Handel's Orientalist Operas the Royal Academy Of

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxvi:3 (Winter, 2006), 419–443.

HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS Ellen T. Harris With Eyes on the East and Ears in the West: Handel’s Orientalist Operas The Royal Academy of Music, established in 1719 for the production of Italian opera on the London stage, operated as a full-ºedged business enterprise. Supported by venture capital and created on the model of a joint- stock company, the Academy was managed by a board of directors personally invested in the enterprise. Surprisingly, however, there has been no serious examination of the potential impact of the directors’ ªnancial goals on their artistic management of the opera. Although the effect of individual directors is not easily dis- cernible, board inºuence in general might be revealed in an unusual artistic feature of the Academy. Throughout the course of its existence (1719–1728), the Academy produced a large proportion of operas with librettos set in the Orient, particularly in its later years when it was suffering successive losing seasons. The directors’ willingness to continue its support of the opera during this period may have been due to the Academy serving as a loss leader for their larger ªnancial investment goals and trade interests. Not only did opera itself, given the large number of ªrst-rate foreign artists attracted to work for it, provide putative value as an emblem of England’s cultural supremacy in Europe, but also, more speciªcally, the directors’ personal connections to the East Indian trade—through investments, naval operations, or direct management—suggest that librettos with Eastern settings had value as lobbying or marketing tools to keep the image of the East in front of those who might assist them politically. This article argues that the unusual number of Oriental set-

Ellen T. Harris is Professor of Music, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Handel and the Pastoral Tradition (New York, 1980). The author thanks Theodore Rabb and Lewis Lockwood for their invitation to partici- pate in the conference “Opera and Society,” Princeton University, March 25–28, 2004, and the Institute for Advanced Study, and the staff of its Humanities and Social Science Library, for the opportunity to think, research, and write across discipline boundaries. Thanks also is due to the Princeton University libraries. Harvard University and Queen’s University, Belfast, provided additional opportunities to present, discuss, and reªne this work. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Ruth Smith for her insights about, and criticisms of, multiple drafts of this article. © 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 420 | ELLEN T. HARRIS tings in the Academy’s operas, especially from 1724 to 1728— Riccardo primo (1727) by George Frideric Handel being a prime example—was a direct result of the investment and mercantile interest of its directors. The evidence for this conclusion is fourfold: (1) the structure of the Royal Academy of Music and the interests of its directors; (2) the speciªc political crisis that ensued from the establishment of an Austrian company out of Ostend in 1722 that threatened direct competition with the English East India Com- pany; (3) contemporary London’s fascination with the East as a result of its increasing international trade, as reºected in literary, dramatic, and visual representations; and (4) the decision of the directors of the English East India Company to place art in the service of commerce by hiring visual artists and architects to create a public image for the company.

the royal academy of music and its directors The idea for the Royal Academy of Music blossomed during the speculative fervor of 1718/19. International trade became the nexus for the threads of government and ªnance, after the almost total conver- sion of the national debt in 1717 to short-term issues, which were held and sold by the East India Company, the South Sea Com- pany, and the Bank of England. The Academy may well have been the ªrst cultural organization to be created on the same principle as these companies—that is, as a partnership or corporation in which individuals could invest in ownership shares with the antic- ipation of making a proªt. The subscribers and directors of the opera were typically men of business, actively engaged in investment, government, and international trade, especially with the East In- dies. Although their aims were undoubtedly related to a love of opera, a ªnancial component must have been involved. The establishment of the Foundling Hospital in 1737, as described by Colley, presented a parallel situation, outside the con- text of art and culture. Although the “375 [hospital] governors ap- proved by George II...contained some very illustrious names... the majority were merchants”; many, like the founder Thomas Coram, a shipwright, were self-made. “From the outset, the char- ity [Foundling Hospital] was run in their commercial image. As a voluntary corporate body with its own directors and legal identity, it was modeled on London’s joint-stock companies, the ªrst time an organization of this kind had been extended to the work of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 421 philanthropy. The hospital’s avowed aim was mercantilist as well as humanitarian: to rescue young lives that would otherwise be wasted and render them useful to the state. Once grown, the girls were sent out as servants; the boys went to sea or worked in husbandry.”1 That the ªnancial interests of the directors have not been taken more seriously into account seems a signiªcant oversight. According to the “Proposall for carrying on Operas by a Com- pany and a Joynt Stock” (1719), the plan was for a capital base of £10,000, with the expectation that calls for money pledged would not exceed 20 percent of the subscribed capital and with the stated prospect of a 25 percent proªt. From a close analysis of the documents, Milhous and Hume concluded that these ªnancial propos- als were “overoptimistic” and “naïve,” and they referred to the “amateurishness of the whole operation.” Gibson disagreed, adding “in any event, ªnancial considerations were not the primary motivation that led the patrons of the opera to become involved”; aesthetic and ethical considerations were. Having “spent a good deal of time abroad—either on the Grand Tour, in a diplomatic capacity, or on service during the Continental campaigns of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough . . . [,] [the investors] wanted to recreate in London the luxurious and prestigious art-form they had come to admire.” According to Gibson, one of their aims and successes was to choose librettos of a “highly serious nature,” “drawn from the classical and historical stock which was the staple diet of a gentleman’s education and...intended to illuminate how the great should behave.”2 Notwithstanding the partial truth of Gibson’s position, the evidence suggests that the directors made their decisions largely on the basis of ªnancial self-interest, whether or not realistic. Al- though the history of the directorship of the Royal Academy of Music is incomplete, ªve separate lists of directors survive: that from autumn of 1719, when the opera was still in the planning stages; spring of 1720, when the ªrst performances took place; the ªrst full season, 1720/21; and the years 1726/27 and 1727/28. In

