The Lives and Times of the Great Composers

Michael Steen

• Editorial: Icon Books
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781848312678
• Categoría: Médias et arts de la scène
• Categoría: Musique classique

'A glorious plum-pudding of a book, to be consulted, with pleasure and profit, over and over again' Sir Jeremy Isaacs Michael Steen's 'Great Composers' was originally published in 2003. A lifetime's work and almost 1000 pages long, it has since become 'the' reference point and key read on the biographical backgrounds to classical music's biggest names.Authoritative and hugely detailed - but nonetheless a joy to read - this new edition will expand its readership further and capitalise on a newfound popular interest in classical music.Steen's book helps you explore the story of Bach, the respectable burgher much of whose vast output was composed amidst petty turf disputes in Lutheran Leipzig; or the ugly, argumentative Beethoven in French-occupied Vienna, obsessed by his laundry; or Mozart, the over-exploited infant prodigy whose untimely death was shrouded in rumour.Read about Verdi, who composed against the background of the Italian Risorgimento; or about the family life of the Wagners; and, Brahms, who rose from the slums of Hamburg to become a devotee of beer and coffee in fin-de-siecle Vienna, a cultural capital bent on destroying Mahler... and much, much more.

HANDEL

CHAPTER 1

ONE COMPOSER WHOSE reputation is surely assured is Handel, whose corp ulent, sombre figure towered over the musical scene in the 18th century.

Under the full-bottomed wig, behind Handel’s dour image, there was, according to the 18th-century musical historian Dr Burney, a smile, ‘bursting out of a black cloud … a sudden flash of intelligence, wit and good humour, beaming in his countenance, which I hardly ever saw in any other’.¹ Without this sunny side to his character, Handel surely could not have been successful in English showbusiness, at the pleasure gardens, or at the Italian opera for which he wrote 36 works and which occupied such a large part of his professional life.² Handel’s shows offered a venue at which London’s privileged classes could meet and his music provided a moment-ary means of escape from the city’s poverty and sordidness.

It did not matter that Handel’s audience did not understand what was being sung, even though this aspect contributed to the ultimate failure of Italian opera in London. One journalist observed that ‘our great Grand-children will be very curious to know the Reason why their Forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own Country, and to hear whole Plays acted before them in a Tongue which they did not understand’.³ Handel’s operatic ventures such as The Royal Academy prospered and his success enabled him to afford a house in Brook Street in modern Mayfair, where we shall go to see his ménage. We shall also travel abroad with him to recruit new stars.

When Handel’s opera business ground to a halt, ever resilient, he developed a new product, the oratorio. This was less expensive to mount and thus far less risky financially. His best-known oratorio is surely Messiah, which was first performed in Dublin. In his final two decades, he continued to write oratorio and took an increasing interest in charitable works, but suffered very bad health and became blind. He was very wealthy when he died, aged 74.

EARLY DAYS IN GERMANY AND ITALY

We must start with Handel’s early career in Germany and Italy. He was born on 23 February 1685, in Halle, some twenty miles from Leipzig, at the centre of the European trade routes. Halle had a strong musical tradition: it had been the home of Samuel Scheidt, one of the trio of important Saxon composers in the early 17th century, Schütz, Scheidt and Schein.⁴ In the wake of the devastating Thirty Years War of 1618–48, Halle was passed around. At first, it was administered under the Elector of Saxony; then it was detached and became a distant outpost of the Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia. The family of the previous Saxon ruler, who had resided in the city and underwritten its prosperity, moved the court to nearby Weissenfels. No wonder Halle was in decline.

