George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
In the season before Handel’s opera Rinaldo, his first written for England, was premiered in London, Dr. Johnson’s gave his famous definition of Italian opera as ‘an exotick and irrational entertainment, which has always been combated, and always has prevailed’. What prompted Johnson was Calypso and Telemachus, an opera in English, but in the Italian style with recitatives, with music by John Galliard and words by John Hughes. Exoticism and irrationality were, from the Johnsonian point of view, dominant features also of Rinaldo, produced with great public success in 1711 at the Queen’s Theatre. Addison and Steele, writing about Handel’s opera in The Spectator, were prejudiced both against the use of the Italian language and the employment of castratos, of which Rinaldo featured three. Addison started from the premise that an opera’s ‘only Design is to gratifie the Senses, and keep up an indolent Attention in the Audience’. He made fun of the release of sparrows on the stage during Almirena’s ‘bird’ aria ‘Augeletti’, fearing that they would take up residence in the theatre, ‘besides the Inconveniences which the Heads of the Audience may sometimes suffer from them’. He condemned the device as an improper mixture of realism with illusion.
"...much to the taste of London audiences"
Rinaldo had 53 performances in London during Handel’s lifetime, more than any other of his operas. Clearly his use of the libretto as a pretext for virtuoso vocal numbers, spectacular stage effects, and brilliant orchestral pieces was much to the taste of London audiences. That Rinaldo has not been one of the more often revived of Handel’s opera in recent times is due, not to the music, which is as rich and varied as any from Handel’s pen, but to the libretto’s failure to inspire him to a dramatic masterpiece. Addison blamed the source: ‘one verse of Virgil’ he wrote, ‘is worth all the clinquant and tinsel of Tasso’. This was unfair to Tasso, since the libretto was a very long way ‘after’ its source in that poet’s Gerusalemme liberata (1575). But the kind of romance Tasso represented ran up against the realism and moralism of English. Dr. Johnson’s commentary on the Italian epic poem genre was that ‘Ariosto’s [de]pravity is generally known; and, though [Tasso’s] Deliverance of Jerusalem may be considered as a sacred subject, the poet has been very sparing of moral instruction’. This echoed what the Canon says in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, about the books that fuelled the hero’s madness: ‘Who could really believe in…all those palfreys, all those wandering damsels, all those serpents, all those dragons, all those giants, all those battles…in fact, all those monstrous absurdities contained in books of chivalry? For myself, I can say that they give me a certain pleasure when I read them – so long as I do not deliberately reflect that they are all triviality and lies. But when I consider what they are I throw the very best of them against the wall’.
Tasso certainly is among the very best. And what did not appeal to prosaic literary moralists marvellously suited the operatic stage, the scene of the most spectacular illusionist effects available in those days, from the new advances in lighting, movable scenery, and special effects. The opportunity for stage transformations was a large part of what had attracted Aaron Hill, the ambitious young director of the Haymarket Theatre, who made the outline of Rinaldo’s libretto, to be versified in Italian by Giacomo Rossi. Tasso’s epic is an imaginative re-telling of the history of the First Crusade (1096-99) in which Christian forces under Godfrey of Bouillon (Goffredo in the opera) captured Jerusalem from the Saracens. The ‘Argument’ of the libretto summarises the plot:
Godfrey, General of the Christian Forces in the Expedition against the Saracens, to engage the Assistance of Rinaldo a famous Hero of those Times; promises to give him his Daughter Almirena, when the City shou’d fall into his Hands. The Christians with Rinaldo at their Head, conquer Palestine, and besiege its King Argantes in That City. Armida an Amazonian Enchantress, in Love with and belov’d by Argantes, contrives by Magick, to entrap Rinaldo in an Enchanted Castle, whence, after much Difficulty, being deliver’d by Godfrey, he returns to the Army, takes Jerusalem, converts Argantes and Armida to the Christian Faith, and Marries Almirena, according to the Promise of her Father Godfrey.
This is a long way from Tasso’s narrative. To multiply the love interest, Hill invented the affair between Armida and Argante, and the entire character of Almirena. The sudden conversion of Armida and Argante to Christianity is especially implausible, probably a concession to English prejudices, but also in keeping with Hill’s theme of the superiority of Christianity to all other religions. This theme is also present in Tasso, whose story was designed to be both delightful and serious, and breathes the atmosphere of the Catholic reformation of Tasso’s time. In Tasso, however, there is only a discreet hint that Armida might one day change her religion. In Hill’s adaptation, the superiority of Christianity is chiefly demonstrated by its more effective magic and its greater power in warfare. The Muslims of the story are also capable of heroism, and of powerful magic, which they use to deceive. Hill’s story outline was partly an imitation of a nationalist and colonialist semi-opera, The British Enchantress.
Further departures from Tasso
It is in his treatment of the relationship between the hero Rinaldo and the enchantress Armida that Hill lets the opera down from a dramatic point of view. A plot based on Tasso should have made the most, as other operas before and since have done, of Rinaldo’s enthrallment by Armida and escape from her snares. The introduction of a virtuous heroine, Almirena, in love with and loved by Rinaldo, takes away from the vitality of the hero, and forces Hill into contortions of plot, such as the necessity for Armida to abduct Almirena as the bait to entrap Rinaldo. As Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp observe (Handel’s Operas 1704-1726), ‘Rinaldo’s music…might strike deeper if he showed the slightest sign of yielding to Armida’s temptations. Hill’s suppression of his spiritual struggle, present in Tasso, was a major blunder’. One suspects Hill was seduced by the attraction of using staging tricks to represent Armida’s transformation of herself into Almirena, to deceive both Rinaldo and Argante (when Handel revised Rinaldo for a lower budget production in 1731, these transformations of Armida were removed in a wholesale re-writing of the plot).
