On Handel's Italian Music: Dixit Dominus, Secular Cantatas, and Concerto Grosso in G Major

Awed and humbled by the masterpieces of composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, my music teachers from kindergarten even to graduate school readily rolled music, man, and myth into one: “Such genius!” After burying myself in their scores for hours and emerging dazed, but amazed, I too was tempted to stare back at the serious faces printed on book covers and etched into marble busts and imagine a “Bach,” “Beethoven,” or “Mozart” commensurate with the gravity and sublimity of their compositions, whose lives, like their music, existed in an exalted realm above the quotidian concerns of the eighteenth-century composer’s life. But of course Johann, Ludwig, and Wolfgang suffered their share of adversity. Consider ill-fated Mozart, whose untimely and tragic death in his thirties left his widow so desperately poor that she hired the hack Süssmayer to finish Mozart’s Requiem so that she could collect the remainder of the commission. Beethoven suffered perhaps the cruelest fate of all for a man whose life’s work is to create sound. Even J.S. Bach, the peerless master of sacred music, was the third choice (!) for his post at St. Thomas Church, and had to take time away from composing some of his most sublime works to pen grumpy but obsequious letters to the town authorities asking for more money for supplies and musicians. These well- documented struggles—with poverty, deafness, political squabbles—add dimension to legend. The mismatch between the value of these men’s enduring genius and the remuneration they enjoyed during their lifetimes is staggering.

And then there’s Handel. Though he was no stranger to the hustle of the London theater scene, Handel preserved his independence throughout his career and remained unfettered to any patron, position, or place that would constrain his composing. The relative paucity of documentation from Handel himself leaves us to assess his career from the outside. What little commentary we do have indicates that he was well respected throughout Europe, a cosmopolitan and flexible composer who found success in a variety of genres. He died a wealthy and respected man and was given full state honors at his funeral. His adopted British public immediately enshrined his legendary status, and his fame there grew to gargantuan proportions in the half-century following his death.

Handel’s choral works have ridden this wave of fame right up to our own time. Messiah has been performed in Britain every year since 1742, when it was written (and can be heard in countless performances across the globe every December). His Coronation Anthem No. 1 has enriched every royal coronation since the 1727 crowning of King George II. Handel’s oratorios and anthems brilliantly express communal triumph, and their sturdy compositional bones easily supported ever-larger numbers of singers and players joining the celebration. Both traits were perfectly suited to the musical endorsement and promulgation of a burgeoning global empire. More recently, the proliferation of historical performance groups turning their attention to Handel’s music has meant not only that more and more of his works have been resurrected in the last fifty years but also that they crackle and burn with all of the crispness and energy available in that style of playing. (I’ll never forget the first time I heard Messiah’s “Hallelujah” unburdened of the bloat it often bears, the sopranos, trumpets, oboes, and violins soaring to the heights). No matter the ensemble’s size or playing style, no one does grandiose better than Handel. And yet he has few rivals when working on the most intimate scale. Though his operas fell into obscurity, they have enjoyed a renaissance in the last few decades. Whether depicting furious rage in a torrent of quick notes or acute heartsickness with an achingly beautiful largo, few composers can pause a story to soundtrack a single character’s psyche the way Handel can. His music’s potent combination of refined polish and raw power thrills audiences today as much as it ever has.