Handel’s elderly father (he was in his 60s when Handel was born) was the son of a coppersmith; like Monteverdi’s father, he was both a barber and a surgeon, a combination customary before the 18th century. He had prospered under the Saxon duke, and he lived in a house in the centre of the city. With his first wife, he had six children; with the second, Handel’s mother, the daughter of a local Lutheran pastor, he had four. Georg Friedrich was at first destined to become a lawyer, a job suitable for the upwardly mobile; but, during a family visit to his step-brother, who worked in Weissenfels, he was heard playing the organ by the duke, who persuaded his father to let him study music. Handel learnt the Italian and German musical styles by studying music primers and by relentless copying.⁵ He was also taught by the organist at Halle’s Marienkirche, a pleasant man who enjoyed knocking back a ‘chearful glass’.⁶

Handel went to the university in Halle, founded a few years earlier in 1694, like other universities, in order to train the growing ranks of state officials.⁷ The nearby ‘reformed’ cathedral, smaller than the Marienkirche, and today noticeably run down, needed an organist. It could not find an appropriate Calvinist to do the job, so it employed the Lutheran Handel. His emoluments included his lodgings, a few paces from where he was born, in the Moritzburg. This was a forbidding, moated and partly ruined fortress, which had been a residence of the Archbishop of Magdeburg, until he was ejected at the time of the war.⁸

Halle was not an ideal location for a highly ambitious young man to stay. It is said that the Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia offered to send Handel to study in Italy, but he shrewdly knew that this would be con-ditional on taking up a permanent post in Berlin, with little or no flexibility to get away. It seems that he was spotted at the ducal court by the director of the Hamburg Opera House, Reinhard Keiser. So, at the age of eighteen, Handel set out for the metropolis of Hamburg, 200 miles away. This was in the same year as Vivaldi joined the staff at the Pietà and Bach took up his first job in the small town of Arnstadt.

Hamburg, the leading North Sea port and financial centre, had largely avoided the depredations of the war and was booming (see colour plate 3).⁹ It was positioned at the gateway to the inland, up the Elbe; it provided a short-cut to the Baltic through its sister city, Lübeck, some 40 miles overland. It was staunchly Lutheran. Consistent with its dignity, it had its own opera. Keiser, probably the first ‘big-time’ impresario, was a big-spending mass producer: he wrote seventeen operas during his four-year directorship. 10 Germans took the parts; and, as there were no castrati that far north, ‘market women and dames of more than questionable reputation sang the female roles’.¹¹ The more pious and orthodox Protestant merchants were unhappy with this state of affairs, and resented the fact that Hamburg’s secular music had eclipsed the sacred music at which it had excelled some 50 years before.¹²

The bustling city, with its population of over 70,000,13 must have been a change for young Handel. We do not know whether he took as dim a view of the weather as Brahms did many years later: on one occasion, Brahms wrote that ‘the weather is vile as only Hamburg weather can be, and is, on 360 days a year. It is difficult enough to hit the other five’.¹⁴ During the winter three years before Handel arrived, the Elbe was so frozen that coaches could travel on the river.

Handel teamed up with Johann Mattheson, formerly a musical infant prodigy, the son of a tax collector. In many ways the two young men were very similar: both were ambitious, highly gifted and also intended originally for the legal profession. They went off to Lübeck’s Marienkirche to compete in an audition to succeed the elderly and renowned organist, Buxtehude.¹⁵ But neither liked the terms, which included marriage to his daughter. This was not a bad deal: frequently, it was the widow who came with a vacancy like this. As Bach also turned down the position two years later, Fräulein Buxtehude has always been assumed to have been plain. At least, she must have been of riper years, because eventually she found a widower ‘ten years younger’. Her husband succeeded her father in 1707; he survived her and married again. This was a normal pattern at the time; Buxtehude himself had married his predecessor’s daughter.¹⁶

The friendship between Handel and Mattheson could be tempestuous. They literally crossed swords: Handel only survived the duel because Mattheson’s thrust struck a button on his coat.

