iTunes 572745-46 bk Handel_iTunes 572745-46 bk Handel 17/04/2012 12:12 Page 1 2 CDs HANDEL Acis and Galatea Kotoski • Gordon • Siebert • Opalach Seattle Symphony Chorale Seattle Symphony • Gerard Schwarz iTunes 572745-46 bk Handel_iTunes 572745-46 bk Handel 17/04/2012 12:12 Page 2 George Frideric CD 1 43:07 CD 2 58:33 HANDEL Act I Act II (1685-1759) 1 Sinfonia 3:44 1 Wretched lovers! Fate has passed (Chorus) 6:10 Acis and Galatea, HWV 49 2 Oh, the pleasure of the plains! 2 I rage, I melt, I burn (Polyphemus) 1:20 (Chorus, Acis, Galatea) 5:40 3 Air: O ruddier than the cherry (Polyphemus) 3:27 A Masque in Two Acts 3 Ye verdant plains and woody mountains 4 Whither, fairest, art thou running? Words by John Gay and others (Galatea) 0:49 (Polyphemus, Galatea) 1:22 4 Air: Hush, ye pretty warbling quire! (Galatea) 6:56 5 Air: Cease to beauty to be suing 5 Air: Where shall I seek the charming fair? (Polyphemus) 5:37 (Acis) 3:01 6 Air: Would you gain the tender creature Galatea . Dawn Kotoski, Soprano 6 Stay, shepherd, stay! (Damon) 0:24 (Damon) 5:31 Acis . David Gordon, Tenor 7 Air: Shepherd, what art thou pursuing? 7 His hideous love provokes my rage (Acis) 0:30 (Damon) 4:54 8 Air: Love sounds th’alarm (Acis) 5:20 Damon . Glenn Siebert, Tenor 8 Lo! here my love, turn (Acis) 0:28 9 Air: Consider, fond shepherd (Damon) 5:23 Polyphemus . Jan Opalach, Bass 9 Air: Love in her eyes sits playing (Acis) 7:01 0 Cease, oh cease, thou gentle youth (Galatea) 0:26 0 Oh! didst thou know the pains of absent love ! The flocks shall leave the mountains / (Galatea) 0:17 Torture, fury, rage, despair Scott Goff, Flute ! Air: As when the dove laments (Galatea) 6:19 (Acis, Galatea, Polyphemus) 3:01 @ Happy we! (Acis and Galatea, Chorus) 3:34 @ Help, Galatea! Help, ye parent gods! (Acis) 1:11 Judy Kriewall, Piccolo # Mourn, all ye muses (Chorus) 5:54 Bernard Shapiro, Oboe $ Must I my Acis still bemoan? / Susan Williams, Cello Cease, Galatea, cease to grieve (Galatea, Chorus) 6:37 Michael G. Morgan, Double Bass % ’Tis done: thus I exert my pow’r divine Jillon Stoppels Dupree, Harpsichord and Organ (Galatea) 0:19 ^ Air: Heart, the seat of soft delight (Galatea) 3:50 & Galatea, dry thy tears (Chorus) 2:35 Seattle Symphony Chorale (Richard Sparks, Director of Chorale Activities) Seattle Symphony Gerard Schwarz iTunes 572745-46 bk Handel_iTunes 572745-46 bk Handel 17/04/2012 12:12 Page 4 George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) England, Handel had, in 1717, accepted the appointment Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, from the Italian cantata Clori, Acis and Galatea, HWV 49 of composer-in-residence to James Brydges, Earl of Tirsi e Fileno, and elsewhere. This was to be revived Carnarvon and, from 1719, Duke of Chandos, a man who successfully in further performances during the following There is an element of paradox about the career of English musical creativity, in their own time they suffered had made his fortune as Paymaster-General during years. In 1739 Handel devised an entirely English version George Frideric Handel. Born in Halle in 1685, the son of variable fortunes at the box-office. There were critics who Marlborough’s campaigns on the Continent. It was for of the work, of which there were further performances, but a distinguished and elderly barber-surgeon by his second found something unsuitable in the mixture of sacred and Cannons, the magnificent house that Brydges had had it seems that he never put on performances of the two-act wife, he gave up other studies in order to become a secular, and audiences came and went as fashions built for him at Edgware, that Handel, in 1718, turned English version now familiar to audiences. musician, working first in Hamburg at the opera, as changed from season to season. In the end, though, it again to the subject of Acis and Galatea in a masque, a The text suggests the setting of the performance. The composer and harpsichordist. From there he moved to the was the creation of this new and peculiarly English artistic miniature English opera, with a libretto by John Gay and scene is ‘a rural Prospect, with Rocks, Groves, Fountains source of all opera, Italy, where he made a name for and religious compromise that ensured Handel’s lasting contributions from Alexander Pope and John Hughes. and Grotto’s, amongst which will be disposed a Chorus of himself as a composer and performer. A meeting in fame, with a series of works that continued in Gay, who was ten years later to write The Beggar’s Nymphs and Shepherds, Habits, and every other Venice with Baron Kielmansegge led him to Hanover as performance until shortly before his death in April 1759 Opera, had poured ridicule on attempts by some English decoration suited to the Subject’. In the first act all is