The giant Handel edifice
2016; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/em/caw038
ISSN1741-7260
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoThe epigraph to this second volume of the projected five could be the advice that Johann Sigismund Kusser gave to fellow foreign musicians seeking success in 18th-century London: ‘Don’t let them make a controversy of you. They are masters at this’ (H. E. Samuel, ‘A German musician comes to London in 1704’, Musical Times, cxxii (1981), pp.591–3). All too true for Handel. The volume opens with damage inflicted on the Royal Academy opera, for which he was increasingly the principal composer, by the factions favouring the leading sopranos Cuzzoni and Faustina; it ends with his ‘Second Academy’ opera facing lethal competition from the perennial Beggar’s Opera, the short-lived English opera and, on his own Italian opera turf, the ‘Opera of the Nobility’, set up ‘against the Dominion of Mr Handel’ (p.641). If you enjoy opera gossip, you will enjoy this book. Plus ça change: media puffs, sniping among fixers, partisanship among patrons, stand-offs (but not brawling) between sopranos (Strada versus Merighi, pp.324, 326, as well as the famous Cuzzoni–Faustina contretemps, pp.127–45), singers’ illnesses and programme substitutions (no understudies then), stars not bothering—the famously deprived and depressive Gertrude Savile makes several outings to the opera and reports a Radamisto from which Cuzzoni was lacking and in which ‘Senesino woud not exert himself coud scarce hear him’ (p.189)—xenophobia, exorbitant demands, deplorable costs, gloomy predictions of the imminent demise of high-art entertainment: it all seems quite modern.
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