Handel… A very German Italian Englishman. Part Two.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you.

And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for this one it is…  the second episode featuring the composer Georg Friedrich Handel. At the end of the last episode he had just composed the anthem ‘Zadok The Priest’ for the coronation of King George II of Great Britain. The year was 1727 and it was the same year that Handel, who had grown up and begun his career in what is now Germany, and who had spent an intensely formative four years in the city states of the Italian peninsula, was granted British citizenship.

For the next few years his most public role was as the composer and impresario of operas and I’m going to start this episode with a song from his 1735 opera ‘Ariodante’. Even though he had only just turned 50 when he wrote it, ‘Ariodante’ would be one of his final operas and I’ll explain this decline in opera output in a few minutes.

The opera is based on a small section from Ludovico Ariosto’s sixteenth century epic poem ‘Orlando Furioso’ set in the era of Charlemagne and which incidentally was the source material for something like 100 other operas composed between the 1620s and the 1840s. 

Early in the 2^nd Act the prince Ariodante has been tricked into believing that the woman he deeply loves and is engaged to has been unfaithful and he sings an aria contemplating ending his life. Now this is dark material… but the music does not quite reach the sort of drama and depth that you might imagine. There is an undeniable sadness to it but I think it communicates more of an aching love at separation than some sort of final farewell to existence.

And I’m going to hazard a guess as to why Handel wrote the music this way. Halfway through the opera you don’t kill off the character whose name is the title of the work. The audience, even if not familiar with the plot of Ariosto’s poem, would have known Ariodante was not going to end his life. And on top of that in the second half of the lyrics Ariodante threatens to return as a ghost to torment his, apparently unfaithful, love. So, he’s going to be around.

The title of the aria in Italian is just the first line… Scherza infida in grembo al drudo,. To get a sense of the meaning of what Ariodante sings… here is the whole text, all six lines, in English…

Enjoy yourself, faithless one, in the arms of your lover,

While I seek the arms of death

Because of your betrayal. 

But to break this vile bond,

I, a naked spirit, a sorrowful shade

Will return to torment you.

If you recall from the last episode I mentioned that one of the accidental outcomes of staging and recording these operas in an era without the castrati, the singers for whom the roles were written, is that wonderful female singers get to play the leads. Generally much better roles than the ones written for women. And here is Anne Sofie Von Otter singing Prince Ariodante with the Musicians of the Louvre conducted by Marc Minkowski. It is about 12 minutes long. Scherza infida in grembo al drudo by Georg Firedrich Handel.

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That was Anne Sofie Von Otter singing Prince Ariodante’s aria Scherza infida in grembo al drudo from Handel’s 1735 opera ‘Ariodante’ and she was accompanied by the Musicians of the Louvre conducted by Marc Minkowski.

Whilst today Handel is probably best known for works that involved singing he was ridiculously prolific in other genres including concertos… which are generally works where one instrument took played a showy solo part whilst accompanied by a larger group of instruments. And the year after Ariodante, Handel wrote a group of concertos for organ and small orchestra. If operas from the first half of the 1700’s haven’t dulled your enthusiasm for Handel then please don’t let the idea of organ music drive you away. This is bright and vivacious music. The organ part is not the ponderous rumbling of a mechanical giant designed to fill a cathedral. Plus the section I am going to play you is only four minutes long.

This is Trevor Pinnock directing the English Concert with Simon Preston playing the organ with the opening section from the 4^th of the group of organ concertos Handel wrote in 1736.

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That was Trevor Pinnock directing the English Concert with Simon Preston playing the organ and they performed the opening section from the 4^th of the group of organ concertos Handel wrote in 1736.

I’m going to stick with orchestral music for the next quarter of an hour and play you all five sections of a concerto grosso from 1739. Now the term concerto grosso, just Italian for big concerto, is used to describe a concerto where more than one instrument is taking a solo role. So you end up with say three or four instruments playing distinctive lines of solo music supported by a larger group whose job is to amplify themes and melodic lines, to add rhythmic structure and to play the chords that establish the harmonic changes of each section. If you know J S Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, they are this type of composition as well.

So here is the 6^th Concerto Grosso from the group published in 1739 by Georg Friedrich Handel, who was by now probably more correctly referred to as George Frederick Handel. This is Christopher Hogwood directing the Handel and Haydn Society. Just before I play it, here is a quote from Claude that I like…  ‘Handel demonstrates his gift for memorable melodies, sophisticated counterpoint, and inventive orchestration while maintaining the accessible, direct emotional appeal that characterizes his instrumental music.’

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That was Handel’s 6^th Concerto Grosso from the group published in 1739 Christopher Hogwood directed the Handel and Haydn Society.

I mentioned a while back that through the 1730s Handel’s rate of composition of operas slowed. His last significant opera was ‘Serse’, or ‘Xerxes’ in English, in 1738. Why was that? Well there were probably a collection of reasons but fashion and expense were probably the main ones. After a twenty-five year love affair with Italian operas the London audiences began to enjoy listening to English being sung… a genre re-invigorated by the success of John Gay’s satirical ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ a few years earlier.