Handel did well for himself. When he was twenty, his first opera Almira ran for twenty nights with Mattheson as the principal tenor. The opera Nero followed and then Florindo. Handel was able to send a remittance home to his mother. Experience in Italy would be the next step. He is said to have been invited to Florence by the musical Prince Ferdinando de Medici. The invitation was possibly transmitted by Prince Gian Gastone, the last of the Medici line, who was in Hamburg in 1703–4 escaping from his wife, a lady described as ‘a surprising mound of bosom and belly – a female colossus that might well inflate a Turk but freeze a Florentine of Gian Gastone’s refinement’.¹⁷

So, farewell to Mattheson, who went on to become conductor, composer, translator, publisher of the first German musical periodical, and a leading author of musical textbooks much in vogue at the time. He was an expert on the aesthetics of music and also compiled a Who’s Who of around 150 composers.*¹⁹

Going south, Handel needed to skirt round the armies fighting the war arising from the most recent succession crisis in the Habsburg family. In 1700, Carlos II, the Habsburg King of Spain, retarded and childless, died. The younger son of the Austrian branch, Archduke Charles, laid claim to the throne, as did Philip, Duke d’Anjou, the younger son of the Bourbon house of France. A union between France and Spain would have upset the balance of power in Europe, which of course troubled the English among others. So the War of the Spanish Succession followed. In August 1704, Marlborough for the English and Prince Eugene for the Austrians defeated the French and the Bavarians in a resounding victory at Blenheim on the Danube in Bavaria. The Austrians went on to besiege Turin.*

Young Handel, a man of fashion, so different from Bach

Around this time, we find Handel, a fashionable young man, in Florence with his first Italian opera, Rodrigo. He then went to Rome, under the patronage of various cardinals. He played at the Marquess Ruspoli’s regular Sunday afternoon salons, where Corelli led the orchestra. He also attended an exclusive circle of noblemen artists and musicians, who affected to live in an idyllic atmosphere, remote from reality, appropriately called the Arcadians.²⁰ He amazed his listeners with his skill at improvisation. A contest was held between Handel and Domenico Scarlatti. Handel won on the organ, whereas Domenico won at the harpsichord.

Since opera was then forbidden in Rome by papal decree,²¹ oratorio was in vogue. Intended for concert performance, this differed from opera only in that the content was moral and devout, and used a narrator to take the action forward.* For Easter Sunday 1708, Handel wrote his first oratorio. The part of the Magdalen was sung by Margherita Durastanti, a regular performer at Ruspoli’s, who joined Handel as a singer in London some years later. Her participation resulted in Marquess Ruspoli receiving a papal rebuke for allowing a woman to take part.²²

Handel moved back and forth between the major centres, while war rumbled alarmingly around him. In Naples, he wrote a one-act serenata, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo; in Venice, his Agrippina was performed for 27 successive nights during the Carnival.

It is possible that Handel fell briefly in love with some Florentine lady at this time. Vittoria Tarquini, a leading singer known as La Bombace, who was already familiar with the bedrooms of the grand duke’s palace, reputedly fell for him.**²³ Whatever happened, we do not know and there are differing views of Handel’s inclinations; certainly there was every kind of experience to be had in Florence, as well as elsewhere.²⁵

Being a Protestant, Handel had no lasting future in Italy. The famine and disease which followed the particularly cold winter of 1709, and the war, meant that Italy was in bad condition. Handel was by now ‘a polished and fully equipped artist’²⁶ and the British ambassador tried to head-hunt him; however, he was persuaded instead to go to Hanover, by Prince Ernst, and by the elector’s deputy master of the horse.

Hanover, the capital of an up-and-coming, ambitious German principality, was in tune with Handel’s own aspirations. Handel went as Kapellmeister, a job much broader than being in charge of chapel music; the Kapellmeister was director of the whole musical establishment (the ‘Kapelle’) of a court, and was expected to compose for it. Composers only created a separate role for themselves in the 19th century, when it was generally considered that it was better to leave the art of composition to ‘men of genius’.²⁷

Handel immediately negotiated a year’s leave; so, with a sure eye for the ‘Big Time’, he left for London, visiting his mother in Halle on the way. London must have seemed ideal, half-way between the narrow Protestantism of northern Germany and the unacceptable Roman Catholicism of the south. For this visit, he stayed only eight months. We should consider some aspects of life in London during the five decades he would live there.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON

The year before Handel arrived, Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral had been completed at a cost of £1,167,474, paid for largely by the import duty on coal.²⁸ Sir Isaac Newton, the great scientist, was still at work. London, with its sounds of wheels rumbling on cobbles and cries from the street vendors, was well into a ce...