Abstract
Few debuts have been so auspicious as the premiere of Rinaldo, Handel’s first London opera, at the Haymarket Theatre on 24 February 1711. This event ushered in the Augustan musical age and helped to effect a basic change in English aesthetics. While Rinaldo was the most lavish Italian opera yet mounted in London, with spectacular scenery in imitation of the earlier semi-operas, its triumph was essentially musical. Discriminating members of the audience could immediately hear the difference between this music and that of the minor Italian masters whose polyglot pasticcios had enjoyed the approbation of ignorance during the previous five or six seasons. But operatic success is a complex phenomenon. It is too easy to agree with John Mainwaring, Handel’s first biographer, that the expensively dressed, all-Italian Rinaldo simply brought to a close the ‘reign of nonsense’ of bilingual opera on the English stage.1 Rinaldo was not in fact the first London opera sung entirely in Italian,2 and it did not put an end to the venerable pasticcio tradition. Nor can one accept the statement in the preface to the libretto that all previous Italianate operas had not been well adapted to English ‘tastes and voices’. Rather, Rinaldo stood out from its predecessors not only in the quality of its music but because it was the first Italian opera designed especially for London and over which the composer himself presided.
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Notes and References
Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (London, 1760), 78; ed. Lorenzo Bianconi, Memorie della vita del fu G. F. Handel (Turin, 1985)
The first was probably Jacob Greber’s Gli Amori d’Ergasto (9 April 1705); see Vice Chamberlain Coke’s Theatrical Papers 1706–1715, ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (Carbondale, 1982), p. xxii. Nearer to Handel’s arrival, two or three operas, including the pasticcio Almahide (10 Jan 1710), were sung in Italian throughout; see Reinhold Kubik: Händels Rinaldo: Geschichte, Werke, Wirkung (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1982), 39–49, and J. Merrill Knapp: ‘Eighteenth-Century Opera in London before Handel, 1705–1710’, in British Theatre and the other Arts, 1660–1800, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Washington, DC, 1984), 103.
in a letter of 5 Dec 1732, in Otto Erich Deutsch: Handel: a Documentary Biography (London, 1955/R1974), 299
Milhous and Hume, passim
see The Genuine Works in Verse and Prose, Of the Right Honourable George Granville, Lord Lansdowne (London, 1732), i, after 191, and Giles Jacob: The Poetical Register: or, the Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (London, 1719), i, 124–5
The Diverting Post, 4 Nov 1704; see Stoddard Lincoln, ‘The Anglicization of Amadis de Gaul’, in On Stage and Off: Eight Essays in English Literature, ed. John W. Ehrstine and others (Pullman, 1968), 46–52, and Robert D. Hume: ‘Opera in London, 1695–1706’, in British Theatre and the other Arts, 85–6
John Downes, in Roscius Anglicanus (1708), 48, reports that ‘it lasted but 5 Days’, a respectable run for a play but disappointing for an opera. In a commonplace book kept during a visit to London between 25 Dec 1704 and 29 May 1707, the composer Johann Sigismund Cousser reports that ‘for a pastorale with a cast of four [i.e. Gli Amori d’Ergasto], Herr Greber received a thousand guineas for a contract for six performances’, trans. Harold E. Samuel: ‘A German Musician comes to London in 1704’, MT, cxxii (1981), 592. In other words, the opera was a qualified success, falling only one performance short of what Vanbrugh had contracted for — not the disaster it has been made out to be. Samuel, who assumes that Cousser compiled his notes (‘Was ein virtuose, so in London kommt, zu observiren’) before arriving in England, thinks the ‘pastorale’ was not Gli Amori d’Ergasto. Yet Cousser’s memorandum sounds like the voice of experience. Besides, the disappointing number of performances is confirmed by a complaint made that season by Haym on behalf of a singer known as the Baroness: see Curtis Price: ‘The Critical Decade for English Music Drama, 1700–1710’, Harvard Library Bulletin, xxvi (1978), 53, n. 51.
see Peter Holman: ‘Bartholomew Isaack and “Mr Isaack” of Eton: a confusing tale of Restoration musicians’, MT, cxxviii (1987).
