Music: Harmonious Boar

You have taken far too much trouble over your opera . . . What the English like is something that they can beat time to, something that hits them straight on the eardrum.

—Handel to Christoph Willibald Gluck

Nobody in his time understood the English eardrum better than George Frederick Handel, and nobody played on it with more conspicuous success. It was the wonder of his career that this adopted son who spoke a heavily Teutonic-flavored English and shaped his musical style after the Italians managed to leave his bulky imprint on England as no composer before or since. When he was buried with regal pomp in Westminster Abbey in 1759, 3,000 people attended the ceremony, and the press reminded its readers that Handel was to music what “Mr. Pope was in poetry.” Last week, with performances of the operas Samson, Semele and Rodelinda, the English were again busy honoring their imported genius in the bicentennial year of his death.

Dragons & Drama. Handel was just 26 on the February day in 1711 when his first opera for an English audience—Rinaldo—opened at the Queen’s Theater in the Haymarket. The son of a German barber-surgeon, Handel had left his home town of Halle at 18, had spent three years in Italy schooling himself in opera and oratorio. On his first visit to England, he patched Rinaldo together in a scant two weeks. Based on the poem by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), the opera was derided by Addison in The Spectator for its “Painted dragons spitting wildfire, and enchanted chariots drawn by Flanders mares.” But its lush melodies were just what the public wanted: it became the first real operatic hit in English history. Its success won Handel a £200 annual pension from the crown.

In the almost 50 remaining years of his life, Handel (who became an English subject) turned out 39 Italianate operas, which shaped English operatic style for a generation, and almost singlehanded gave a new, dramatic shape to oratorio style. A shrewd businessman, he combed Italy for singers, scored such a success with famed Soprano Francesca Cuzzoni —described by one listener as having “a nest of nightingales in her belly”—that she sold out a benefit performance of his Ottone at a top of £50 a seat.

Greater Than Mozart? An ungainly giant of a man (“No land, nor clime, nor age/ Have equaled this harmonious boar,” wrote one acquaintance in reference to his overeating), Germany’s Handel became a symbol of beefy British solidity. Since his death, he has often been thought of as a kind of stodgy musical ecclesiastic, partly because of the ceremonial repetition of his Messiah, partly because of Handel’s own susceptibility to mawkishly awkward texts—most notably in the numerous bird songs like “Hark! ‘Tis the linnet and the thrush” in Joshua.

To modern ears, Handel’s more successful operas—Rodelinda, Ottone, Giulio Cesare—have proved more appealing than his oratorios. German Handelians have already dusted off and scheduled eight operas, including an unexpectedly witty production of Deidamia, a featherweight tale of Achilles in girls’ clothing. “He is the great melodist of all times,” glowed Conductor Sir Arthur Bliss in London last week. “Greater even than Mozart. This festival will give some idea of his grandeur.”

But the Munich Staatsoper’s Dr. Hermann Friess remained skeptical: “For the last 200 years, Handel has always been rediscovered only to be forgotten again.”