1 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven, 1992), 59. 2 For a detailed discussion of the planning documents for the Academy, see Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “New Light on Handel and The Royal Academy of Music in 1720,” Theatre Journal, XXXV (1983), 149–167. Elizabeth Gibson, The Royal Academy of Music: 1719– 1728 (New York, 1989), 17 (emphasis added), 285–286.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 422 | ELLEN T. HARRIS her discussion of the Academy’s directors, Gibson focused on “what is known about their musical and operatic tastes,” and her capsule biographies of them emphasized the importance of the Grand Tour, their years abroad, and the dates of their signiªcant appointments. Retracing her steps through the standard biograph- ical sources that she consulted reveals what Gibson chose to omit.3 Although few, if any, of the directors were outright scoun- drels, few of them were simply selºess patrons of the arts. Many were not only heavily invested and involved in international trade but also risk takers or hoarders dedicated ªrst and foremost to the acquisition of wealth and power. Among other documented activ- ities, they gambled, spent money excessively, and engaged in illicit liaisons. The same ironic words written about Baron Richard Edgcumbe (director in 1727/28)—”Though he was corrupt with the political corruption of the age, Edgcumbe seems to have been in other respects a worthy person”—seem to apply just as well to other directors of the Academy. A few speciªc examples sufªce to illustrate the less savory side of the directors’ lives.4 William Keppel, Lord Albermarle (director 1726/27, 1727/ 28) was a known spendthrift who piled up debts and ran through vast amounts of money. Horace Walpole alleges that at the time of his marriage in 1723, Albermarle had £90,000 in investments and that his wife brought him £25,000 more, but that at his death, he left nothing for his creditors or his children. The friends of Wil- liam Pulteney, Lord Bath (director April 1720, 1720/21) unani- mously censured him for “too great a love of money,” a characteristic that no doubt contributed to his vacillation on a bill in 1737 to reduce the interest on the national debt, since his wife was heavily invested.5 The Earl of Egmont wrote of George Montague, Lord Hali- fax (director April 1720) that he was a squanderer who loved

3 Gibson, Royal Academy, 24. Gibson discusses each list of directors (24–30, 33–34 [a sum- mary table]), showing also which directors continued to be associated with London opera after the Royal Academy disbanded in spring 1728. Ibid., 51, 334–345. 4 Gibson summarizes basic material from three principal sources: Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (eds.), The Dictionary of National Biography (with supplements) (London, 1937/38; orig. pub. 1885–1901), 22v. (hereinafter dnb); George E. Cockayne (rev. ed. Vicary Gibbs et al.), The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1910–1959; orig. pub. 1887– 1898), 13v. (hereinafter cp); Richard Romney Sedgwick, History of Parliament, House of Com- mons, 1715–1754 (London, 1970), 2v. (hereinafter hp). dnb, VI, 377. 5 dnb, XI, 45; XVI, 477, 471.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 423 horseracing, kept a mistress, and, as a result, left little to his daugh- ters. Charles Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton (director April 1720, 1726/ 27, 1727/28), described by Lord Hervey as “nor ever...dangerous but to woman-kind,” is said to have “made love to George II’s daughter Princess Amelia” when he was old enough to be her father. Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterªeld (director 1720/21, 1726/ 27) married an illegitimate daughter of George I and wrote famous letters to his son and illegitimate son, both named Philip Stanhope, on the conduct becoming a gentleman. One of his favorite activi- ties was gambling at White’s Club. James Brudenell (director 1726/27, 1727/28), Master of the Jewell Ofªce from 1716 to 1730, was discovered to have taken a quantity of royal plate after it was seized by his creditors and offered for sale. Whatever their musical backgrounds, it is difªcult to believe that such men invested in the opera solely for the purpose of supporting good music and not also with their own social and ªnancial goals in mind.6 Supporting the opera might have beneªted the directors personally in a number of ways. At the outset of the enterprise, association with the opera provided access to the highest levels of society, thus increasing the opportunity for a director to raise his social position or help his friends. Furthermore, the prospectus promised ªnancial rewards. Even if the directors were not primarily interested in proªting from the opera, as Gibson argues, they were certainly not sufªciently interested in the art of it alone to sustain continued losses. By the time the directors ended the company in 1728, the Academy had clearly become established as a continuing ªnancial drain. The directors might have been willing to maintain the opera until 1728, despite its heavy losses, because of its useful- ness during the Ostend crisis. That is, a careful choice of librettos might have helped to promote the image of the East in London to the beneªt of the East India Company, as well as possibly to sway important votes in Parliament. But operatic performances could also, more generally, have served as a reminder of England’s supremacy in Europe. The notion of upholding English interests in East India trade by supporting an Italian art form, set in the Orient, composed by German and Italian composers, and sung in Italian by Italian per- formers may not be as contradictory as it seems. The directors not

