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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2020
Winton Dean described Handel's 1740 ode L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato (hwv55), with its pastoral texts by Milton, as ‘perhaps the profoundest tribute Handel ever paid to the land of his adoption’. Yet for the first revival in January 1741, Handel prepared Italian-texted movements for this quintessentially ‘English’ ode in order to accommodate his star castrato that season, Giovanni Battista Andreoni. With the help of Paolo Rolli, a librettist long associated with Handel and a respected translator of Milton, Handel reset four English-texted arias and one accompagnato with Italian contrafacta and composed a completely new Italian accompagnato and bravura aria for Andreoni, to be performed before the very last chorus. While these Italian-texted movements in macaronic Handel revivals are often either neglected by Handel scholars or dismissed as unfortunate compromises, a textual and musical analysis of the accompagnato ‘L'insaziabil fantasia’ and the aria ‘Troppo audace’ reveals a quasi-operatic mini-scena that had personal and professional resonances for both Handel and Rolli – an artistic manifesto of sorts on moderation, ambition, imitation and freedom within the transnational mid-eighteenth-century European world of letters and music.
1 Horace Walpole, Walpoliana, second edition, ed. John Pinkerton, two volumes (London: R. Phillips, c1800), volume 1, 35–36.
2 Dean, Winton, Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 320Google Scholar.
3 Griffin, Dustin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3Google Scholar. Griffin argues convincingly that Milton had a central and liberating influence on eighteenth-century English poetry.
4 Smith, Ruth, ‘Milton Moderated: Il Moderato and Its relation to L'Allegro and Il Penseroso’, Händel-Jahrbuch 56 (2010), 139 and 159Google Scholar.
5 Daily Advertiser (31 January 1741). Burrows, Donald, Coffey, Helen, Greenacombe, John and Hicks, Anthony, eds, George Frideric Handel: Collected Documents (henceforth Handel Collected Documents), volume 3: 1734–1742 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 672Google Scholar.
6 Charles Jennens, letter to James Harris, 29 December 1740. Handel Collected Documents, volume 3, 666.
7 Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Carl von Ossietzky (D-Hs), MA/1002.
8 See Alcini, Laura, ‘Paolo Antonio Rolli, primo traduttore di Milton’, Perusia: rivista del Dipartimento di Culture Comparate dell'Università per Stranieri di Perugia 1 (2006), 5Google Scholar.
9 van Zanten, Jakob, t’ Paradys verlooren: heldendicht in tien boeken. Door John Milton; uyt het Engels in rymelooze Maat vertaald door J. van Zanten, M. D. (Haarlem: Geertruyd van Kessel, 1728)Google Scholar; Nicolas-François Dupré de Saint-Maur, Le Paradis perdu de Milton: Poëme héroique. Traduit de l'anglois. Avec les remarques de Mr. Addisson [sic] (Paris: Cailleau, Brunet, Bordelet and Henry, 1729); Johann Jacob Bodmer, Johann Miltons Verlust des Paradieses: ein Helden-Gedicht. In ungebundener Rede übersetzet (Zurich: Marcus Rordorf, 1732).
10 In his translation of the work published in London, Rolli called Paradise Lost ‘il piu Divino, il piu Sublime, e forse il maggior Poema che Mente umana dettasse’ (the most divine, sublime and perhaps the best poem that a human mind has ever produced). Dedication, Rolli, Paolo, Del Paradiso Perduto. Poema inglese di Giovanni Milton. Libri sei, parte prima (London: Samuel Aris, 1729)Google Scholar.
11 See Dorris, George, ‘Paolo Rolli and the First Italian Translation of Paradise Lost’, Italica 42/2 (1965), 213–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 215, and John T. Shawcross, ed., John Milton: The Critical Heritage, two volumes, volume 2: 1732–1801 (London: Routledge, 1999), 6–9.
12 Rolli, Paul, Remarks upon M. Voltaire's Essay on the Epick Poetry of the European Nations (London: Thomas Edlin, 1728)Google Scholar.
13 Franca Sinopoli, ‘Dalla repubblica letteraria alla letteratura europea: Paolo Rolli tra Italia e Inghilterra’, in I cantieri dell'italianistica: ricerca, didattica e organizzazione agli inizi del XXI secolo. Atti del XVII congresso dell'ADI – Associazione degli Italianisti (Roma Sapienza, 18–21 settembre 2013), ed. B. Alfonzetti, G. Baldassarri and F. Tomasi (Rome: Adi, 2014), 1.
14 GB-Lbl R.M.20.f.11, fols 1r–4v and GB-Lbl R.M.18.c.11, fols 157r–162v. The scena was most likely removed from the performing score (D-Hs MA/1002) after this single revival.
