what was something like a death blow to English music; and what now passed for native compositions amounted to pitiable odds and ends. Rolland ridicules the claim of some unthinking people that Handel “killed English music since there was nothing left to kill.” A renewal of the Puritanical opposition which poisoned the English stage contributed to the confusion and discouragement of British artists, and the worst of such attacks as the notorious Jeremy Collier had made on the “profaneness and immorality” of the theatre lay in the fact that, as such things often do, they expressed the deep feelings of the nation. In consequence of a universal hypocrisy foreign elements came to fill the vacuum created. Some bad Italian librettos were set to wretched music and served up with momentary success. Other “entertainments” of the sort mingled Italian and English words and were duly satirized by the jealous and priggish Joseph Addison, nettled by the failure of his own piece, “Rosamund”, to which one Thomas Clayton had composed atrocious music.

Handel came into contact with one Aaron Hill, who managed the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket, and received from him an opera text, “Rinaldo”, which an Italian, Giacomo Rossi, had adapted from Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered.” The new arrival rose magnificently to his opportunity. The music was completed in just two weeks and performed on February 24, 1711. And luck aided Handel by supplying him with some extraordinary singers, all of them new to England—Giuseppe Boschi, a young and astounding bass, and the sensational castrato, Nicolini, who took London by storm. The tale of “Rinaldo” was that of the Venetian “Agrippina” all over again! In one evening the British capital was subjugated, for all the bile and venom Addison and Steele could discharge into the columns of The Spectator and The Tatler. The melodies of the opera spread like wildfire and seem to have appealed to the lower classes as well as to the aristocracy. To this day some of them have preserved their vitality. The noble air, “Lascia ch’io pianga”, in sarabande rhythm, is a fairly familiar item on recital programs; and the Crusaders’ March, a fine, swinging tune, was adapted to the words “Let us take the road” by Dr. Pepusch when he assembled out of countless folksongs and dances John Gay’s deathless “Beggar’s Opera”—in 1728 a thorn in Handel’s side but still, after more than two centuries, a classic with an iron constitution.

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Roughly speaking, Handel composed forty-four operas from “Almira”, in 1705, at Hamburg to “Deidamia”, 1741, in London. It is obviously impossible to consider even a small fraction of them here and we shall have to content ourselves with little more than the names and dates of only a few. All the same, it may be well to pause here momentarily to ask ourselves what, in the first place, a Handel opera really is like. For unless we are specialists, not to say antiquarians, we have little means of definitely knowing. The lyric drama of that period cannot be judged by the works of the 19th and 20th Centuries or even by more than a scant handful of masterpieces of Gluck and Mozart. Its problems, its musical and dramatic aspects are basically different. A movement, which had its rise in Germany after the First World War and which continued on and off for several years (even spreading intermittently to other countries, including the United States) demonstrated that these baroque entertainments are essentially museum pieces, prizable as certain of their elements may be. To us, who have been nurtured on the theatre works of Mozart, of the composers of the school of dramatic and pictorial “grand opera”, of the opera buffa and the opéra comique, the drame lyrique of Gounod and Bizet, the works of Verdi, the music dramas of Wagner and his assorted successors of various nationalities—to us the operatic specimens of Handel seem infinitely alien and remote in their premises and calculated stylizations. The nearest we can approach them today is through such surviving examples of the old opera seria as Mozart’s “Idomeneo” or Gluck’s “Alceste”. And even those do not supply genuine parallels.

To the average person reared on the lyric drama as known to two or three generations preceding ours the long-established description of a Handelian opera as a “concert in costume” may suffice at a pinch. But in a larger sense it begs the question, for Handel’s forty odd operas are both more than this and less. We should find their librettos so cut to a pattern that the most old-fashioned “books” of the 19th Century would possibly strike us, by comparison, dramatically bold, even involved. Handelian operas have no trace of psychological subtlety or elementary “conflict”. What theatrical “action” there is passes before us with something like lightning speed. Incidents which need to be communicated to the spectator are, in the main, recounted in recitative. What we understand as “incident” is subordinate to phases of emotional expression; and in ensemble pieces. Joy, rage, sadness, a broad scale of elemental feelings, are recognizably embodied in musical moods and tempos unmistakable in their lyrical or dramatic communications of “affetti” (“emotions”). There is little, if indeed any, of what a later esthetic was to call “the art of transition” and it was nothing in any manner unusual for a fiery or combative presto to precede (or follow) a tender largo or andante, and other formalistic clichés. The accompaniment, the orchestra, indeed the “action” and the stage picture is not much more than incidental background and frame.

The true center of gravity of a Handel opera lies in the performance of the singers and their command of declamation, florid utterance, sustained song and artifices at that epoch accepted as supremely expressive. Only in grasping these facts can we put ourselves in the frame of mind needed to understand the essential principles of these baroque masterpieces and to appreciate what—apart from their sheer melodic beauties—lifts them to a higher level than curios lacking any further validity, difficult as it may be for many of us to force our imagination and our feelings into such a mold.

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Having conquered England at a blow and become the idol not only of high society but of the common people as well, Handel recalled in the spring of 1711 that he was still Kapellmeister of Hanover. In London he had made enemies as well as friends and one of the most implacable of his foes was the great but churlish Addison. His admirers, on the other hand, included a child named Mary Granville, later Mrs. Delany, one of his staunchest friends; the Duke of Burlington, through whom he had entrée to Burlington House; and the famous eccentric, Thomas Britton, a coal dealer by day but who, on certain evenings, sponsored memorable concerts in a specially outfitted loft above his coal shop, which drew prominent London musicians and cultured aristocrats to the Clerkenwell “garret”, where Handel frequently appeared as harpsichord and even organ virtuoso.

Back in Hanover June, 1711, he renewed his contacts with Bishop Steffani, composed organ concertos and other chamber music, as well as a quantity of songs to German texts by the Hamburg Senator, Brockes. He would have liked to produce “Rinaldo” but the Hanover Opera was closed. Yet London had entered his blood and nothing would content him but his speedy return, the more so because his English admirers demanded him. He obtained leave “on condition that he return to Hanover after a reasonable time”; and by November, 1712, he arrived in England to supervise