6 cp, II, 247, 45–46; I, 183; dnb, XVIII, 918; hp, I, 498.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 424 | ELLEN T. HARRIS only wanted to see London unrivaled in international trade, but also considered the development of a ªrst-class opera, musical values aside, a symbol of their status. In Choudhury’s words, “[T] he ability to recruit the best European castrati and sopranos for the English stage helped develop a sense of power, a sense of cultural capital, and, speciªcally, a sense of capturing European cultural capital....Without . . . harnessing the best talents of Europe, the aspiration toward global supremacy would be substantially re- tarded. The vision of London as the commercial capital of the world thus automatically conºates with the vision of London as the cultural Mecca of the world.”7

east india trade Portugal was the ªrst European nation to open trading routes to the East by sea after Vasco da Gama’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1498. During the early seventeenth century, however, the Dutch United East India Company—Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (voc)— became dominant in the East. The English were hard-pressed to compete with Dutch ªnancial resources and naval strength. In the three Anglo-Dutch Wars of 1652 to 1654, 1665 to 1667, and 1672 to 1674, “whatever their outcomes in Europe, in Asia the English invariably saw their ships captured and their Bantam trade inter- rupted.” Nevertheless, the third war saw the international mo- mentum shift in favor of the English. At the end of the century, however, a domestic wrinkle arose in the English efforts to domi- nate East India trade—the establishment of a New East India Company (1698) in competition with the Old Company. The for- mation of the United Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies in 1709 resolved the issue of internal competition and moved England closer to its goal of European supremacy in the eastern markets. Such is the vantage point from which the English East India Company viewed the looming threat of competition from ships sailing from the Austrian Netherlands.8 The political concern raised by the Ostend East India Com-

7 Mita Choudhury, Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theater, 1660–1800: Identity, Performance, Empire (Lewisburg, 2000), 59. 8 Anthony Farrington, Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 1600–1834 (London, 2002), 51–52. On the English East India Company, see, ªrst and foremost, K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660–1760 (New York, 1978); Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, 1962); Farrington, Trading Places. On the voc, see Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 425 pany was not just the introduction of another external competitor for trade routes, ports, and merchandise. This foreign challenge had a direct link with internal political opposition that took aim at the ªnancial strength of the government and fragile international alliances. Monod argues that the formal establishment of the Ostend East India Company in 1722 “coincided, probably by design, with the genesis of the Atterbury Plot,” a plan by supporters of Stuart claims to the English throne (“Jacobites”) to overthrow the government. By this time, however, ships from Ostend had been sailing to Eastern trade ports for seven years. The ªrst ship, backed by an Irishman named Thomas Ray, departed in 1715, a year that also saw a major Jacobite uprising in England. Much of the merchandise acquired on these voyages from Ostend was smuggled into England and sold at prices that undercut the legal trade. The proªts of the English traders were reduced both by the competition for goods in the East, which limited supply and raised prices, and by the sale of contraband at home. Adding to the frus- tration of the English merchants, the Ostend company frequently employed British seamen and British ships.9 As early as 1716, the East India Company presented a petition to George I “against such interlopers as ‘the ship “Victoria” of Ostend,’ which had arrived at Surat under the emperor’s colours with an Irish captain ‘Haver Sandªeld,’ probably to be identiªed with Xavier Sarsªeld of Limerick, whom James ‘III’ had admitted to noblesse at St. Germain in 1712.” The Company’s protest had little effect; ships kept sailing from Ostend, at least ªfteen between 1718 and 1722. The situation for England deteriorated with the formal establishment of the Austrian company in 1722, and in 1722/23, the East India Company was forced to reduce the divi- dend on its stock. It became critical in 1725 when Spain agreed to support the Austrian trade, and Austria promised to help Spain re- cover from Britain the important military gateway to the East, Gi-