well. Kapellmeister and from there, almost immediately, to and subsequently formed the basis of popular English poets to explore a vein of pastoral realism, much as The sea nymph Galatea is in love with the shepherd Acis, London, where he was invited to provide music for the choral repertoire into the following centuries. Shakespeare, a hundred years or so earlier, had, in As who is seen searching for her. The lovers are given newly established Italian opera. It was, then, primarily as The pastoral has a long history in European culture, You Like It, mocked pastoral pretensions. In Acis and friendly advice by another shepherd, Damon, who a composer of Italian opera that Handel made his early stemming from Theocritus and his Alexandrian Galatea Gay provides an example of the true Greco- suggests that Acis has been neglecting his flocks, but, reputation there. contemporaries, handed on through Virgil to find further Roman form. The work was given a successful production with the lovers now together, all ends in happiness and Xenophobia has always run strong in England, and development in Renaissance Italy and in the newly at Cannons, where Pepusch, the composer responsible rejoicing. The second act is in a darker mood. The chorus while ready, in the interests of Protestantism, to accept a developing form of Italian opera. The essence of pastoral, for collecting music for The Beggar’s Opera, was director warns of danger to come. The one-eyed giant German king as successor to Queen Anne, the public was which takes for its subject the lives and loves of of music. Polyphemus, a monster, is jealous and, in a contrapuntal less wholehearted in its support of foreign opera. shepherds and shepherdesses, lies in its urban view of In 1731 a benefit performance of Acis and Galatea outburst, threatens Acis. Damon urges prudence on Common sense found some objection to the artificiality of the countryside, an idealised Arcadia, without winter and was given at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Polyphemus, but the lovers promise to be true to each the form, supported by the strong existing literary and rough weather, where little work is done, as shepherds sit This was followed, in 1732, by the announcement of an other, while Polyphemus expresses his jealous anger, dramatic traditions of the country. It seemed that John idly upon the rocks, birds sing madrigals and where the unauthorised performance for the New Theatre, in the finally crushing his rival under a great rock. The chorus Gay's The Beggar’s Opera, a political parody of grand only ills come from unrequited love, where rejection often Haymarket, a direct challenge to Handel, who was and Galatea mourn, but she remembers her semi-divine opera, in the satirical vein of Henry Fielding’s novel proves fatal. presenting Italian opera at the King’s Theatre opposite. In nature and miraculously turns the dead Acis into a river, to Jonathan Wild, appealed to a much wider public than any The story of Acis and Galatea has its earliest response Handel mounted his own production of Acis and the general satisfaction of the chorus. foreign entertainment ever could. surviving literary source in Theocritus in the third century Galatea as a three-act serenata, in a bilingual version that Handel was deeply concerned in the business of B.C. It owed its Renaissance resurgence to the treatment now included additional elements taken from his Italian Keith Anderson Italian opera, and when rivalry of an opposing company of the subject in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the inspiration for and fickle popular taste suggested the need for change, paintings by Claude and by Poussin. The Sicilian he turned instead to a form of music that seemed shepherd Acis, son of Faunus and a river-nymph, is in admirably suited to London audiences. English oratorio love with Galatea, in origin a sea-nymph, but depicted as provided what was essentially an Italianate operatic a shepherdess. Acis is killed by his rival, the Cyclops entertainment, at least as far as the music was Polyphemus, who crushes him under a rock, and is turned concerned. It had the advantage, however, of being in into a river. English, and the further attraction of an appeal, through its Handel’s first treatment of the subject of Acis and choice of subjects and texts, to Protestant religious Galatea was in the summer of 1708 in Naples. There he proclivities. completed a cantata or serenade, apparently composed Although Handel’s oratorios were to fascinate for the wedding of the Duca d’Alvito and the niece of generation after generation of English choral singers and Beatrice Sanseverino, which took place, seemingly in the exercise an effect so overwhelming as to paralyse future composer’s absence, in July.