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The Changes; Or, Plus Ça Change? Newburgh Hamilton's Early Writings and the Politics of Handel's Libretti

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The Changes; Or, Plus Ça Change? Newburgh Hamilton's Early Writings and the Politics of Handel's Libretti King’s Research Portal DOI: 10.1080/02690403.2017.1361171 Document Version Peer reviewed version Link to publication record in King's Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Stanyon, M. (2017). The Changes; or, plus ça change? Newburgh Hamilton's Early Writings and the Politics of Handel's Libretti . JOURNAL- ROYAL MUSICAL ASSOCIATION, 142(2), 221-255. https://doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2017.1361171 Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. 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Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 The Changes; or, plus ça change? Newburgh Hamilton’s Early Writings and the Politics of Handel’s Libretti MIRANDA STANYON** I. Introduction The politics of Handel’s oratorios and operas provoke heated debate, not least about how we define ‘politics’ in the eighteenth century and how, if at all, we separate ‘Handel’ from the collaborative endeavours and multiple sites of composition, patronage, business, performance, and reception that make up ‘Handel’s oratorios and operas’.1 Libretti feature prominently in these debates.2 Even if they reveal little (at least directly) about Handel’s sensibilities, they at least seem to reveal something; when musical settings seem impossibly opaque, texts can appear welcomingly decipherable and explicit. Understandably so: among other things, political theorizing is generally conducted in words; words are the primary medium of scholarship; and modern musicological tools of interpretation have their origins in hermeneutic techniques developed over millennia to deal with words. Yet interpretations of Handel’s libretti and librettists are themselves fraught, whether they support claims about Handel’s music, its receptions, or its contexts. A decade ago, Suzanne Aspden issued a particularly clear call for Handel scholars to recognise the malleability and contingency of interpretation itself, among eighteenth-century ** This is an Accepted Manuscript, barring figures, of an article to be published by Taylor & Francis in The Journal of the Royal Musical Association. 1 See Reinhard Strohm, ‘Handel and his Italian Opera Texts’, Essays on Handel & Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1985), 34–79; Curtis Price, ‘English Traditions in Handel’s Rinaldo’, Handel Tercentenary Collection, ed. Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (London, 1987), 120–135; William Webber, ‘Handel’s London’, in Cambridge Companion to Handel, ed. Donald Burrows (Cambridge, 1997), 45–54; Edward Corp, ‘Music at the Stuart Court at Urbino. 1717–18’, Music & Letters 81.3 (2000), 351–63; David Hunter, ‘Handel among the Jacobites’, Music & Letters 82.4 (2001), 543–56; Ellen Harris, Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Cambridge MA, 2001); Strohm, ‘Darstellung, Aktion und Interesse in der höfischen Opernkunst’, Händel Jahrbuch 49 (2003), 13–26; Harris, ‘With Eyes on the East and Ears in the West: Handel’s Orientalist Operas’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36.3 (2006), 419–443; Paul Monod, ‘The Politics of Handel’s Early London Operas, 1711–1718’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36.3 (2006), 445–472; James Winn, ‘Style and Politics in the Philips-Handel Ode for Queen Anne’s Birthday, 1713’, Music & Letters 89.4 (2008), 547–561; Corp, The Stuarts in Italy, 1719–1766 (Cambridge, 2011), 87–92; Thomas McGeary, The Politics of Opera in Handel’s Britain (Cambridge, 2013). 2 Some studies almost exclusively treat libretti, like Deborah Rooke, Handel’s Israelite Oratorio Libretti: Sacred Drama and Biblical Exegesis (Oxford, 2012); Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995). Others focus strongly on text, suggesting, for example, that ‘[m]usicologists have looked in vain for’ ‘musical clue[s]’ to interpretation. Suzanne Aspden, ‘Ariadne’s Clew: Politics, Allegory, and Opera in London (1734)’, Musical Quarterly, 85.4 (2001), 735–70 at 746. 