1585–1740 (Oxford, 1989); idem, “England, the Dutch and the Struggle for Mastery of World Trade in the Age of the Glorious Revolution, 1682–1702,” in Conºicts of Empires: Spain, the Low Countries and the Struggle for World Supremacy 1585–1713 (London, 1997), 349–360. On the Ostend East India Company, see Gerald B. Hertz, “England and the Ostend Company,” Eng- lish Historical Review, XXII (1907), 255–279; Paul Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise: Smug- gling, Jacobitism, and Commercial Culture in Southeast England, 1690–1760,” Journal of British Studies, XXX (1991), 150–182. 9 Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 172–173.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 426 | ELLEN T. HARRIS braltar, unleashing a ºood of pamphlets in London. An open letter to William Pulteney (an Academy director in April 1720 and 1721/22) from Charles Forman was bent on “shewing how perni- cious, the imperial company of commerce and navigation, lately established in the Austrian Netherlands is likely to prove to Great Britain, as well as to Holland.”10 In 1726, the king addressed the issue in his speech to the opening of Parliament, acknowledging “the negociations [sic] and engagements entered into by some foreign powers, which seem to have laid the foundation of new troubles and disturbances in Europe, and to threaten my subjects with the loss of several of the most advantageous branches of their trade.” A pamphlet of 1726 urged the mutual interest of Holland and Britain in opposing the Ostend Company, arguing that British and Dutch “trade is recip- rocally advantageous,” but the “the Ostend company ...will... enable the house of Austria to become mistress of the British Seas.” Abel Boyer extracted this pamphlet in his journal, The Polit- ical State of Great Britain, concluding, “I shall only add, that if this Company be not destroy’d, ours must be ruin’d:...our Com- merce, and Maritime Power must dwindle and decay, the House of Austria become Mistress of Navigation... andthen, the Liberties of Europe, and the Protestant Religion will soon be destroy’d.”11 The climax occurred in the king’s opening speech to Parlia- ment in 1727: “[W] e must determine either tamely to submit to the peremptory and unjust demands of the king of Spain, in giving up Gibraltar, and patiently to acquiesce in the [Austrian] emperor’s usurped and extended exercise of trade and commerce, or must resolve to be in a condition to do ourselves justice, and to defend

10 Hertz, “Ostend Company,” 257, 265 (for protests against the Ostend trade between 1714 and 1722); Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 173; Mr. Forman’s letter to the Right Honourable William Pulteney, Esq. (London, 1725), exemplar at Firestone Library, Princeton University (HF483.N2 F7). Forman describes himself as having been in exile for nine years as a result of his conduct at the beginning of the reign of George I, which essentially identiªes him as a Jacobite participant in the uprisings of 1715. A manuscript in Avignon lists a “Forman” in the company of the Pretender in Avignon in the year after the uprising (MS. Musée Calvet, Avignon, 2827, 611, cited in Alistair Tayler and Henrietta Tayler, 1715: The Story of the Rising [London, 1936], 334). 11 Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England from the Norman Conquest, in 1066, to the year, 1803 (London, 1806–1820), VIII, 494 (microªlm, no. 19169, Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature, Cambridge, Mass. [hereinafter gkl]); The Importance of the Ostend Com- pany consider’d (London, 1726) (microªlm, nos. 6449 and 6450, gkl); Abel (ed.), The Political State of Great Britain (London, 1726), XXXI, 377 (microªlm, nos. 3745–3747, gkl).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 427 our undoubted rights against these reciprocal engagements entered into in deªance and violation of all national faith, and the most solemn treaties.” The House of Commons resolved to expand the land forces and voted £885,494 9s. 4d. to defray the cost. Spain at- tacked Gibraltar, only to lift its siege four months later, leaving England in possession of the city and port. By then, the emperor had agreed, under pressure, to suspend all trade of the Ostend East India Company. Shortly thereafter, George I died suddenly while abroad. Four years later, in 1731, the Ostend Company was formally abolished.12 Hertz argues that although credit has often been given to the Dutch Republic for the dissolution of the Ostend East India Company, “it is reasonable to believe that [its defeat]...wasreally due to the relentless energy of the middle-class whigs, whose opinions found expression in the [published] tracts.” If Hertz is correct that public pressure played a signiªcant role, then the Academy directors may need to be added the credit line for helping to keep the image of the East before the people who mattered.13

views of the east For eighteenth-century Londoners, the boundary between the East and the West, separating Europe from the Ottoman Empire, traced an imaginary line approximately from the city of Danzig on the Baltic Sea along the eastern borders of Silesia and Moravia in the Austrian territories to the eastern border of the Venetian dominions. This boundary was similar to the division between the Roman Republic and imperial Byzan- tium. Oddly, although the geographical “East” included modern Greece, ancient Greek culture and mythology was embraced as Western, especially as translated through such Roman authors as Tacitus, Livy, Virgil, and Ovid. The Ottoman Empire, covering the entire eastern half of the Mediterranean, including a signiªcant swath of North Africa, remained a palpable military threat, its in- vasion of Vienna in 1683 still a living memory.14 From the late sixteenth century, however, the British Levant

