Bursting With Ideas: Young Handel in Rome

Whenever you attend a performance of Messiah or one of George Frideric Handel’s operas, the program notes are likely to mention the astonishing speed at which he composed these works. Such creative momentum defies belief, yet even this is eclipsed by the rate of Handel’s artistic transformation at the start of his career, during the period he spent in Italy during his early 20s, from 1707 to 1710.

“He goes to Rome as a 22-year-old and comes face-to-face with Italian style. He gets to work with one of the best orchestras in the world, which is led by Arcangelo Corelli,” says Robert Mealy, director of Historical Performance. And Handel emerged from his Italian sojourn as one of the most sought-after composers in Europe.

This fall, Juilliard415 and Juilliard singers are presenting two programs of cantatas that explore the results of this sojourn. Collectively called Handel in Rome, the concerts are Aminta e Fillide at the Morgan Library and Museum (November 19) and Clori, Tirsi e Fileno at Alice Tully Hall (December 1). Both evenings also celebrate the two figures at the core of Les Arts Florissants, the period-instrument ensemble founded by William Christie, who is artist in residence at Juilliard this year and who conducts the November 19 concert. Paul Agnew, co-director of Les Arts Florissants, will make his Juilliard debut leading a semistaged performance of Clori, Tirsi e Fileno at the December 1 concert.

“What I love about this moment for Handel is that he is just bursting with ideas,” Mealy says. “This is music that then becomes the seed for so much of what he does later. But the level of freshness, invention, and virtuosity is so inspired. I think the biggest appeal for me is that Handel is writing this music at the same age as a lot of our students are playing it. It’s a moment for emerging professionals to demonstrate their virtuosity in a brilliant style.”

Handel had already started expanding his horizons after gigs as an organist in his native Halle and then, bitten by the opera bug, as a violinist, harpsichordist, and eventually composer at the opera house in Hamburg. Around 1706 came an invitation to travel to Italy under princely patronage and experience the latest musical developments there. But Handel insisted on going under his own steam. His Italian years took him to Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice, where the hyper-ambitious young German became fondly known as “Il caro Sassone” (“the dear Saxon”—Halle being located in the central German region of Saxony).

“Handel always wants to be independent,” Paul Agnew explains. “This marks an important difference from his contemporary J.S. Bach, who is always going from post to post within the structure. This is fundamental to the different ways in which they see their work. Handel directs the whole of his career himself and never has a boss in the way that Bach does.”

Instead, Handel relied on patrons while in Italy—both secular and from the Roman Catholic Church—and wrote to order according to what they commissioned. “Throughout this time, he’s writing vast quantities of music, storing it up for use later on, as material to be recycled in future operas and so on,” Agnew says. “What is also amazing is to find him at this young age directing these projects with absolute confidence, with such distinguished older musicians as Corelli [then at the twilight of his long career] at the head of his orchestra.”

Agnew points out that Handel’s genius for assimilating Italian musical traditions has a fascinating counterpart in his capacity “to convert himself 100 percent to the Roman Church while never becoming a Catholic himself.” While he remained a “pious and well-informed Protestant,” some of Handel’s most-impressive products during his Roman period are “highly Catholic pieces in the Italian tradition,” including the psalm setting Dixit Dominus and the sacred Easter oratorio La resurrezione.

“What I love about this moment for Handel is that he is just bursting with ideas,” Mealy says. “The level of freshness, invention, and virtuosity is so inspired."

There were secular masterworks as well. Along with winning the patronage of three of the most powerful cardinals at the time, Handel was taken in by the aristocrat (later a prince) Francesco Maria Ruspoli after arriving in Rome in 1707. Comfortably situated at Ruspoli’s palace in the Eternal City and at his country estate outside Rome, Handel composed an abundance of chamber cantatas for his patron’s weekly meetings of the Arcadian Academy. This was a reformist assembly of poets and musicians who found inspiration in the pastoral literature of antiquity.

The particularly lovely Clori, Tirsi e Fileno, composed in the fall of 1707, is one of the gems of Handel’s work for Ruspoli, who also supplied first-rate musical resources for performance. The libretto, written by an unknown poet, depicts the shepherdess Clori and her two love interests, the faithful, sensitive Tirsi, and Fileno, who becomes wary after seeing how Tirsi has been treated. The two shepherds therefore end up rejecting Clori, and the three conclude that avoiding heartache is the best path. They end with a trio resolving “to live, but not to love.”

“We don’t know who originally sang these pieces,” Agnew says, adding that the “trouser roles” were likely sung by castrati. “But in the Acadian movement, gender doesn’t matter. Here we find the beginning of what will become Handel’s great operas as he is forming himself.” In this production, Fileno will be sung by Korean countertenor Siman Chung; Clori and Tirsi will be sung by soprano master’s students Anneliese Klenetsky and Mer Wohlgemuth.

With regard to the theatrical element, Agnew plans to include stage movement, with the cast singing from memory. But he cautions against projecting contemporary ideas of psychological realism. “Other than having the score [which was only rediscovered in 1960, having been thought to be lost] and the date, there’s really little to go on. But we can extrapolate from what we know about the staging of La resurrezione [also written for Ruspoli]. Handel’s genius is quite enough to bring out the colors in each of these characters without us having to project too much. There is no tragedy in this piece. If we try to put it in modern dress or into a context outside Arcadia, we change the inherent nature of the piece. We will try to do something very authentic, in the sense of very honest and sincere.”

Thomas May writes about music and theater and has published books on Wagner and John Adams