oratorios which populated his output during the 1740s.

Handel’s restless invention is also evident in the way that he tweaked and added value to the experience of Italian opera as it gasped its dying breaths in London.  To compete with the rival company he introduced features like concertos for strings and organ, with himself flamboyantly performing the solo parts, in between the acts of the operas his company produced, so you could be…entertained while you are entertained:

This entr’acte entertainment is the origin of many of Handel’s organ concerti and concerto grossi that are so inventive and beloved by a small handful of his diehard devotees.  The opus 6 Concerti Grossi for strings, in particular, are a varied and imaginative set modeled after Corelli’s collection of the same opus number (for more information about the opus system, read this post), but infused with a level novelty and muscularity that could only have come from Handel.  Even after discovering them two decades ago, they’re still among my favorites:

This concept of performing minor musical numbers between the acts of a major event is still practiced.  For example the Central Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra, in which I play, often features performances from local music students and university ensembles in the lobby to entertain the audience during intermissions.  It is like a refreshing palette cleanser between the two halves of headier symphonic fare of the main event.

In the operas of the 1730s Handel also applied his inventive capabilities to subverting the standard format of serious Italian opera that he had inherited and worked in so successfully during the previous decade.  In the more or less formulaic operas of the 1720s he had demonstrated an impressive level of sensitivity and orchestrational variety within the format of repetitive virtuoso arias, but they still remained primarily vehicles of showy virtuoso singing.  This is not to say the drama is not effective, but it’s certainly not the primary focus.  For the operas of the 1730s Handel allowed his finely tuned dramatic sensibilities to guide their shape more fully than before, much to the frustration of his veteran Italian singers who were befuddled by works like Orlando, so different were they from the conventional cast of their typical territory.  Perhaps Handel sensed the twilight of the Italian opera venture and so threw off his restraints in order to push the boundaries of dramatic music, no matter the self-absorbed needs of his pampered primo uomos.  The resulting works of the 1730s, with Orlando standing out far from the pack, transcend the formulaic serious operas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as absorbing dramatic works that look ahead to future developments in the course of operatic creation.

While I love many passages from all across Handel’s operatic works, it is Orlando that I find the most consistently fascinating in purely dramatic terms.  If I had to watch one like a movie, Orlando would be the most entertaining, so unusual and effective is its storytelling.  Senesino, the star castrato who first sang the title role, decried the fact that he had barely any opportunity to unleash his vocal fireworks upon his adoring fans.  And maybe Handel was aware that the appeal of such singing was fading, opting instead to test his singers’ powers of dramatic communication in sublime arias like Gia l’ebro mio ciglio, which the protagonist sings as he slips into an exhausted slumber following a most twisty adventure of heroism and madness:

Instead of featuring the impressive vocals of a star singer like Senesino, the true highlight of this aria is the accompanying violin duet, splendidly played in 1733 by the Italian brother violinists, Pietro and Prospero Castrucci, both students of the great Corelli.  Handel and the Castrucci brothers went way back to his time in Italy during the 1700s and he wrote those magical lines to be played, not on their violins, but a closely related and now extinct instrument, the violetta marina.  Instead of a vocal cadenza, each performance of this aria features a short, entrancing improvisation for the duo as Orlando finally surrenders to his long-deserved slumber.  Every cadenza is different, and it is the final, masterful touch from Handel in this unusual and wonderful work from a most uncertain time in his life.

You can watch the whole opera here:

Or just watch Act III, in which is found “Gia l’ebro mio ciglio”:

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