15 Donald Burrows is careful to say that these Italian texts ‘may have been Rolli's without any input from Jennens’. See ‘Reconstructing Handel's Performances of L'Allegro’, The Musical Times 154 (Spring 2013), 70.
16 Anderson, William S., ed., Ovid's Metamorphoses: Books 6–10 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 87–88Google Scholar.
17 Ovid's Metamorphoses in fifteen books. Translated by the most eminent hands. Adorn'd with sculptures (London: Jacob Tonson, 1717), book 8, 67.
18 Charles Jennens, letter to Edward Holdsworth, 4–8 February 1742. The Foundling Museum, London, Gerald Coke Handel Collection 7672. Handel Collected Documents, volume 3, 780.
19 George Frideric Handel, letter to Charles Jennens, 29 December 1741. Handel Collected Documents, volume 3, 758.
20 Ruth Smith, ‘Milton Moderated’ and Smith, Ruth, ‘“In this Ballance seek a Character”: The Role of “Il Moderato” in L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato’, in Music in the London Theatre from Purcell to Handel, ed. Timms, Colin and Wood, Bruce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 175–189Google Scholar.
21 Smith, ‘In this Ballance seek a Character’, 176.
22 Smith, ‘Milton Moderated’, 146.
23 See Smith, ‘In this Ballance seek a Character’, 178–179.
24 Boccaccio, in his De genealogia deorum gentilium (1472), refers to Icarus only indirectly, seeing in the craftsman Daedalus (as did many other poets, including Joyce) the ideal antitype of the artist.
25 For comprehensive surveys of how the Icarus myth is employed by both classical and Renaissance poets see Quint, David, ‘Fear of Falling: Icarus, Phaethon, and Lucretius in Paradise Lost’, Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004), 857–888Google Scholar, and Turner, John T., The Myth of Icarus in Spanish Renaissance Poetry (London: Tamesis, 1976), especially 49–58Google Scholar.
26 Rolli, Paolo, La bucolica di Publio Virgilio Marone all’ Altezza Serenissima di Giorgio Prencipe della Gran Britannia da Paolo Rolli, Compagno della Reale Societa (London, 1742)Google Scholar.
27 Di Tito Lucrezio Caro: Della Natura delle cose. Libri sei. Tradotti da Alessandro Marchetti (London: Giovanni Pickard, 1717); Il decameron di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio. Del MDXXVII (London: Thomas Edlin, 1725); Il pastor fido, tragicomedia, e la Idropica, commedia, di Battista Guarini (London: Enrico Chapelle libraro in Grosvenor-Street, 1737).
28 Delle satire e rime de m. Ludovico Ariosto libri due (London: Giovanni Pickard, 1716), Delle Satire e Rimi del Divino Ludovico Ariosto (London: Vandenhoek, 1731) and Delle opere del Cavalier Battista Guarini (Verona: Tumermani, 1737). All of them contain Guarini's famous Icarian sonnet XII, ‘O voi, donna volando’.
29 Paolo Rolli, ‘Vita di Giovanni Milton’, published along with the first six books of Rolli's translation of Paradise Lost, Del Paradiso Perduto.
30 Quint, ‘Fear of Falling’, 857–858.
31 John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 211.
32 ‘Cosa non detta in prosa mai, ni in rima’ (Orlando Furioso, canto 1 ottava 2); ‘carmina non prius / Audita Musarum sacerdos’ (Ode 3.1). See Forsyth, Neil, ‘Introduction: From Imitation to Intertextuality’, Nordic Journal of English Studies 8/2 (2009), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 For a discussion of the more ambivalent treatment of the Icarus myth by Horace see Hornbeck, Cynthia, ‘Caelum Ipsum Petimus: Daedalus and Icarus In Horace's Odes’, The Classical Journal 109/2 (2013–2014), 147–169CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in the Renaissance, Rudd, Niall, ‘Daedalus and Icarus (ii)’, in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Martindale, Charles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 38–46Google Scholar.
34 Jortin, John, Remarks on Spenser's Poems (London: John Wiston, 1734)Google Scholar, cited in Griffin, Regaining Paradise, 33.
35 Lauder, William, An Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in his Paradise Lost (London: J. Payne and J. Bouquet, 1771)Google Scholar, printed in Shawcross, ed., John Milton: The Critical Heritage, volume 2, 180.
36 Hayley, William, Life of Milton (London: T. Cadell junior and W. Davies, 1796), 3Google Scholar, cited in Griffin, Regaining Paradise, 33.