12 Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, VIII, 524, 547. 13 Hertz, “Ostend Company,” 271. 14 This boundary is illustrated in a map of Asia, Asia noviter delineata, printed in Amsterdam c. 1640 by William Blaeu. The eastern border of the map lies approximately on this imaginary line and the western border at Japan (reproduced in Farrington, Trading Places, 14–15). Robert

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 428 | ELLEN T. HARRIS Company had negotiated monopolistic trade agreements with Ot- toman dominions, including the overland routes through the Near East to India in 1592. Eight years later, when the East India Com- pany began its shipping trade to India and Indonesia, the two companies shared a single governor and many of the same merchants. In the contemporary view of geography and trade, the Near East, Middle East, and South Asia comprised a collective “East” (the Far East of China and Japan being added to the mix with the growing successes of the East India Company there by the mid-eighteenth century). This divide between the European West and the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal Empires not surprisingly found cultural representation in many forms, including the contemporary Italian operatic libretto.15 Piemontese found that two-thirds of the librettos written between 1640 and 1740 depict Western, principally Roman, themes. The remaining one-third, about 270 librettos, has Persian or East- ern settings, which Piemontese divides into two categories. The chronologically earlier group consists of ªctional (“ahistorical”) stories set in ancient Media (today western Iran and southern Azerbaijan) and Persia, as well as in such bordering countries as Assyria, Armenia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Phrygia, Syria, Egypt, and Arabia; they tend to feature a heroine or Amazon protagonist and focus on the consolidation or restoration of a legitimate regency through marriage. The group that followed comprises semihistori- cal (“parahistorical”) stories of a later period largely about dynastic succession and just lineage in Asiatic and Mediterranean monar- chies, often depicting the imperial confrontation between Europe and Asia and the intrinsic conºict between the Orient and Occident.16 Handel’s fourteen operas for the Royal Academy of Music

C. Ketterer, “Why Early Opera Is Roman and Not Greek,” Cambridge Opera Journal, XV (2003), 1–14. 15 Alexander H. De Groot, “The Organization of Western European Trade in the Levant,” in Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra (eds.), Companies and Trade (The Hague, 1981), 233. In 1605, the charters of the Levant and East India companies showed sixty-four names in common. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 2003; orig. pub. 1978), 17, deªned the “Ori- ent” at the end of the eighteenth century similarly: the “Near Orient” of Egypt, Syria and Arabia with the added involvement of the “more distant” Persia and India, but not the Far East. For the seventeenth and ªrst half of the eighteenth century, southeastern Europe—especially Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey—must be included as well. 16 Angelo Michele Piemontese, “Persia e Persiani nel dramma per musica Veneziano,” in Studi di musica Veneta. II. Opera e libretto (Florence, 1993), 1, 5, 9.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 429 reverse the overall proportion found by Piemontese. Only one- third of them treat Rome as a cultural emblem of Western values. The remaining two-thirds are Oriental by location (or, in one case, by topic), and belong to Piemontese’s second category. From 1720 to 1725, Handel’s Western and Eastern librettos are equal (four), the location of Floridante having been moved from Norway in the source libretto to Persia. After 1725, however, ªve out of six operas appear to fall into the Oriental category. Handel’s librettos for the Royal Academy of Music are categorized in Table 1.17 Although the action of Scipione takes place in New Carthage (now modern Spain), this libretto falls into the Eastern column. New Carthage was part of the North African Carthaginian Em- pire, which Scipio had captured for the Romans, and the depiction of hostilities between the Romans and the Carthaginians makes Scipione a type of East-West drama set in the philosophical “East,” if not the geographical East. Conversely, Admeto belongs in the Western column because, even though its Grecian location could identify it with the East, its mythological connection associates it with the West. Furthermore, the story is not about cultural conºict but the resolution of Admetus’ confused allegiances to his wife Alcestis and to Antigone, to whom he was previously betrothed.18 The speciªc placement of Scipione and Admeto does not, however, change the larger picture. For example, in the last two years of the Academy, even the revivals of Handel’s operas favored the East: three Oriental operas, Floridante in 1727 and Alessandro and Radamisto in 1728, to one Roman opera, Ottone in 1727. The same proportions characterize the librettos that composers other than Handel set for the Academy. Handel was not the only composer employed by the Royal Academy, but his operas comprised a signiªcant share of the operas produced during its nine-year existence. In its early years, the Academy had two internal, political factions: the opposition party—Jacobite, Catholic, and Italian, represented by composer Giovanni Bononcini and librettist Paolo Rolli—and the court party, represented by Handel and the librettist Nicola Haym.

