The King's Consort / Robert King HANDEL Acis and Galatea

After his early visits to Italy, Handel’s desire to experience music in all the main European countries was great enough for him to insist that, on his appointment as Kapellmeister in Hanover in 1710, he should have an immediate twelve months leave of absence to visit England. The Elector’s apparent generosity in so readily agreeing to this has to be seen in its wider context, for as heir to the British throne he was in effect simply allowing the transfer of his employee from one court to his next. Handel was favourably received at Queen Anne’s court, and certainly performed there once, but his eyes were already on Vanbrugh’s new opera house, the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket. With his introduction to the publisher John Walsh, numerous society contacts and the sensational success of the first Italian opera especially composed for London, Rinaldo, which opened on 24 February 1711, his reputation seems already to have been partly made.

Handel left for Germany in June 1711, but remained in contact with people in London, including the poet John Hughes. In the Autumn of 1712 he returned to London (on his employer’s condition that he remained only ‘a reasonable time’), staying first in Barnes, and then for three years (1713–16) with the young Lord Burlington in Piccadilly. A great patron of the arts, Burlington’s circle included the poets Pope, Gay and Arbuthnott: Arbuthnott in particular became a supporter of Handel’s music. The Queen also commissioned works including the ‘Utrecht’ Te Deum and the ‘Ode for Queen Anne’s Birthday’ and provided Handel with a pension of £200 a year. In 1714 the Queen died, and was succeeded by Handel’s German employer, now King George I. Handel had far exceeded the ‘reasonable’ conditions of his stay, but some diplomatic work on the part of Baron Kielmansegge mended any damage, and there appears to have been no real royal disfavour. Indeed, George doubled Handel’s pension. But, royal favour apart, the greatest attraction for Handel was still the theatre, and Silla, Teseo, Il pastor fido and Amadigi were all produced, though without the wild success of Rinaldo, which was revived four times in five years.

During the summer of 1717 Handel entered the service of the Earl of Carnarvon (who became Duke of Chandos in 1719) at Cannons, his palatial new residence in Edgware, just north of London. The Duke maintained a resident group of musicians, instrumentalists and singers and, with Pepusch already installed as master of music, Handel’s job was that of court composer.

Acis and Galatea was one of Handel’s most popular works, revived no fewer than eight times and performed at least seventy times by the middle of the century. It was also one of the few large scale-works to remain popular after his death: Mozart re-orchestrated it in 1788 for the celebrated concerts of music organized by van Swieten, Mendelssohn performed it in 1828, and Meyerbeer even planned a staged performance of it in 1857. It was in fact Handel’s second setting of the myth, for the first, a serenata entitled Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, had been composed in Naples in 1708, probably for the wedding of the Duke of Alvito. We know little of the first performance of the Masque, which was a private affair at Cannons, other than a letter from Sir David Dalrymple to the Earl of London in May 1718 which mentions Handel being at work on a ‘little opera’. A manuscript of the score was included in a catalogue of the Duke’s music library made in 1720, and although Handel’s ‘conducting score’ of 1718 does not survive, several contemporary manuscripts do, including one in the British Library.

Acis and Galatea is first mentioned as being a ‘Masque’ in the Duke’s catalogue of 1720. The heyday of the form had been nearly a century before when mime, music, dancing, spoken dialogue and lavish spectacle had been combined by figures such as Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones to make court entertainments of great splendour. The Masque never again recaptured the full glory of its Elizabethan form, but it did continue to serve as entr’actes in plays and operas for many years. In early eighteenth-century London the form recurred, partly as a home-grown reaction against the increasing popularity of Italian opera. Mostly these masques were short operas on pastoral or mythological subjects, usually divided into two ‘interludes’ or ‘entertainments’, and Handel would certainly have had first-hand experience of the work of two principal providers, the composer Pepusch and the poet John Hughes.