William Hogarth, The Bad Taste of the Town (Masquerades and Operas), 1723-24. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
London, June 1727, the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. They are giving Bononcini’s Astianatte; Caroline, Princess of Wales, is in the house, and on stage are the two most celebrated prima donnas of the moment, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni. When one sings, the other’s supporters hiss. Then it comes to blows, in the pit, in front of the future queen. The most recent scholarship absolves the two singers and blames their partisans, but for the company that paid them the result is the same: the performance ends in scandal.
That company was the Royal Academy of Music, and George Frideric Handel was its leading composer. It was born in 1719 as a true joint-stock company, with a group of noble subscribers and a royal charter of twenty-one years. It was supposed to last until 1740. In its whole life it paid a single dividend, of seven per cent, in 1723. Its last night was 1 June 1728, with a revival of Handel’s Admeto: afterwards the stars left their contracts, left England, and the theatre stood dark for a year. A few months earlier, on 29 January, John Rich’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields had seen the debut of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which made fun of Italian opera itself and stayed on the bill for sixty-two nights in a row.
The image of a Handel who ruins opera companies is convenient and wrong. The documents tell another story: in London, Italian opera seria was a product nobody could make add up, and Handel was merely the man who tried longest. The reasons are all in the evening of Astianatte. Singers hired in Italy at fees that contemporaries judged enormous, a small public that split into factions, a language the audience did not understand and that Gay had just made ridiculous.
Handel did not change trades. In 1729 he founded a second company at the King’s Theatre with the impresario John James Heidegger, brought the castrato Senesino back to London and began again. The relationship between Handel and the castrato had been terrible for years: John Mainwaring, the composer’s first biographer, wrote that one was perfectly refractory and the other equally furious. In 1733 Senesino crossed to the other side. A group of noblemen gathered around Frederick, Prince of Wales, had founded the Opera of the Nobility, with Nicola Porpora as music director, which took Senesino and the bass Antonio Montagnana away from Handel and called Cuzzoni back to London. At the end of the 1733-34 season the rivals took the King’s Theatre too, and soon afterwards Farinelli joined them. Winton Dean, the scholar who reconstructed these seasons, observes that Handel had alienated the directors and the supporters with his overbearing ways: it was not Heidegger who drove him out of the King’s Theatre, it was the Opera of the Nobility.
He looked at once for another theatre and found it at Covent Garden, the new house of John Rich, the same impresario who had made money with The Beggar’s Opera. It was his third company. For three seasons London had two Italian opera houses fighting over the same public, which was already not enough for one. In 1737 both failed. The Opera of the Nobility went bankrupt and dissolved, and for the following season what remained of the two companies reunited at the King’s Theatre. In April Handel was struck by an illness, perhaps a mild stroke: his right arm was left paralysed. He went to take the waters at Aachen, and by autumn he was cured.
Seen up close, then, the failure was a failure of the system. The first company died of fees and satire, the second and third of competition, and with them died the noblemen’s company that had fought them. Handel was the only one who stood in the middle of all of them, and that is why history has put the bill in his name.
His last Italian opera, Deidamia, was staged at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 10 January 1741. It had three performances. Fifteen months later, on 13 April 1742, in Dublin, the Messiah was performed for the first time.