Handel by Jonathan Keates Page B

two genres always remained distinct from one another. Though certain cantatas might seem to invite staged performance, they were not intended for theatrical performance and there is no contemporary record of Handel’s cantatas ever having been presented in this fashion. Given the prevailing ban on opera in Rome, this would hardly have been possible in any case.
    A quick learner, Handel immediately grasped the form’s expressive potential, especially in the hands of a versatile contemporary practitioner such as Alessandro Scarlatti, whose mastery led to the composition of over 500 cantatas, many of them commissioned by the more musically inclined Arcadians. During his stay in Italy Handel himself produced nearly a hundred works of this type. The existence of several manuscript copies of selected cantatas in various Italian libraries suggests that it was precisely these works for which he first became famous (a collection of twenty-three of them in the Biblioteca Marciana at Venice features two portrait caricatures, developed from the initial ‘C’ of ‘cantata’, one of which may even be of the composer himself ). Respect for his handling of the genre is shown in the number of contemporary copies of individual examples, such as Sento là che ristretto and Se pari è la tua fe. Admiration was well founded. The cantatas are an extensive sampler of Handel’s skill in capturing a range of different moods, besides underlining that essentially human dimension which never failed to stimulate his musical imagination.
    Many of them are carefully observed character portraits, by turns passionate, ironically humorous or tenderly pathetic, but tinged with a characteristically broad sympathy. Some exploit that favourite feature of Italian lyricists, the simile aria, in which the lover’s state of mind is paralleled with a ship in a storm or a swallow seeking her nest. Others take us through the various phases of an emotional drama. Tu fedel, tu costante , for instance, shows an integration of numbers so absolute as to make the mocking simplicity of the final aria a logical counterpoise to the hysterical turbulence of the opening sinfonia. Handel was to use pieces of identical form (abrupt staccato chords followed by volleying semiquaver sequences) in Partenope and Alcina for the obviously similar purpose of precipitating crises of feeling.In the cantata we watch the jilted girl’s sense of injustice at her Fileno’s sexual effrontery turn to a frank cynicism as Handel progressively lightens the music’s intensity.
    What most clearly appealed to him was the form’s dramatic potential. Three of his finest cantatas are cast in the shape of tragic scenas , the heroine in each being a woman driven by circumstance to the brink of despair. Agrippina condotta a morire (Agrippina led to her death), whose title encapsulates its theme, is a striking essay in structural control and an excellent illustration of the way in which the Baroque recitative and aria form are designed to work. Initially Agrippina is still the vigorous Roman matron of history, properly outraged at the way events have overtaken her, but as her nerve starts to crack, so does the rigidity of the cantata’s outlines. Her third air collapses into simple recitative after fourteen bars, briefly resumes with her resolve, then peters out again, a pattern continued through the scene with an aria whose middle section changes from quadruple to triple time. The whole piece ends with superb abruptness on four bars of unadorned recitative. Armida abbandonata , of which J. S. Bach made himself a copy, opens with an extraordinary stretch of declamation introduced by a vocal line supported on two arpeggiando violins and featuring one of the earliest of those plangent sicilianos Handel enjoyed devising for his lovelorn heroines. The cantata O numi eterni , for soprano and continuo, carrying his fame out of Italy under its better known name of