Free Handel by Jonathan Keates Page A

two years later) but left a mark on the young man’s aria style and even on his choral writing: the latter, already well known in Roman and Florentine circles which had welcomed Handel, was to furnish a significant source for his later borrowings.
    The spring of 1708 found Handel returning to Rome and the Ruspoli palace, where an exciting and ambitious new commission was awaiting him. For Easter Sunday and Monday of that year the Marquis was planning to present a large-scale oratorio on the theme of Christ rising from the dead, to a text by his fellow Arcadian Carlo Sigismondo Capeci. Extensive preparations were begun in the palace itself,where a special stage was set up in the largest of the saloni . Its principal decoration was a large painting of the Resurrection by Ceruti, framed by the Ruspoli arms, with an ornate frontispiece showing the work’s full title, Oratorio per la resurrezione di Nostro Signor Gesu Cristo in letters cut out of transparent paper and lit from behind by seventy lanterns. Crimson, yellow and scarlet hangings in damask and velvet adorned the hall, where light from sixteen candelabra allowed the immense audiences to read their wordbooks (1,500 of them, suggesting packed houses on each day).
    For the orchestra special music stands were made, their legs shaped like fluted cornucopiae, painted with the arms of Ruspoli and his wife Isabella, and a platform was devised for the concertino strings, led by Corelli. The full band consisted of thirty-eight string players, two trumpets and four oboes, who could presumably double on flute and recorder. Handel himself was taken good care of by the Marchese, as the household accounts reveal in their details of a bed and bedcovers hired from the Jews of the ghetto, whose chief line of business this was, and of the substantial bills for his food – a healthy indulgence in the pleasures of the table would stay with him till the end of his life.
    The first of the sumptuously stage-managed performances (nondramatic, of course) went off successfully in a fashion typical of Ruspoli concerts, but news that Margherita Durastanti had taken one of the solo roles was quick to reach the ears of the Pope, who issued a scandalized admonishment to the Marchese for employing a female singer in an Easter oratorio and threatened the wretched soprano with a flogging. She was promptly replaced by a castrato called Filippo. Otherwise Ruspoli’s satisfaction expressed itself in the customary lavish gifts to the performers of diamond, emerald and ruby rings.
    As the grandest work Handel had so far attempted in Italy, La Resurrezione reflected even more powerfully than the Latin psalms those qualities of opulence and sensuality pervading the religious atmosphere of late-Baroque Rome. The oratorio form itself had been evolved in the city during the preceding century and brought to maturity in the works of composers like Carissimi and Stradella, whose sacred dramas reached out to embrace the language of the theatre without abandoning an essentially devout aim. Once again, therefore, the young Saxon master was being called upon to provide music in a genre of which his audience would have considered itself the best judge in the world,and to strike a perfect balance between orthodox religious posture and the tastes of those to whom secular lyric drama was currently forbidden.
    Thus we should not expect to find in Handel’s first oratorio qualities similar to those we look for in the great English works of his maturity. The two choruses were sung by the soloists and there is nothing especially dramatic in the outline of the text. An angel champions Christ’s harrowing of hell against the braggadocio of the arrogant Lucifer, while on earth Mary Cleophas and Mary Magdalene, lamenting their lost Saviour, are consoled by St John with the assurance that He will rise again on the third day. Lucifer and the angel try conclusions once more and the last scenes of the work