Händel Operas
Although he cultivated most of the vocal and instrumental genres of his time, Georg Friedrich Händel’s true calling always was the opera. Indeed, most of his professional life was devoted to writing and performing operas. As a youth, he was already a member of the Hamburg opera orchestra, writing some operas in the eclectic style of Reinhard Keiser, blending Italian da Capo arias, German recitatives and French-style dances. In order to keep up with Italian music – which was then a synonym of fashionable music – Händel traveled to Italy in 1706, where he composed numerous chamber cantatas and religious music in Latin. In late 1707 he wrote his first Italian opera, Rodrigo, which premiered in Florence, and at the end of 1709 Agrippina was performed in Venice, showcasing his brilliant assimilation of the Italian style. After this opera’s success, Händel accepted the invitation to travel to London, where the taste for Italian opera was just beginning thanks to some pasticcios and a version of Camilla by Giovanni Bononcini, which was extraordinarily successful.
In 1711 Handel premiered Rinaldo in London, which was the first Italian opera composed in Great Britain. In spite of the reservations expressed by some critics due to the use of the Italian language, Rinaldo achieved great success and consolidated the genre in London. A significant moment came for Händel in 1719, when a group of aristocrats founded the Royal Academy of Music, which aimed to produce Italian operas of the highest quality. Händel acted as orchestra conductor and, together with Giovanni Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti, was commissioned to compose operas for each season. He wrote some of his best operas for the Royal Academy of Music, such as Giulio Cesare in Egitto, but the high costs of the productions and a certain fatigue in the audience led to the financial bankruptcy of the society in 1728. As a result, Händel and the businessman Heidegger began to produce operas on their own with the support of the new King George II, until the board of the Royal Academy of Music granted the King’s Theatre to the Opera of the Nobility, a society that hired Nicola Porpora as composer and the castrato Farinelli as its main star. Händel then decided to rent a new theater in London, the Covent Garden, which had a small choir and a ballet company, led by French dancer Marie Sallé. Handel incorporated in his operatic seasons the performance of odes and oratorios in English, which were very popular among the public.
Towards the end of 1737, the Opera of the Nobility closed, and Händel returned to the King’s Theatre, although he did not replicate the success of his previous productions. The last opera season promoted by Händel was that of 1740/41, which concluded with the failure of his last opera, Deidamia, performed only three times. A few months later, Händel was composing The Messiah, which premiered in Dublin in 1742. He then found out that short seasons of oratorios were very profitable because of their lower cost and greater popularity among the English public, so he adopted this business model until the end of his life. Nevertheless, he did not completely abandon the operatic genre, as he transferred to his oratorios many of the dramatic-musical resources he had used in his operas. Some of his oratorios are not even inspired by biblical or hagiographic themes, but rather are mythological, such as Hercules or Semele.
Handel’s operas, just like the drammi per musica of his time, are based on ancient history or on Italian Renaissance epics. They revolve around the characters’ emotions, who are at the crossroads of choosing between opposing ideals, mainly between love and honor. As explained by Carl Dahlhaus, the essence of dramma per musica does not lie in the presentation of the characters nor in the development of actions, but in the expression of pathos, i.e., of the affects. The core of the Italian opera playwriting consists in weaving a plot, which advances thanks to the recitatives, in which the events trigger emotional reactions that the characters express through the arias. This explains the importance of the so-called «affect theory» or Affektenlehre. According to this theory, the main purpose of music would be to arouse a diversity of emotions in the listeners. These affects were not conceived as subjective or irrational, as they were understood in the Romantic period, but as objective and rational processes. The philosopher René Descartes identified six primary affects: joy, sadness, hatred, love, admiration and desire. In order to represent these emotions, Baroque composers such as Johann Mattheson – a friend and colleague of the young Händel in Hamburg – had at their disposal a set of conventions. Händel was particularly renowned for his use of such techniques to express the passions of the characters in his operas.
