Free Handel by Jonathan Keates

appreciated these. How Handel spent his time otherwise at Florence is sketched in for us by a nugget of gossip retained by Mainwaring, who, besides remarking that he received a present of a hundred sequins and a service of plate for Rodrigo ’s composition, says ‘ VITTORIA , who was much admired both as an Actress, and a Singer, bore a principal part in this Opera. She was a fine woman, and had for some time been much in the good graces of his Serene Highness. But, from the natural restlessness of certain hearts, so little sensible was she of her exalted situation, 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.’ Vittoria Tarquini was certainly in Florence during this period, as a star of the Pratolino operas, but she was not among the Rodrigo cast. How far her amorous involvement went with Handel we can never know, but a letter from the Electress Sophia of Hanover to the Queen of Prussia in 1710 bears out the existence of a liaison.
    Scarlatti, meanwhile, had retreated to Venice, whose vibrant theatrical life would surely offer some profitable operatic commissions. Handel seems to have followed him there as soon as his Florence engagement ended, and by January 1708 we find the two composers meeting at a carnival party. As Mainwaring tells us, ‘while [Handel] was playing on a harpsichord in his visor [mask] Scarlatti happened to be there, and affirmed that it could be no one but the famous Saxon, or the devil. Being thus detected, he was strongly importuned to compose an Opera. But there was so little prospect of either honour or advantage from such an undertaking that he was very unwilling to engage in it.’
    This reluctance is somewhat puzzling. Venice at that time had the most active and influential operatic culture in Europe and most composers would have jumped at the chance to write for one of the city’s many theatres.Honour and advantage alike were there for the taking. Handel seems to have restricted himself on this occasion to absorbing what the carnival season had to offer in the way of musical entertainment. Among the operas being presented, Handel almost certainly heard La Partenope by Antonio Caldara, whose move to Rome the following year brought him the patronage of Marchese Ruspoli. On the text used by Caldara, an abridgment of Silvio Stampiglia’s libretto originally written in Naples in 1690, Handel would later base his own Partenope , a sparkling and sophisticated erotic comedy. Elsewhere among the Venetian theatres, the opera which probably interested Handel most and made a decided impact on his own style was Alessandro Scarlatti’s Mitridate Eupatore , whose grandeur of outline and boldness of design – the story dispenses with the happy ending customary in Baroque opera – evoked a hostile reception from Venetian opera-goers.
    There was a chance as well to meet other composers in the bustling, competitive world of the four opera houses at San Cassiano, San Fantin, Sant’ Angelo and San Giovanni Grisostomo, of the pious orphanages, each with its orchestra of teenage pupils, of private concerts in patrician palaces and of the great basilica of St Mark’s. Yet it was not to the works of the nowadays better-known Venetian masters such as Vivaldi, Albinoni and the Marcello brothers that Handel most eagerly responded, but to the music of Antonio Lotti, organist at St Mark’s, and Francesco Gasparini, Vivaldi’s predecessor as director of the redoubtable band of girl instrumentalists at the Pietà foundling hospital. The former not only became a friend and supporter of Handel’s music (he and his wife were among the most vociferous partisans of Agrippina , written for Venice