1 listeners as well as musicologists. She suggested that operatical exegetes should welcome the discovery that even ‘ostensibly straightforward’ material ‘becomes not more but less easy to read, the more deeply we delve into the labyrinths of history and allegory.’3 Such suggestions have received mixed responses. Thomas McGeary has recently dismissed a broad swathe of allegorizing approaches to Handel’s operas, arguing that topical and party-political meanings inhered primarily in extra-musical sources, which appropriated the operas and turned them to political ends (especially in squibs and journalism), rather than in the actions of partisan producers and performers, or in allegories constructed within libretti and reconstructed centuries later.4 But some may hesitate over McGeary’s distinctions between partisanship and broader political ideologies, or between ‘extrinsic’ politicisations of music and apparently intrinsic or intended meanings.5 In more heated debate surrounding the ‘anti-Judaic message’ of Handel’s Messiah, Michael Marissen has been accused of allowing slippage between the possible intentions of Handel, his Nonjuring librettist Charles Jennens, and anti-Jewish sources Jennens used in compiling Messiah.6 Yet even casting Handel as relatively indifferent to his librettists’ possible theological- political investments leaves open the question of how individual texts and writers contribute to the composite compositions that go by the name of ‘Handel’s works’. This article grapples with this question in the course of exploring the early writings of one of Handel’s lesser-known librettists, Newburgh Hamilton. It describes what seems to be the first publication attributable to Hamilton, The Changes (1711), sets it in the context of other early publications and biographical details, and conducts a thought experiment of reading two Handel libretti alongside Changes. The early writings are approached less as contexts for the oratorios than texts with their own interest, and intertexts to be set in dialogue with later productions. This approach follows current literary understandings of interpretation as a process of exploration, unfolding, playing-out or performance, and related cultural-historical understandings of political meanings as on one hand implicit in cultural objects—whether or not these 3 Ibid., 753; compare Smith, Handel’s Oratorios, 187. 4 McGeary, Politics of Opera, 5–6. 5 See, for example, Ruth Smith’s review of McGeary in Eighteenth Century Music, 11.2 (2014), 294–9. 6 Marissen, Tainted Glory in Handel’s Messiah (New Haven, 2014), 3. Compare John Roberts, ‘False Messiah’, JAMS 63.1 (2010), 45–97. 2 meanings were intended and perceived—and on the other hand as unpredictable, performed, and contingent as they relate to individual agents.7 Hamilton’s collaborations with Handel were shaped by his position in a particular Tory-oriented network, and traces of the writer’s early connections with High Church, pre-Revolution, and sometimes Jacobitical tastes, patrons and causes can plausibly be seen in his later texts for Handel. This argument supports the growing understanding of Handel’s music as embedded in contemporary political-religious cultures. Recognising the complexity of these cultures and Handel’s mobility within them does not entail that politics and music occupied separate ‘domains’; the fruits of Handel’s collaborations with librettists like Hamilton were not determined by ‘party affiliations’, yet neither did they ‘transcend[]’ politics.8 II. Hamilton, Sacheverell, and The Changes We know comparatively little about Newburgh Hamilton, an admirer and friend of Handel who arranged the text for Alexander’s Feast (1736), Samson (1743), the Occasional Oratorio (1746), and possibly Semele (1744). From at least 1725–1754, Hamilton served as steward to the Earl of Strafford and his family, and their papers contain much of the scarce information we possess about his working life and enthusiasm for Handel.9 Hamilton’s origins have seemed uncertain. Musicologists generally describe him as flourishing from 1712, when his first piece opened at Drury Lane. As regards his political affiliations, the consensus is that while ‘[t]he political identities of Hamilton’s patrons and dedicatees are markedly oppositionist,’ ‘Hamilton’s politics are not known’ directly.10 7 See, for example, Steven Connor, ‘Spelling Things Out’, New Literary History, 45 (2014), 183–97; Peter Burke, ‘Performing History:
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