And as the producer of the operas Handel made and lost fortunes on a regular basis with audiences demanding more and more spectacular staging effects, superstar singers demanding astronomical fees… and increased competition from rival opera companies.

Handel needed something new… something more ‘contemporary’. And as old-fashioned as it might sound to us now… his solution was to take religious texts and have them sung in English in concert style performances with soloists, a chorus and an orchestra.

This type of composition was called an ‘oratorio’ which came from a style of religious music performance that had evolved in Rome… where Handel had first experimented with it three decades earlier.

And Handel would compose over twenty works in this genre including the work for which he is ultimately best known in the English speaking world… his 1741 oratorio called ‘The Messiah’. ‘The Messiah’ is an extended reflection on the life and meaning of Jesus Christ and the words that Handel set to music were put together with excerpts from the King James Bible and the Common Prayer Book by a fascinating eccentric by the name of Charles Jennens… who is, perhaps unfairly, rarely mentioned when people talk about ‘The Messiah’. A better known character who was mixed up in the first performance which took place in Dublin was Jonathan Swift of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ fame who was the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin at the time and had to be cajoled to let the members of his church choir sing in Handel’s work.

I am going to play you just the opening three sections… the overture and then ‘Comfort Ye My People’ followed by ‘Ev’ry Valley Shall Be Exalted’. The performers are the Gabrieli Consort and Players conducted by Paul McCreesh and the solo tenor singer is Charles Daniels. All up about ten minutes of The Messiah with the libretto by Charles Jennens and the music by George Frederick Handel.

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That was opening three sections… minutes of The Messiah with the libretto by Charles Jennens and the music by Handel. The performers were the Gabrieli Consort and Players conducted by Paul McCreesh and the solo tenor singer was Charles Daniels. Incidentally I will include the, for me, puzzlingly popular ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in the Spotify playlist for this episode I will add a link to in the show notes you can find for this episode at classicalforeveryone.net.

Alright, we are coming to the end of this second episode of Handel’s music and I am going to play you one more beautiful song…  from the opera I described earlier as Handel’s last significant opera…. ‘Serse’ or ‘Xerxes’. The song is ‘Ombra mai fu’. It is from the beginning of the opera where Xerxes, the King of Ancient Persia is singing the praises of the plane tree in his garden. For those of us lucky enough to live in temperate climates this might seem a little odd. But I think it can be argued that the Europeans of Handel’s day thought everywhere south and east of the Mediterranean was one giant desert. The shade of a tree was a pretty big deal.

Here again is the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie Von Otter. This time she is performing with William Christie directing his group Les Arts Florissant. She is singing Xerxes' words…

"Ombra mai fu / di vegetabile, / cara ed amabile, / soave più" Which translates to something like:

"Never was the shade / of any growing thing / so dear and lovely, / so gentle"

For those who recognise it, If I have shattered some illusions as to what the aria is about, please feel free to just hear a beautiful love song.

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That was the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie Von Otter performing with William Christie directing his group Les Arts Florissant. She sang Xerxes aria ‘Ombra mai fu’.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. I have another couple of pieces coming up but before I get to them I want to give you a little information that I hope you find useful…

If you would like to listen to past episodes, of which there are more than forty, or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net. And on the individual episode pages of the website there are links to Spotify playlists with the full versions of most of the music played in each of the episodes. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net.

Alright, to finish the story I’ll briefly touch on the final years of the man I’ve called a ‘Very German, Italian Englishman’. With another dozen oratorios and instrumental works as well as public performances as an organist and conducting revivals of ‘The Messiah’, Handel remained extraordinarily active pretty much until his final few years by which time he was blind and in poor health. But his vast amount of work and the contemporary success of so much of it had elevated him to a position of Great Britain’s leading composer and one of the most significant figures of his day.  After his death in 1759 at the age of 74 he was given a state funeral where over three thousand people attended and he was buried in Westminster Abbey… the first composer to be interred there since Henry Purcell sixty five years earlier. To conclude here is another short piece of Handel’s music for solo keyboard performed on a modern piano by Keith Jarrett. It is the section called ‘Allemande’, named after a German dance, from his Suite with the catalogue number HWV 452. It was written in 1738… the same year as the aria ‘Ombra mai fu’ I just played you.

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That was the section called ‘Allemande’ from Handel’s Keyboard Suite with the catalogue number HWV 452 performed by Keith Jarrett. Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’.

This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never.

And if you have listened to the credits… here is a little bonus for you… a section from one of Handel’s last major works… his Music for The Royal Fireworks from 1749. It might have been the first Handel I ever heard. I seem to remember it being used to sell champagne when I was a kid. Ah, the musical crimes of the advertising industry. Maybe a theme for a future show. This is Christopher Hogwood conducting the Academy of Ancient Music.

Thanks again for listening.