Handel by Jonathan Keates Read Free Book Online

Popular historical awareness tends all too readily to forget that the War of the Spanish Succession involved more diffuse theatres of activity than the plains of Flanders and the Danube on which Marlborough gained his famous victories. Bourbon and Habsburg armies were heavily engaged not only on France’s eastern borders but also in Spain and throughout the entire length of Italy. Handel’s arrival was on the heels of a huge imperial push made possible by the brilliant operations of Prince Eugene, culminating in his victory at Turin and the surrender of Milan, both during the September of 1706. With the exception of Venice, which adopted its by now customary position astride the diplomatic fence, all the Italian states were heavily committed, either through enforced levies as imperial fiefs, or through direct political and military involvement.
    In terms of prestige the severest losses were suffered by the dominions of the Pope, whose support of the Bourbon cause in Spain and of the family of the exiled James II of England outweighed his efforts towards peace as far as Austria and her allies were concerned. Raised to the papacy in 1700, as Clement XI, Gianfrancesco Albani was destined to a term of office as miserable as it was long. Unlike his immediate predecessors, who had interpreted their responsibilities in a spirit of self-seeking worldliness, Clement was a worthy and conscientious pontiff, whose idealistic attempts to do right were perpetually frustrated by the cynical turn of European great-power politics.
    Early in his reign he had seen his capital devastated by a succession of natural disasters. The Tiber flooded the city three times in as many years, and on 14 January 1703 there began a series of violent earth tremors, which lasted with a more or less consistent intensity for nearly two months. Special prayers, fasts and processions took place to ward off what was seen as a fitting punishment for the decadent luxury of Roman society: ‘Faith is not dead in Rome,’ said an eyewitness, ‘the earthquake, in fact, has been a great preacher.’Terrible cracks appeared in the Vatican and the Colosseum, and the pillars of Bernini’s great baldacchino in St Peter’s were seen to tremble. Perhaps the most amazing scenes took place on the night of 2 February, when a rumour spread that the city was to be destroyed within two hours. Streets, squares and gardens quickly filled with people, many of them half dressed, flinging themselves on their knees, making public confession and embracing each other as if for the last time, and it was almost morning before a relative calm was restored.
    Clement was instrumental, not only in sustaining Roman morale during such periods of intense crisis, but in reaffirming the city’s metropolitan character through his extensive restoration of its older basilicas and his reconstruction of walls, aqueducts and fountains. The Rome in which Handel arrived was thus in one of its signal moments of renewal, even though its population was decreasing and in area it was little more than a magnificent market town among a scatter of impressive ruins.
    Roman society was naturally dominated by ecclesiastics and by the noble families from whose ranks many of them were recruited. The machinery of patronage was controlled by these two heavily interlinked groups, and the city’s flourishing artistic life depended exclusively upon their support. Alone among the major Italian cities, however, Rome boasted no opera house. The puritanical zeal of Innocent XII had closed the Teatro Tor di Nona in 1697 and no new theatrical enterprise was to be set on foot until the opening of the Teatro Capranica in 1709. Musicians nevertheless continued to flock to the city. Besides the inevitable demand for new music to accompany church celebrations of every kind, there was enough continuing impetus from wealthy and distinguished amateurs among the cardinals and their noble relatives to promote