As someone who never tires of working on Handel’s music (and as someone who very occasionally puts pen to paper to create new compositions), I wonder how it all came to be. The pieces on today’s program provide a snapshot of Handel’s output during the formative years he spent in Italy, 17061710. Throughout the seventeenth century, composers were drawn to Italy, the home of violin making, a hotbed of great singing, and the birthplace of opera, oratorio, and the secular cantata—all genres in which Handel would excel in the eighteenth century. Though he was just a young twenty- something, all of the musical traits that characterize his mature music were already in evidence. His years there would prove especially fertile, producing his first forays into opera and oratorio, a number of instrumental and keyboard works, and more than one hundred vocal cantatas, all of which he would draw on later in his career. His Italian sojourn also sheds light on Handel the budding businessman. Legend has it that he waited to go to Italy until he could do so “on his own bottom, as soon as he could make a purse for that occasion.” From the limited documentation available, a picture emerges of Handel’s thriving at the nexus of the political, ecclesiastical, and cultural cross- currents buzzing through Italy at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Handel spent the majority of this time in Rome, with side trips to Florence, Venice, and Naples. Upon his arrival in Italy he quickly made a favorable impression on a number of patrons and hosts, namely cardinals. In spite of a Protestant upbringing, Handel’s first compositions in Italy were written for the Catholic Church, including his expansive setting of Dixit Dominus, featured today. The favor of Handel’s Roman patrons extended beyond hosting within the city, and he received invitations to grand estates in the countryside. To many of these patrons, Handel was not a servant but a distinguished house-guest, a protégé whose music was proudly presented in regular salons that gathered various dignitaries and dilettantes from Italy and other places. These gatherings offered Handel the opportunity to perform his works for elite audiences and also to meet and rub elbows with Italian musical luminaries like Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti (with whom he purportedly had a keyboard playoff) and Arcangelo Corelli, the famous violinist.

Clement XI’s Papal decree banning opera seria in Rome forced composers there to channel their dramatic leanings into un-staged genres. With a ready supply of star opera singers available for performance, solo vocal cantatas flourished. Tempting as it may be to consider Handel’s vocal cantatas as workshop pieces—warm-ups for the later dramatic arias in his operas—in fact they distill the drama of a longer operatic arc into a few movements of concentrated emotion. Freed from the conventions of opera seria, the composers and poets who created cantatas and the noble patrons who enjoyed them could experiment together with an increasingly charged and intimate genre that celebrated the human voice and exploited its matchless capacity for emotional expression.

Our program begins with selections from three such cantatas. Handel created Cuopre tal volta in 1708 in Naples, where he worked with virtuoso bass Antonio Manna. In the recitative and aria excerpted here, the singer compares the glances of his lover to flashes of lightning and her words to tempestuous waves, pleading for mercy (“may the arch of your brow become a rainbow of peace”). Between 1707 and 1709, Handel wrote music for his most eminent secular patron, the Marchese Francesco Maria Ruspoli, at both the nobleman’s Roman palace and his country estate. Ruspoli’s considerable appetite for vocal cantatas, which featured in weekly conversazioni of the Academie degli Arcadi, drew forth some forty contributions to the genre from Handel’s pen. Handel wrote Armida Abbandonata in Rome in June 1707, for the star soprano Margherita Durastanti (who would later follow Handel to London to sing Italian operas there). Agrippina condotta a morire dates from a similar time and may also have been written for Durastanti. Both works feature female characters from classical stories in moments of turmoil. Armida, a Saracen sorceress, bewitches Christian knights. At the moment her cantata begins, she bemoans her abandonment by her lover, for whom she burns with ardor, but who has proven impervious to her charms. (In subsequent movements, she summons sea monsters to destroy his ships, then relents—and then asks God to help her forget him). In Agrippina, we meet the Roman queen after she’s been sentenced to death by her son, the Emperor Nero, whose trust has been eroded by his mother’s own shenanigans (like poisoning her husband, the Emperor Claudius). She decries his “insane fury” (or is it hers?) and vents her incredulous rage through a barrage of rapid-fire syllables set to unstable harmonies. In the first aria, she describes the dark thunderstorm gathering around her. In the subsequent recitative and aria, she bids Jove to aid her in revenge and cries to him: “turn the pitiless tyrant to ashes with your cruel thunderbolt.” Handel has the violins brazenly send a lightning-bolt scale pattern zigzagging down across all four of the instrument’s strings. Such vivid pictorial effects would turn up in some of his oratorios many years later, as when he depicts the plagues in Israel in Egypt (a feat that prompted Haydn to declare of Handel, “Surely he is the master of us all!”).