37 Rolli called Milton ‘il britanno Omero’ (the British Homer) in the dedication to the Prince of Wales of his newly issued translation of Paradise Lost (London: Carlo Bennett, 1735) and ‘l'Omero Inglese’ (the English Homer), in his preface to the wordbook for Sabrina (London: J. Crichley, 1737).
38 Giuseppe Riva, letter to Lodovico Muratori in Hanover, 7 September 1725; trans. Leonardo Pettoello in Händel-Handbuch, volume 4: Dokumente zu Leben und Schaffen, ed. Walter Eisen and Margret Eisen (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1985), 135–136.
39 Letter from Paolo Rolli in Todi to L'Abbate Frugoni in Parma, 11 October 1747; Fassini, Sesto, Il melodramma italiano a Londra nella prima metà dell Settecento (Torino: Fratelli Bocca, 1914), 176Google Scholar.
40 Dorris, George, Paolo Rolli and the Italian Circle in London, 1715–1744 (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 168CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Dorris, Paolo Rolli and the Italian Circle in London, 154–156.
42 Watson, David, The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace, Translated into English Prose (London: J. Oswald, 1741), 214–216Google Scholar.
43 [Robert Price,] ‘Observations’, in [John Mainwaring,] Memoirs of the Life of the late George Frederic Handel. To which is added a Catalogue of his Works, and Observations upon them (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1760), 161–162; my italics. In a later passage (174), Handel is called an ‘unbounded Genius’.
44 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757), ed. Adam Philips (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 74.
45 Johnson, Claudia, ‘“Giant HANDEL” and the Musical Sublime’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 19/4 (1986), 515–533CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Gilman, Todd, ‘Arne, Handel, the Beautiful, and the Sublime’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 42/4 (2009), 529–555CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 Johnson, ‘“Giant HANDEL” and the Musical Sublime’, 517.
47 Anonymous, Harmony in an Uproar: A Letter to F-d-k H-d-l, Esq. (London: 1733). Handel Collected Documents, volume 2: 1725–1734 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 741–742.
48 The London Magazine (May 1738), 250–251. Handel Collected Documents, volume 3, 405. For a longer discussion of the statue and its significance see Aspden, Suzanne, ‘“Fam'd Handel Breathing, tho’ Transformed to Stone”: The Composer as Monument’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 55/1 (2002), 39–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Scodel, Joshua, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 285Google Scholar.
50 Hayes, William, The Art of Composing Music (London: J. Lion, 1751), 9Google Scholar, cited in Johnson, ‘“Giant HANDEL” and the Musical Sublime’, 523.
51 Alexander Pope, Poems, and Imitations of Horace (London: Dodsley, 1738), 15.
52 Handel set Dryden's Alexander's Feast (1736) as well as his Song for St. Cecilia's Day (1739). As noted earlier, Handel chose to pair Dryden's 1739 Song with L'Allegro ed il Penseroso instead of Jennens's Il Moderato in his performances from 1743 onwards.
53 Avison, Charles, An essay on musical expression . . . Likewise, Mr Avison's reply to the author of remarks on the essay on musical expression. In a letter from Mr. Avison, to his friend in London, second edition (London: C. Davis, 1753), 50Google Scholar.
54 The Craftsman (7 April 1733). Handel Collected Documents, volume 2, 609.
55 For a detailed discussion of the Craftsman tirade, and its application to Walpole and Handel, see Thomas McGeary, The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 135–145.
56 Anne, Viscountess Irvine (Irwin), letter to the Earl of Carlisle, 31 March 1733. Castle Howard Archives Ych J8/1/252. Handel Collected Documents, volume 2, 608.
57 On 4 February 1729 Rolli in London wrote petulantly to Senesino in Venice that ‘Io sempre sono stato, siccome sarò, gravissimo seco, nè gli ò dato buon viaggio’ (I have been, and will continue to be, very cool with him [Handel], nor did I wish him bon viaggio [to Italy]). Handel Collected Documents, volume 2, 272. My translation.
58 Lord de la Warr, letter to the Duke of Richmond, 16 June 1733. Handel Collected Documents, volume 2, 641.
59 Charles Delafaye, letter to William, Third Earl of Essex, 24 May 1733. Handel Collected Documents, volume 2, 630.
60 Sir Henry Liddell, letter to Henry Ellison, 27 November 1735. Handel Collected Documents, volume 3, 110.
61 See Chrissochoidis, Ilias, ‘Handel at a Crossroads: His 1737–1738 and 1738–1739 Seasons Re-Examined’, Music & Letters 90/4 (2009), 607CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chisholm, Duncan, ‘Handel in Hell’, Handel Institute Newsletter 9/1 (1998)Google Scholar, unpaginated; and David Hunter, ‘Margaret Cecil, Lady Brown: “Persevering Enemy to Handel” but “Otherwise Unknown to History”’, Women & Music 3 (1999), 43–58.