17 On the Roman inºuence in operatic librettos, see, Ketterer, “Why Early Opera Is Ro- man and Not Greek.” 18 I am grateful to Wendy Heller for sharing her detailed exploration of the Admeto libretto before publication. See Heller, “The Beloved’s Image: Handel’s Admeto and the Statue of Alcestis,” Journal of the American Musicological Society (forthcoming).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 430 | ELLEN T. HARRIS Table 1 The Geography of Handel’s Operas for the Royal Academy of Music east west Radamisto (1720) Armenia Muzio Scevola (1721) Rome (near Mount Ararat on the Araxes River) Ottone (1723) Rome Floridante (1723) Persia (Tyre) Flavio (1723) Lombardy Giulio Cesare (1724) Egypt (No. Italy) Tamerlano (1724) Turkey (Bursa in Bithynia) Rodelinda (1725) Milan Scipione (1726) Spain (New Carthage) Admeto (1727) Greece (Larissa Alessandro (1726) India (Oxidraca) in Thessaly) Riccardo primo (1727) Cyprus (Limissol) Siroe (1728) Persia (Seleucia on Tigris River) Tolomeo (1728) Cyprus

Bononcini and Rolli were both dismissed from the company in the autumn of 1722, apparently for political reasons, the Atterbury Plot having led to increased “suspicion and even persecution” of Roman Catholics in England. Bononcini managed to have four of his operas produced between 1722 and 1727, a signiªcant reduc- tion for him, since the company had produced four of his operas in the previous two seasons. Rolli did not resume work for the company until 1726.19 Partly as a result of political unrest, Handel ultimately became the Academy’s dominant composer. His contribution of fourteen operas (including Elpidia, an opera that Handel arranged, but not Muzio Scevola, for which he composed only the third act) to the total of thirty-four accounts for nearly 40 percent of the Acad- emy’s productions. Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti were each responsible for eight, and three other composers contributed one apiece. The remaining opera was a collaboration. The number of performances was even more in his favor (leaving out Muzio Scevola, for which Bononcini also contributed an act): 261 for Handel, 114 for Bononcini, 53 for Ariosti, and 30 for others. In terms of their settings, however, the operas by other composers followed the same pattern as Handel’s operas.20 At the beginning of the period, Roman and Oriental librettos were in about equal proportion. For example, Numitore (1720),

19 Gibson, Royal Academy, 167–172. 20 See Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp, Handel’s Operas: 1704–1726 (Oxford, 1987), 308–309.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 431 the ªrst opera for the Academy, adapts the story of the founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus, but Astarto (1720), like Handel’s Floridante (1723), is set in Tyre (Persia). Beginning with the 1724/ 25 season, all of the librettos not set by Handel were Eastern: Artaserse (1724) and Dario (1725) both set in Susa (Persia), Elisa (1726, similar in story to Handel’s Scipione of the same year) in New Carthage, Lucio Vero (1727) in Ephesus (Turkey), Astianatte (1727) in Epirus (Greece), and Teuzzone (1727) in China. In sum, of the ªfteen new operas presented by the Academy in its ªnal four years, twelve have Eastern settings. The Academy operas were based on older texts, with either newly composed or revised scores. Since their subject matter re- versed the proportion of Eastern and Roman operas found by Piemontese in the general pool, the reasons for these choices are worth examining. Gibson is correct to suggest that the directors aimed for serious high art with moral overtones. They rejected the libretto of Partenope, which Handel later set, possibly because it was considered too burlesque. The preference for serious and moralizing librettos, however, would not in itself have weighted the result so heavily toward Eastern settings, unless that attribute was also a priority. The disproportionate (and growing) number of Eastern (as opposed to Roman) settings among the librettos for the Royal Academy points to the contemporary lure and importance of the East as a result of commercial and imperial interests.21 British fascination with the Orient was not new in the 1720s. Among the earliest examples of English joint-stock companies were those organized for Eastern trade, such as the Muscovy (1553), which traded with Russia and the Baltics; the Levant (1591), which dealt with Turkey and Palestine; and the East India Companies (1600). The merchants returning from these voyages came home rich with exotic stories as well as goods. Not surprisingly, a sense of adventure in faraway places and a growing commercial and national interest found their way into seventeenth- century drama. Writing about Restoration theater, Orr argues that “far more often than has been allowed, the heroic dramatists...[were] drawn to Oriental subjects because the Levantine and Eastern states depicted were of immediate commercial, military or confes-