see Vice Chamberlain Coke’s Theatrical Papers, 4
see The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music (London, 1702–11): March 1706, ‘Help, help, th’unpractis’d Conqueror cries’ (by Eccles, sung in 5.i), ‘Listning, she turns’ (Issack, not printed in the playbook), ‘Plague us not with idle Stories’ (Eccles, 3.ii), ‘Thoughtful Nights, and restless waking’ (Issack, sung in 2.i by Mr Laurence); June 1706, ‘Make room for the Combat’ (anon., 5),’ sound the Trumpet, touch the lute’ (anon., l.i), ‘When Loves away, then Discord reigns’ (anon., 2.i); July 1707 (copy in the Houghton Library, Harvard U.), ‘Hail to Love, and Welcome Joy’ (anon., 2.i); Sept 1707, ‘When with adoring Looks we gaze’ (Issack, 1.i). For locations of the instrumental music, see Curtis Price: Music in the Restoration Theatre (Ann Arbor, 1979), 151–2, 242
In a letter of 6 May 1706 (printed in Milhous and Hume, p. 4), Haym reports that Coke, who took a personal interest in the commissioning of music for the theatres under his control, had commanded him to set an ‘Ode of discord’, hitherto unidentified and presumed lost. This may be part of the masque in Act 2 of The British Enchanters, where an ‘ODE for DISCORD’ and other pieces are sung to torment the captive hero, Amadis. But this apparent connection presents a puzzle. Granville’s semi-opera was produced exclusively at the Haymarket, but in spring 1706 Haym was closely associated with the rival Theatre Royal; the bass Richard Leveridge, who was supposed to sing the ode, was also attached to this company. Such duplicity would, however, be in line with other attempts by Coke to undermine the Haymarket’s success, as is Haym’s insistence that his compatriot Gasparini, and not Corbett, play the difficult first violin part at a rehearsal of the ode to be held at the Vice Chamberlain’s house. Since Granville was continually tinkering with the semi-opera during its initial run, it is conceivable that Haym’s ‘Ode of discord’ was prompted by one of the revisions; see Elizabeth Handasyde: Granville the Polite: the Life of George Granville Lord Lansdowne, 1666–1735 (Oxford, 1933), 96. One of the songs in the ‘Ode for Discord’ (When Loves away’) was published in The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music (June 1706), without ascription (see n.10 above). It seems to betray no overt Italianate characteristics, and since it is for soprano rather than for bass, it is probably not by Haym.
see The Genuine Works
Addison cites the compliment as an example of Rossi’s fustian, but in the index to the book version of The Spectator, the review of Rinaldo is conspicuously entitled ‘Mynheer Hendel styled the Orpheus of the Age’.
Memoirs, 63–4
trans. Samuel, p. 591
In the Bath Journal, 13 Nov 1752, discussed by Richard Luckett: ‘“Or rather our musical Shakespeare”: Charles Burney’s Purcell’, in Music in Eighteenth-Century England: Essays in Memory of Charles Cudworth, ed. C. Hogwood and R. Luckett (Cambridge, 1983), 68. Kubik, p. 13, points out that the epithet ‘Orfeo del nostro secolo’ was ‘in Italien nicht ungebräuchlich: schon 1689 hatte es Angelo Berardi an Corelli verliehen’. In post-Purcellian England Rossi’s compliment could not, however, have been taken at face value.
Mitridate is discussed by Michael F. Robinson in ‘Porpora’s Operas for London, 1733–1736’, Soundings, ii (1971–2), 67, and in ‘How to demonstrate virtue: the case of Porpora’s two settings of Mitridate’, Studies in Music, vii/1 (1982), 47–64. Cibber’s belated interest in this aspect of Italian opera is curious. At about this time he provided the English translation of Paolo Rolli’s Polifemo (also set by Porpora), though his knowledge of Italian was minimal and he thus garbled several key lines: see Richard Hindry Barker: Mr Cibber of Drury Lane (New York, 1939), 176. In commissioning Mitridate the directors of the Opera of the Nobility may have thought that Cibber would do less harm in the writing than in the translation.