One can’t help but marvel when a human voice or violin meets the demands of Handel’s daredevil writing. But it’s more than just fireworks; the internal emotional turmoil of such moments as depicted in these cantatas cannot be contained by rigid recitative-aria formulas, and Handel develops new possibilities. Extroverted violin writing abounds in the cantata selections on today’s program. Some of the passages in Agrippina are nearly impossible to play elegantly, and that’s precisely the point. Neither bolts of lightning nor fits of rage should sound smooth. The music allows us to see and hear the character unraveling before our very eyes and ears. Armida opens with a busy, troubled scratch of quick bow crossings on the violin, immediately summoning an atmosphere of distress into which the solo voice enters, ungrounded by any bass instruments. In a surprise twist, in the subsequent aria, “Ah! Crudele,” the violins are silenced, as the drama zooms in for an intimate close-up on its central figure, whose slowly outpouring streams of vocal filigree do all of the talking. Such inventions transform the cantata into more of a dramatic scena, where vocalist and instruments flexibly serve the demands of a dramatic text, and where compositional sleight of hand can use music to reveal the kinds of psychological depths that would lend Handel’s later operas their allure. Notably, Handel would create an entire opera on the character Agrippina just two years later, in 1709. And, interestingly, a copy of Armida exists in what is believed to be the handwriting of J.S. Bach, whose most gut-wrenching moments come in the inventively accompanied solos of his Passions and cantatas.

One of Handel’s first stops in Italy was the Palazza della Cancelleria of Cardinal Ottoboni, for whom the famed violinist and composer Corelli had organized concerts for many years. Handel’s music from Italy has traces of Corelli’s playing style, and in the eyes of some critics even surpasses it. (Handel and Corelli worked together on multiple occasions, and once, when Corelli haughtily refused to play a passage because it lay outside of the “Italian” style, Handel purportedly picked up the violin and showed him how he thought it should go). Handel excelled in a Corellian genre, the concerto grosso. The Concerto Grosso in G Major, which pits a string trio against a full string ensemble, shows Handel’s mastery of the vigorous dialogues typical of concertos, on par with that of his contemporaries Vivaldi and Bach, as toe-tapping as The Four Seasons and the Brandenburgs.

Handel’s choral works—some twenty-five oratorios, Coronation Anthems, the Chandos Anthems, and a number of sacred works—maintain interest through a rich display of varied choral textures: massive block-chord declamations; frenzied cascades of scales scattering vocal energies in all directions; carefully constructed fugue subjects tightly woven together; and deft combinations of all of these and other procedures. All are in evidence in the 1707 setting the Vespers psalm Dixit Dominus. The powerful, violent images of the psalm seemed to have inspired Handel’s young, fecund imagination (perhaps in an effort to impress a patron) and left him unafraid of marshaling his forces in a variety of challenging ways. In the first movement, Handel swaps the long-tone chorale tune presentation typical of Lutheran church music for a Latin psalm-tune cantus firmus and embeds it in a typically Italianate texture, churning with a driving bass and dizzyingly active passagework in the upper strings. In the sixth movement, he layers Renaissance-like dissonant suspensions in the chorus atop a relentless onslaught of eighth notes played by all the strings in unison. The sixth movement ends with menacingly choppy quarter notes depicting the shattering of skulls. At the beginning of the seventh, the bass instruments and choir disappear, the brisk pulse melts into a gentle adagio, and Handel unspools a heartrendingly beautiful duet for two sopranos. In the last movement, extremes of range, enormous leaps, and angular vocal lines combine in a fugal tour de force for the choir. The variety throughout is remarkable.

1707 proved quite a year for the twenty-two-year-old. Over the next two years, Handel continued to write in several genres for various patrons, sharpening both his compositional and entrepreneurial skills. He deepened his understanding of the voice and forged lasting relationships with singers whose performances in London would bolster his success. He had begun to master the grand ceremonial anthem style that would win him favor with the Crown. And though he wouldn’t begin writing oratorios in earnest for another thirty years (and wouldn’t write Messiah for another thirty-five), he had thoroughly explored the choral and orchestral structures and textures that would be their hallmarks. By 1710, Handel had returned to Germany, where he had secured a position as Kapellmeister in Hanover. He immediately took advantage of that post’s flexible leave policy to visit his ailing mother in Halle and to spend time at the court in Düsseldorf. But the siren call of London, where Handel would be able to concentrate on opera, was alluring, and he soon traveled to Holland to make the first sea voyage of his life. The rest may be history, but what a delight it is to revisit this early music from Handel’s formative visit to Italy, when he first learned how to keep us on the edge of our seats.