Handel by Jonathan Keates Read Free Book Online Page A

an exciting musical culture, whose influence was to condition Handel’s style more strongly than any other he had encountered before or was to meet again.
    Several of the leading ecclesiastics maintained their own domestic bands and, if not actually composing themselves, wrote texts for the musicians they patronized. Pietro Ottoboni, for example, appointed a cardinal at the age of twenty-two by his great-uncle Pope Alexander VIII, seems to have laid out most of an enormous income in indulging a passion for music. Before Innocent’s ban on theatres, Ottoboni had staged operas by promising young composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti,Giovanni Bononcini and Francesco Pollarolo, in his huge Palazzo della Cancelleria, which also had a little stage for marionette operas. *(c)
    None of Handel’s works was specifically written for Ottoboni, but the Cardinal’s Wednesday music meetings offered Handel a chance to make valuable contacts with some of Italy’s leading musical masters. The atmosphere is well summed up for us by the French traveller Blainville, who was in Rome at the same time. ‘His Eminence keeps in his pay the best musicians and performers in Rome . . . so that every Wednesday he has an excellent concert in his palace. We were there served with ices and other delicate liquors . . . but the greatest inconveniency in all these concerts is that one is pestered with swarms of trifling little Abbés, who come thither on purpose to fill their bellies with these liquors, and to carry off the crystal bottles with the napkins into the bargain.’ The Ottoboni connexion in fact bound together many of the musical Italians who later made their way to London while Handel was there. Nicola Haym (already in England) and Paolo Antonio Rolli, later to become his librettists, for example, had both been part of the cardinal’s circle, as had the violinist Pietro Castrucci, leader of the opera band, and Filippo Amadei, a brilliant cellist who later collaborated as a composer with Handel and Giovanni Bononcini on Muzio Scevola .
    Handel’s most significant encounter at the Cancelleria was with the orchestra’s leader, Arcangelo Corelli. Corelli is one of those artistic figures whose effect on their contemporaries is out of all proportion to the volume of their output. He wrote and published a relatively small amount, six instrumental collections in all, but in so doing he profoundly altered and deepened the whole character of European music. His influence pervaded everything from a tiny trio sonata to a full-blown opera, and with those of Vivaldi and the elder Scarlatti his musical personality dominates the central phases of the Italian Baroque. Domenico Scarlatti once told the violinist Francesco Geminiani that he was especially struck by Corelli’s ‘nice management of his band, the uncommon accuracy of whose performance gave the concertos an amazing effect . . . for Corelli regarded it as essential to the ensemble of a band,that their bows should all move exactly together, all up, or all down; so that at his rehearsals, which constantly preceded every public performance of one of his concertos, he would immediately stop the band if he discovered one irregular bow’. The example was surely not lost on the young Handel, consolidating on what he had already learned as a member of the Gänsemarkt orchestra.
    The effects of the master’s music itself upon his own style are not so much heard as felt within the framework of the pieces Handel composed during this period, through the creation of structures immediately recalling those used in Corelli’s concertos (which, though not published until 1714, may already have been known in manuscript). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the setting of Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus domino meo , which Handel completed in the April of 1707. The Corellian lyricism and suppleness of the string writing determine the