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HANDEL’S OPERAS 1726–1741
Winton Dean
Boydell, 2006
565 pp.
[ISBN 10 1-84383-268-2]
£49.85 $85.00
When Winton Dean, the doyen of Handel
scholars, first started thinking about a survey of the operas some forty years ago, he could hardly have envisaged in his
wildest dreams that by the time the project was complete every one would have been commercially recorded. Equally as remarkable
in this context is the fact that between 1754, when Admeto became the last Handel opera to be given in the composer’s
lifetime, and the start of the modern revival in 1920 with Rodelinda at Göttingen, not a single Handel opera was given complete.
Although not announced as such, the
present survey amounts to a volume 2, the first having been published by Oxford University Press as Handel’s Operas
1704-1726 in 1987. The earlier volume was written in association with John Merrill Knapp, although there had been a parting
of the ways some time before the book was completed. For some reason, the imprint of this long and eagerly anticipated sequel
has passed from OUP to Boydell, who are to be congratulated on a handsome publication that includes 16 black and white illustrations,
cleanly produced music examples and a near absence of errors. Although statistics imply greater concision (the earlier book
dealt with 17 operas over 751 pages against the 22 dealt with here), there is no sense of being short–changed, with
the arguable exception of the final opera, Deidamia.
The scheme of the book follows the
same pattern as the earlier volume – and indeed Dean’s even earlier Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques
(1959) – with a chapter devoted to each opera in order of composition, itself divided into sections that start with
a synopsis of the plot before proceeding to the background of the opera, a general survey of the work and a character by character
(rather then chronological) analysis of each number. Each chapter concludes with an admirably up-to-date performance history,
including a non-evaluative note of recordings, and sub–sections on the autograph scores, librettos and the various performing
editions. These last, although perhaps of less interest to general readers, will henceforth form an indispensable reference
tool for conductors, researchers, and, more in hope than expectation, stage producers. Punctuating the chapters devoted to
individual operas are those that link the various stages of Handel’s operatic career, the chapter devoted to “The
Rival Queens 1726-1728” being particularly valuable for its concise account of the rivalry between Handel’s two
great prima donnas, Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni, a rivalry that played no small part in the demise of the Royal
Academy of Music, the opera company that had supported Handel since 1719. In his consideration of the five operas in which
they appeared together with Senesino, Dean also clearly shows that Handel’s attempts to accommodate his three superstars
on terms of equality seriously affected the balance of the operas concerned (Admeto, Alessandro, Riccardo Primo, Siroe, and
Tolomeo), none of which would be likely to enter a list of “Handel’s greatest operas”.
In the second of two Epilogues, Dean
charts the modern revival of Handel’s operas from the beginnings in Germany, when, among many acts of butchery, opposition
to high–voiced male singers resulted in widespread downward octave transposition. He cites the example of “Qual
torrente”, the brilliant coloratura aria for Caesar in Giulio Cesare, which in transposition when sung “even by
a world–famous baritone [suggests] not so much a summons to battle as a man with a sore throat gargling in his bathroom”.
That phase is largely over, but Dean is also concerned with the modern phenomenon of the omnipotent opera producer, at whom
he directs a few well-aimed and well-deserved kicks for not infrequently bypassing Handel in favour of bolstering his or her
own ego. Finally, there are five appendices, the most valuable of which will probably be that devoted to Handel’s borrowings,
a godsend for lesser mortals plagued by “where have I heard that before?” syndrome. (I’ve consulted the
analogous appendix in the earlier book more times than I care to confess.)
The quotation included in the foregoing
paragraph also serves to illustrate one of the great pleasures of Dean’s writing, for notwithstanding the awesome learning
and insight he brings to his books, this is academism worn with the lightest of touches, with an apt turn of colloquial phrase
never far away. The description of the eponymous character in Faramondo as a “half–witted hero with more than
a tendency to cut off his nose to spite his face” is just one of many felicitous descriptions with which the book abounds.
The writing is in fact throughout an object lesson to those who with half (or less) of Dean’s scholarly knowledge would
blind us with obtuse and convoluted language. It is this above all that will surely ensure Handel’s Operas a place on
the shelves of the general enthusiast in addition to specialists.
Those enthusiasts who do turn to
Dean will find him in the main a reliable guide capable of stepping outside academic caution to provide pithily subjective
analysis. Not surprisingly he reserves his strongest endorsement for those operas universally acknowledged as masterpieces,
in this period Orlando, Ariodante, Alcina, the three operas drawn from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. But it is also rewarding
to find Dean not only rating Serse and Partenope (surprisingly revealed in the appendix devoted to modern productions of the
operas as one of the least frequently staged) so highly, but also having no time for the equivocation of commentators embarrassed
by the fact that Handel stooped to writing “comic” operas. As Dean sagely notes of Partenope, Handel shares with
Mozart a “comprehensive vision of human nature as matter for laughter and tears, often in the same situation”.
Much the same goes for Serse, accorded what is arguably the most compelling chapter in an endlessly compelling book. Here
Dean not only gives full weight to earlier versions by Cavalli (Xerses), which he justly praises, and Bononcini, from whom
Handel’s many borrowings are justly set in context as “not so much theft as a strange form of re–creation”,
as is Burney’s excoriation of the libretto as “one of the worst that Handel ever set to Music”. Needless to say, those who know the operas will not agree with all Dean’s assessments, and his dismissal
of Deidamia is surely wide of the mark in the light of Alan Curtis’ revelatory recording. Indeed his verdict –
“a sad culmination of [Handel’s] long and glorious career in the theatre” – might equally be adapted
to his own rather peremptory final chapter.
Looking back over the book as a whole,
certain questions arise, not all of them comfortable. One that has exercised me considerably is that of Handel’s librettos
and Dean’s views on them. Virtually all are drawn from earlier books, the source often dating back to the 17th or very
early 18th century, when the requirements for extensive stretches of narrative recitative and much shorter arias were very
different to those of Handel’s day. Such librettos required extensive adaptation and, above all, pruning, a process
to which Handel became increasingly prone in his later operas to accommodate London audiences no longer prepared to accept
wordy texts in a foreign language. Why was Handel so wedded to such old sources? As Dean shows time and again in castigating
the cut–and–paste jobs of Handel and his collaborators (where he had one), the results invariably left gaping
holes in the plot. How could Handel the dramatist have moved from an outstanding libretto like Orlando to that of Arianna
in Creta, the libretto of which Dean calls “a wretched affair”, in the space of less than a year? Attempts to
find answers beg further questions. How deeply did Handel and his audiences actually care about the dramatic veracity of the
plot and the motivations of the characters that people them? If the answer is, as I suspect, not much (the operas we especially
value today are not always contiguous with those admired by Handel’s contemporaries), then is Dean applying modern taste
and thinking to his excoriation of so many of the librettos?
By the time Winton
Dean had concluded this book he had attained the age of 90, in itself an extraordinary fact. More astonishing still is the
achievement enshrined within the two volumes of Handel’s Operas, one that will not only stand as a monument to scholarship
but is also a legacy that ensures its author an honoured place in posterity. The
completion of a near-lifetime of scholarship, it is a cause for profound gratitude and the heartiest of congratulations.
This review will
appear in Goldberg Early Music Magazine
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