Back to Germany and then to London
Whilst in Italy Handel made a number of useful contacts, specifically in Venice. These included Prince Ernst of Hanover (brother of the Elector of Hanover and the nominated future King George I of Great Britain), and Baron Kielmansegg (Master of the Horse to the Elector). These friendships were to shape Handel’s future as, in June 1711, he left Rome for Hanover and was appointed Kapellmeister to the Elector at the substantial annual salary of 1,000 Thalers. One of the conditions of his employment was that he should have an immediate leave of absence of twelve months in order to visit London. (No doubt his employer, the imminent heir to the British throne, was aware that he was merely transferring Handel from one pocket to another – so to speak – and, by exposing Handel to the British musical establishment, was cautiously paving the way for the inevitable establishment of his own musical court in London.) In September 1711 Handel left Hanover and travelled to London via the Netherlands. This first visit to London lasted for eight months.
Handel arrived in London at a time when the music of the Stuart dynasty was uttering its last gasps. (The Stuart dynasty was founded in Scotland in 1371 with the accession of Robert II, and in Great Britain in 1603 with the accession of James VI of Scotland, King of Scots (1567-1625) and, as James I, King of Great Britain (1603-1625). It ended with the death of Queen Anne in 1714.) A service of thanksgiving, held in 1707 in the newly consecrated St Paul’s Cathedral, and attended by Queen Anne to commemorate the parliamentary Acts of the Union of England and Scotland under one crown and one flag, inadvertently saw the end of a great musical tradition, namely, music composed for the very last time for such an occasion by composers and singers from the Royal Household – by which I mean the Chapel Royal. This included composers such as William Croft (1678-1727) and Jeremiah Clarke (1674-1707) who had been somewhat left behind by the great raft of composers of the late Reformation, trying in vain to fill the vast shoes of Henry Purcell who had died in 1695. The newly-unified Great Britain was ready and waiting for a new musical voice and, at the start of the eighteenth-century, London was, by some way, the wealthiest city in Western Europe. (This represents a staggering rise of fortune given both the bubonic plague and the great fire of London which had ravaged and decimated the city a mere decade or two before Handel’s birth.) The new wealth led to a cosmopolitan explosion of new opportunities and extravagant taste amongst the ruling classes, chief amongst these being a predilection for the newly-imported and exciting genre of Italian opera which was becoming very fashionable very quickly. (This is somewhat ironic given that in Rome at the time the performance of opera was still prohibited.)
Whilst on sabbatical in London, Handel gave concerts at the Royal Court of Queen Anne (1665-1714), where his …writing for trumpets made a great sensation. He also ingratiated himself at the opera house: the newly opened Queen’s Theatre on the Haymarket (the very same theatre known today as Her Majesty’s Theatre, and where Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Phantom of the Opera has been running continuously since 1986). Aaron Hill, Director of the theatre at the time, gave Handel a libretto from which emerged the opera Rinaldo. This was the first truly Italian opera composed especially for performance in London. Handel completed the piece in a fortnight, much of the music being adapted and parodied from his earlier secular cantatas written in Rome. It was given over twenty performances and was a sensational success. Hill went to a great deal of trouble to make this production a spectacle, with elaborate scenery, impressive machinery to move it about, and, amongst other things, a fresh flock of live sparrows released into the theatre at a specific moment during every performance. The cast was led by three alto castrati, including the very well-known and popular singer at the time, Nicolini, in the title role. The plot, set in and around Jerusalem during the First Crusade, provided Handel with the perfect opportunity to display to the wealthy and the culture-hungry his talents as a composer, harpsichordist and conductor.
Following this success, Handel was recalled by his employer and left London in 1712 returning to Hanover where, for the next eighteen months, he was obliged to spend time producing chamber and orchestral music – there being no opera house in Hanover. The so-called Hanoverian duets, written for Princess Caroline (later Queen Caroline of Great Britain) with continuo accompaniment, also date from this time. A letter of 1713 from Handel to his mother shows that it was his intention – or maybe that of his employer – to return to London.