21 Gibson, Royal Academy, 248–249.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 432 | ELLEN T. HARRIS sional concern.” She associates “several dozen” heroic plays with typical Oriental themes, including “the corruption, tyranny and internecine conºict over succession regarded as characteristic of Oriental despotisms,” the “clear and present danger” of the Otto- man Empire to Europe, and “Christian maidenhood endangered by Persian lust.” Some of these plays preview topics that would later appear in Handel’s Academy operas. Alexander the Great’s love for both Statira and Roxana in Handel’s Alessandro had prece- dent in The Rival Queens (1677) by Nathaniel Lee, and the precur- sors to Handel’s Tamerlano were Charles Saunder’s Tamerlane the Great (1681) and Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane (1702). In both cases, Handel’s operas appeared in conjunction with revivals of the earlier plays, probably by the deliberate, tactical choice of the opera directors.22 According to Orr, some of the seventeenth-century Oriental plays are directly connected to incidents involving the East Indian and Levant companies. She associates Lord Orrery’s Mustapha (1665) both to a new trade agreement beneªcial to the Levant Company and the Turkish-Austrian war, and John Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe (1675) to contemporary tensions between the East In- dia Company and the Mughal emperor Aurengzeb. Amboyna (1673), an earlier play by Dryden, depicts the execution of ten English East India employees by the Dutch on the Indonesian is- land of Amboina in 1623, emphasizing the moral superiority of the English. Similarly, as noted earlier, the Royal Academy’s preference for Oriental subjects during the 1720s may well have had its cause in the threat posed by the newly formed Ostend East India Company, which coincided with the Atterbury Plot against the Hanoverian court.23 The focus on Eastern settings in the Academy librettos is par-

22 Bridget Orr, Empire on the English Stage, 1660–1714 (New York, 2001), 3, 41–43. A number of the plays with Oriental themes were by Elkanah Settle: The Empress of Morocco (1673), The Heir of Morocco (1682), Cambyses (1676), Ibrahim the Illustrious Bassa (also 1676), and Distress’d Innocence (1691). See also, Joseph Roach, “The Global Parasol: Accessorizing the Four Corners,” in Felicity A. Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 2003), 93–106, who discusses the relationship between richly illustrated atlases and the scenery and costumes of exotically located Restoration drama, proposing the parasol as the “visual metonym for the concept of difference itself” (103). Gibson, Royal Academy, 214 (on Tamerlano), 232–233 (on Alessandro). 23 Orr, Empire, 43 (on Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe), 76 (on Lord Orrery’s Mustapha). Benjamin Schmidt, “Mapping an Exotic World: The Global Project of Dutch Geography, circa 1700,” in Nussbaum (ed.), Global Eighteenth Century, 21–37, describes Amboyna as a “mapping meta-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 433 ticularly noticeable beginning in 1726 (for Handel’s operas, see Table 1), a period of heightened tension. The directors at this time (1726/27 and 1727/28) included Grafton, Chesterªeld, Albemarle (William Keppel), Brudenell and Edgcumbe, among others, and at least three men who were speciªcally involved with the Orient (other than simply as investors in the funds). Sir John Eyles (director 1726/27), who had been an East India Company director (1710–1714, 1717–1721), was made subgovernor of the South Sea Company (1721–1733) after its crash of 1720. In 1732, however, he was accused in Parliament of carrying on private trade detri- mental to that company. His brother Sir Joseph Eyles (director 1727/28) was heavily involved in the trade with Turkey and responsible for proposing the rate of remittances required by the forces in Minorca and Gibraltar. Friedrich Ernst von Fabrice (director 1726/27, 1727/28) was a Hanoverian who, in the service of the Holstein-Gottorp court, had been posted to Turkey (1709– 1712) when King Charles XII of Sweden was encamped at Bender. After the death of King Charles in 1719, he was appointed gentleman of the bedchamber to George I in his role as Elector of Hanover.24 Two further directors are worth mentioning in this regard— James Brydges, Marquis of Carnarvon (director 1726/27), who had a connection with the Orient through his father the Duke of Chandos, an original investor in the Academy and since 1718 the governor of the Levant Company, and Sir William Yonge (director 1726/27), who had been one of the named supporters of the motion to augment the land troops in January 1727. Albemarle, Brudenell, Carnarvon, Fabrice, the Eyles brothers, Edgcumbe, and Yonge were all new to the board in 1726 or 1727.25 Since the librettos chosen by the Academy directors came out of the general pool of Italian librettos that Piemontese examined, the origins of which date as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century, none of them can be said to have a ªxed allegorical