62 In the most detail, for example, by Carole Taylor, ‘Handel's Disengagement from the Italian Opera’, in Handel Tercentenary Collection, ed. Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1987), 165–181.
63 The London Daily Post (4 April 1741). Handel Collected Documents, volume 3, 696.
64 This is Pope's own explanatory note to The Dunciad, Book IV, 63–70, third version (London: M. Cooper, 1743), cited in Robert Ness, ‘The Dunciad and Italian Opera in England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 20/2 (1986), 180.
65 Taylor, ‘Handel's Disengagement from the Italian Opera’, 169.
66 Handel, letter to Charles Jennens, 9 September 1742, cited in Taylor, ‘Handel's Disengagement from the Italian Opera’, 171.
67 Harris, Ellen T., ‘Handel the Investor’, Music & Letters 85/4 (2004), 542CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 Handel's estranged assistant, John Christopher Smith, wrote to the Earl of Shaftesbury in July 1743 that ‘the Prince of Wales desired him [Handel] at several times to accept of their offers, and compose for them, and said that by so doing He would not only oblige the King and the Royal Family but likewise all the Quality’. Händel-Handbuch, volume 4, ed. Eisen and Eisen, 363–364.
69 [Anonymous, April 1739,] ‘Advice to Mr Handel’. Harvard University Widener Memorial Library, EB7.A100.739a, cited in Handel Collected Documents, volume 3, 491.
70 Milton's texts were arranged, with small additions from his other poems, by Newburgh Hamilton.
71 ‘Hearing Mr. Handel's Sampson [sic], at the Theatre in Covent-Garden’, The London Magazine (April 1744). Händel-Handbuch, volume 4, ed. Eisen and Eisen, 375.
72 In a clever piece of poetic punning on the double meaning of ‘onde’, Rolli conflates two phrases in Italian: ‘sal’ onde’ (salty waves), and ‘onde il nome’ (‘hence the name’ – an explanation for the etymology of the Icarian Sea, near Icaria, an island near Samos).
73 Dean, Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques, 317.
74 Of the thousands of da capo arias that Handel wrote, only nine have changes in both key and time signatures in their B sections. Interestingly, all occur in Handel's oratorios, beginning with Samson in 1739. Eight of the nine have, like ‘Troppo audace’, a notated key signature change in the B section to the parallel (tonic) minor or major key.
75 Compare these to lines 3–4 of ‘Troppo audace’: ‘Pensa pira, ch'all’ alte Cime / La caduta appresso stà’.
76 Ursula Kirkendale, ‘Handel with Ruspoli: New Documents’, in Music and Meaning: Studies in Music History and the Neighbouring Disciplines, ed. Warren Kirkendale and Ursula Kirkendale (Florence: Olschki, 2007), 388, and Ellen Harris, ‘The Cantata as Narrative: Serials, Colloquies, and Commemoratives’, in Word, Image, and Song, volume 2: Essays on Musical Voices, ed. Rebecca Cypess, Beth L. Glixon and Nathan Link (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 31.
77 ‘VITTORIA, who was much admired both as an Actress, and a Singer, bore a principal part in this Opera [Rodrigo]. She was a fine woman, and had for some time been much in the good graces of his Serene Highness [Prince Ferdinand]. But, from the natural restlessness of certain hearts, so little sensible was she of her exalted situation [as mistress of Ferdinand], that she conceived a design of transferring her affections to another person. HANDEL's youth and comeliness, joined with his fame and abilities in Music, had made impressions on her heart. Tho’ she had the art to conceal them for the present, she had not perhaps the power, certainly not the intention, to efface them’. [Mainwaring,] Memoirs of the Life of the late George Frederic Handel, 50–51. Additionally, in a letter of 14 June 1710, Sophia the Dowager Electress of Hanover writes to Princess Sophia Dorothea of Prussia: ‘Otherwise . . . there is not much to say from here except that the Elector has taken on a Master of the Chapel named Hendel, who plays marvellously on the harpsichord, which gives the Electoral Prince and Princess great joy. He is quite a handsome man, and gossip says that he has been Victoria's lover’. Handel Collected Documents, volume 1: 1609–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 69.
78 Peraino, Judith, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 218–227CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
79 Winton Dean, ‘Charles Jennens's Marginalia to Mainwaring's Life of Handel’, Music and Letters 53/2 (1972), 164.
80 Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 227.