Addison did not, however, approve of this source: ‘And as for the Poet himself, from whom the Dreams of this Opera are taken, I must entirely agree with Monsieur Boileau, that one Verse in Virgil is worth all the Clincant or Tinsel of Tasso’ (The Spectator, 6 March 1711).
see, for example, Friedrich Chrysander, ed.: Rinaldo, HG, lviii: ‘The author [Verfasser] of the poem was an Englishman, Aaron Hill … and Giacomo Rossi translated it into Italian’ (‘übertrug das englische Gedicht in’s Italienische’). This opinion was echoed by Winton Dean: Handel and the Opera Seria (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), 28: ‘The moving spirit was… Hill, who sketched the libretto in English and gave it to Giacomo Rossi to translate into Italian’. Dean slightly modified this position in The New Grove Handel (London, 1982), 14: ‘Hill drafted the scenario … and gave it to… Rossi to versify’.
see Dorothy Brewster: Aaron Hill: Poet, Dramatist, Projector (New York, 1913), 87; Kubik, pp. 10–13, also considers Rossi the librettist, regarding Hill, who was at the time co-manager of the Haymarket opera house, as little more than the producer. For an account of Hill’s managerial career, which ended abruptly with his sacking on 3 March 1711, only nine days after the premiere of Rinaldo, see Milhous and Hume: ‘The Haymarket Opera in 1711’, forthcoming in Early Music.
Strohm: ‘Handel and his Italian opera texts’, in Essays on Handel and Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1985), 40–1
Jupiter assumes the shape of Amphitryon, Mercury that of Sosia. In both Amphitryon and Rinaldo the characters who witness the transformations seem convinced by the magic. Whether actors of dissimilar appearance were deliberately cast as doubles for humorous effect in the earlier play is discussed by Milhous and Hume in Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays1675–1707 (Carbondale, 1985), 209ff. In the case of the opera, any humour may have been unwanted, because when Rinaldo was revised in 1731 the scenes in which Armida takes on Almirena’s appearance were substantially rewritten: Rinaldo simply hears his beloved’s voice rather than confronts her ‘double’ (see below, n.27).
Compare this with Humphreys’s more literal though still execrable translation for the 1731 revival: Oh, my Espous’d, my dearest Part, Where art thou sever’d from my Heart? Return! return! my Soul’s Repose! And dissipate my killing Woes! Ye Haggard Forms, I scorn to fear Your Erebus that opens here: What e’er your Fury can supply, Ye dreary Daemons I defy!
trans. Edward Fairfax: Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recoverie of Jerusalem (London, 1600), p. [ii]
Apart from characters’ names and a fickle reliance on Tasso, Handel’s libretto bears no resemblance to Dennis’s worthy tragedy.
see Mary Chan: ‘Drolls, Drolleries and Mid-Seventeenth-Century Dramatic Music in England’, RMA RC, no. 15 (1979), 124, and
Curtis Price: ‘Orpheus in Britannia’, in Music and Context: Essays for John M. Ward, ed. Anne Dhu Shapiro (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 264–77
In the 1731 version the effect was entirely lost in the editing described in n.22 above: ‘Armida places herself upon a little Bank, behind a Vase of Flowers, and as Rinaldo is going, a Voice resembling Almirena’s, invites him to embrace her’.
Strohm: ‘Handel and his Italian opera texts’, 46, 54; see also Sasse: ‘Die Texte der Londoner Opern Händels in ihren gesellschaftlichen Beziehungen’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Martin-Luther-Universität-Halle-Wittenberg, iv/5 (July 1955), 627–46
Duncan Chisholm: ‘Handel’s Lucio Cornelio Silla: Its problems and context’, Early Music, xiv (1986), 64–70
Brian Trowell: programme note for Rinaldo at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, Stagebill, xi/5 (Jan 1984)
Strohm, p. 47
‘Political Allegory in late seventeenth-century English opera’, Music and Theatre: Essays in Honour of Winton Dean, ed. N. Fortune (Cambridge, 1987), 22–5
Most seventeenth-century reprintings of Fairfax’s translation include the ‘Allegoria’, though Doyne dropped it from his edition: The Delivery of Jerusalemme: an Heroick Poem (Dublin, 1761). He ridicules Tasso’s resorting to ‘fairy tales’ and then attempting ‘to turn them all into an allegory equally absurd’ (p. 26). A modern edition of Fairfax’s translation, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. Roberto Weiss (London, 1962), p. xii, further muddies the waters: in the allegory of the poem ‘Fairfax [sic] explained the hidden meaning of the Gerusalemme, a meaning which Tasso had naturally never dreamt of’.
briefly considered by Kubik, pp. 110–13
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Price, C. (1987). English Traditions in Handel’s Rinaldo. In: Sadie, S., Hicks, A. (eds) Handel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09139-3_7
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