All in all, the libretto’s lack of faithfulness to Tasso and its mishmash of Classical, Christian, and fairy-tale sources (notably in the creation of a ‘Christian magician’) shows that Hill was above all out to create ‘a good show’. He wanted to combine the virtuosity of his expensive Italian singers with scenic extravagance, pandering to the public taste for magic and military pageantry. Exotic certainly, irrational often, but these could be strengths in a pretext for music. It was claimed, without much evidence, that Handel had composed all the opera’s music in two weeks. The author of the Italian libretto, Rossi, reported that ‘Mr.Hendel, the Orpheus of our century, scarcely gave me the time to write.’ This arouses the suspicion, confirmed by research, that Rossi was being asked to provide words for music Handel had composed in Italy, and Rinaldo is ‘to some extent an anthology culled from the best works of his Italian period’ (Dean and Knapp). This leads to incongruities such as the singing of an aria ‘All around me I seem to hear the hissing of Alecto’s serpents’ by a Saracen King, Argante, about to open negotiations for a truce. Handel originally put this aria in the mouth of the cyclops Polyphemus in his 1708 cantata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, composed in Italy. The aria in which Handel achieved a spectacular success as performer as well as composer - Armida’s ‘Vò far guerra’, with its harpsichord cadenzas between the sections of the aria, expressing Armida’s ever mounting avenging rage - was modelled on an aria in the opera Agrippina, which had won Handel a triumph in Venice the year before.
"...varied and impressive orchestration..."
As René Jacobs, the conductor of a recent recording of Rinaldo, points out, ‘In a magic opera the magic tricks are performed not only on stage, but also in the pit’. Of all Handel’s operas, Rinaldo features the most varied and impressive orchestration, and the most purely instrumental pieces (half a dozen ‘symphonies’, including transformation scenes, marches, and battle music). The effectiveness of these added greatly to the opera’s popularity, and is reflected in The Beggar’s Opera of 1728, where the march of the Christian army in Act 3 of Rinaldobecomes a chorus of highwaymen. This ironic treatment of the content of the courtly and chivalric subject material of Rinaldo shows that English opinion didn’t take it entirely seriously. What they remembered was the effect, in this already memorable number, of the sudden addition of two trumpets to the pair that start the march.
Action in the recitatives!
The major criticism of Rinaldo from the perspective of what Handel achieved in later operas is that the libretto did not allow him to build his series of striking individual numbers into music conveying cumulative dramatic tension. Many of the magic transformations that demanded and got staging devices occur in the recitatives that advance the action. We can be sure that the instrumentalists in the pit – the cello, harpsichord, even harp – did their best to make these transformations musically vivid. One of Handel’s cellists, Nicola Haym, was particularly equipped to do so, having edited Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Since, however, the most elaborate musical means available to Baroque opera were in the arias and their accompaniment, it is there one hopes to find compelling characterisation and sense of the dramatic situation.
Rinaldo in the original production was the alto castrato Nicolini, regarded as the leading male singer of his time. Burney called him ‘this great singer, and even greater actor’. He first came to London in 1708, and was largely responsible for the increased popularity of Italian opera there. Handel’s music for him is showy and effective, if a little anonymous. The exception in Rinaldo is the aria ‘Cara sposa’, sung when Armida’s magic has snatched his betrothed Almirena from him. This lament over an intricate string texture in crossing parts was praised by Burney as ‘by many degrees the most pathetic song, and with the richest accompaniment, which had been then heard in England’. Other arias exploited Nicolini’s flexibility, though without fully engaging with his dramatic predicament. ‘Il Tricerbero umiliato’, in which the mystery as to why Rinaldo should threaten Cerberus again suggests an origin in a [lost] Italian cantata, combined brilliant orchestration, for four trumpets and drums, with a tune so catchy that it soon became a popular hit, fitted to the English words ‘let the waiter bring clean glasses’!
Recitative and opening of 'Lascia ch'io pianga' in Handel's manuscript, 1711
The first Almirena, soprano Isabella Girardeau, seems to have been a singer of modest gifts, and is given only four arias – one of them the most famous Rinaldo excerpt of all. Her aria with the birds has already been mentioned, and is notable for its parts for three recorders. ‘Renditions’ by simpering sopranos, sometimes equipped with a handkerchief to catch the tears they hope to induce in their hearers, have failed to spoil the beauty of ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, even taken out of context in myriad books of Italian arias. As Dean and Knapp observe, Handel here obtains an immensely emotional effect from a simple tune and accompaniment in a major key with a minimum of accidentals. The second act of Rinaldo is dramatically the strongest, thanks to Armida. Rinaldo gains most of his interest from the attraction and repulsion of this formidable sorceress. She is a glittering rather than a seductive figure, her power reflected in music of passion and energy. Most remarkable is the aria she sings after her rejection by Rinaldo, ‘Ah! crudel’, her heart torn between love and anger, its dark opening for bassoon, oboe and double bass uncannily suggesting how a supra-human character can experience human emotions. It’s the kind of thing which now and again takes Rinaldo into the world of a great musical dramatist, who for the rest of the time has been displaying his powers to the fullest as a brilliant master of musical invention and illusion.
First published in Opera~Opera July 2005