81 Ellen Harris, ‘Pamphilj as Phoenix: Themes of Resurrection in Handel's Italian Works’, in The Pamphilj and the Arts: Patronage and Consumption in Baroque Rome, ed. Stephanie C. Leone (Boston: Boston College McMullen Museum, 2011), 189–197, especially 193.
82 I am grateful to Dr Goffredo Plastino for assisting me with the English translation of this syntactically awkward passage.
83 ‘Fluttring his pennons vain plumb down he drops / Ten thousand fadom deep’ (book 2, 933), ‘Featherd soon and fledge They summ'd their Penns . . . soaring th’ air sublime’ (book 7, 421), and ‘Birds . . . rising on stiff Pennons, towre / The mid Aereal Skies’ (book 7, 441), in Paradise Lost, a new edition by Robert Bentley (London: Jacob Tonson, 1732).
84 Despite having sung this aria in Messiah scores of times, I had not noticed its rather obvious musical affinity with ‘Troppo audace’; I'm grateful to Ruth Smith for pointing this out.
85 [Mainwaring,] Memoirs of the Life of the late George Frederic Handel, 41.
86 See Hunter, David, ‘Royal Patronage of Handel in Britain: The Rewards of Pensions and Office’, in Handel Studies: A Gedenkschrift for Howard Serwer, ed. King, Richard G. (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2009), 127–153Google Scholar, especially 142.
87 For both Samson and the Occasional Oratorio, Milton's words were arranged/adapted by Newburgh Hamilton. There are further Miltonic ‘echoes’, rather than adaptation, in Jephtha by Thomas Morrell, but, again, nothing from Paradise Lost. See Alsop, Derek K., ‘Artful Anthology: The Use of Literary Sources for Handel's Jephtha’, The Musical Quarterly, 86/2 (2002), 349–362CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
88 Ruth Smith suggests that two submissions to Handel of oratorio adaptations of Paradise Lost – one by Mrs Delany in 1744 and the other by John Upton in 1746 – were not set by Handel, perhaps because they both ‘religiously observed’ Milton's text, even to the extent of refusing versification and keeping to Milton's blank verse (see ‘Handel, Milton, and a New Document from Their English Audience’, Handel Institute Newsletter 14/2 (2003), unpaginated). We also know that both Harris and Jennens were in the early stages of preparing oratorio adaptations of Paradise Lost for Handel, but it is not known how far either of them got, nor whether Handel ever actually saw their work (see letters from the Earl of Salisbury to James Harris on 14 September 1744, and from Jennens to Harris on 30 November 1744, in Burrows, Donald and Dunhill, Rosemary, eds, Music and Theatre in Handel's World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, 198 and 208). It was only the year after Handel's death, in 1760, that an oratorio version of Paradise Lost was created by Handel's copyist John Christopher Smith to a libretto by Benjamin Stillingfleet, but it was given only two performances, with a third cancelled, possibly on account of ‘poor receipts’ (see Margaret Seares, ‘Paradise Lost: The Impact of Political, Social and Market Forces on John Christopher Smith's Oratorio Season of 1774’, Eighteenth-Century Music 10/1 (2013), 110). There was also a single, ill-attended performance in 1761, and a similarly unsuccessful single-night revival in 1774, which Seares ascribes to competition from performances of Handel's works as well as to changing tastes. It could be said that the first (and only?) successful musical adaptation – albeit a loose one – of Milton's Paradise Lost was Haydn's Creation, perhaps itself an imitatio of an unused Handel libretto (see John Rogers, ‘“Begin at the Beginning”: Milton, Handel, Haydn, and the Origins of The Creation’, HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 3/1 (2013), http://haydnjournal.org, 2.
89 Handel did write a number of Italian chamber duets in the 1740s in an unknown context, some of which were quickly reused in the choruses of Messiah and Belshazzar. A 1742 Dublin revival of his 1740 opera Imeneo (hwv41) was his last of an Italian opera, and his curious introduction of much earlier Italian opera arias into the December 1744 revival of Semele could be viewed as a very last attempt to appease the Italian-opera faction.
90 Rolli, Paolo, Dell'Atalia tragedia del celebre poeta francese Giovanni Racine traduzione di Paolo Rolli (Rome: Niccolò e Marco Pagliarini, 1754)Google Scholar.
91 Rolli, Paolo, De’ Portici – del Signor – Paolo Rolli (Venice: Giovanni Tavernin, 1753)Google Scholar. For a modern edition and commentary see Paolo Rolli: libretti per musica, ed. Carlo Caruso (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1993).