phor” that appeared at the exact time that the Dutch were “becoming less and less engaged in conquering the world” and “more and more vested in describing it” through the publication of maps and atlases (22–23). 24 hp, II, 21. For Fabrice, see Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin, 1953–2003) IV, 730; R. M. Hatton, Charles XII of Sweden (London, 1968). 25 Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London, 1964; orig. pub. 1935), 255; Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, VIII, 547.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 434 | ELLEN T. HARRIS content pertaining to contemporary English politics or international trade. Nevertheless, the directors probably selected many, if not most, of these librettos with an eye toward analogies with events in the news. In contrast to Restoration or contemporary theater, none of the evidence appears to indicate either that the artists involved in these operas were pursuing a speciªc agenda or that particular audiences received them in this way. Yet, the evidence does suggest that opera audiences (like theater audiences) were ready to make connections. The directors must have been alert to possible contemporary interpretations, if only to protect themselves against accusations of treasonous content. Floridante (1721) is the only libretto that Handel set to music known to have been interpreted politically at the time of its ªrst performance. In a letter written ten days after the opera premiered (and after it had been performed three times), Dr. William Stratford, Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, wrote, “Some things have happened at a new opera which have given great offence. It is called Floridante. There happens to be a right heir in it, that is imprisoned. At last the right heir is delivered and the chains put upon the oppressor. At this last circumstance, there happened to be a very great and unseasonable clapping, in the presence of great ones. You will hear more when you come to town.”26 Stratford’s comments on Floridante would seem to indicate that a Jacobite claque in the audience identiªed the hero, Flori- dant, prince of Thrace, with the Pretender and the usurping king, Orontes, with George I. Gibson suggests, however, that it was the “dedication of the libretto to the prince of Wales [that] was tact- less,” since the story of a prince “whom a jealous father tries to de- prive of his rights to the throne” “paralleled the troubles between the Prince and George I” (though in Floridante the king is not Floridante’s own father but the stepfather of his beloved). Sasse, in yet another interpretation, argues that Floridant’s reconciliation with Timante, the prince of Tyre, represents the Duke of Marl- borough’s “approach to France in opposition to the Hanoverian ‘usuper’ George I.”27 The case of Floridante illustrates that, even with evidence of a

26 Alcina (1735) was interpreted as moral, not political, allegory in the Universal Spectator (5 July 1735), reprinted in Otto Erich Deutsch, Handel: A Documentary Biography (New York, 1974; orig. pub. 1955), 391–392. Stratford quoted in Gibson, The Royal Academy, 155–156. 27 Gibson, Royal Academy, 155. The opera’s dedication, signed by the librettist Paolo Rolli,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 435 contemporary political interpretation, the libretto does not (and cannot) deªnitively support a single ªxed allegory. As Loftis pointed out with regard to common themes of contemporary tragedy, and the same holds true for contemporary librettos, the “ostensible subject [of] the affairs of monarchs, nobles, and gener- als in remote times and places...avoided [the necessity of] literal social comment; but the superªcial distance from contemporary concerns” allowed tragedy to be “in even closer touch with the currents of political thought than comedy.” However, the very ease of drawing multiple political allusions from Handel’s operatic librettos rules against conferring much credibility on any one of them.28 Hume has critically interrogated the rush to allegorical interpretations of opera in London “prior to the arrival of Handel in 1711.” His conclusions have a bearing on reading allegory into Handel’s operas as well: “The oft-cited hypothesis that opera pro- tagonists must be identiªed with the reigning monarch is not borne out by scrutiny of the texts. . . . The inclination to con- struct elaborate parallels and personiªcation readings should be re- sisted where there is no extrinsic evidence with which to validate them. However ingenious or textually plausible they may seem, they are not a sound form of historical scholarship.”29 The Oriental librettos chosen by the directors do not openly

states that the libretto is dedicated to the prince “because in it those two most noble qualities, so difªcult to express—the heroic lover and the loving hero—have been, I make bold to say, most vividly and feelingly celebrated in excellent music” (translated in Dean and Knapp, Han- del’s Operas, 408). Konrad Sasse, “Die Texte der Londoner Opern Händel in ihren gesellschaftlichen Beziehungen,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Martin-Luther-Universität-Halle- Wittenberg, (1955), IV, 632, as discussed by Dean and Knapp, Handel’s Operas, 389. 28 John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford, 1963), 5. Not surprisingly, a number of scholars (myself included) have detected political allegories or analogies in individual librettos that serve to support either the court or its opposition, the latter expressed either as Jacobite resistance to the Hanoverian Succession or patriotic rejection of tyranny and absolutism. See Sasse, “Die Texte”; Reinhard Strohm, “Händel und seine italienischen Operntexte,” Händel Jahrbuch, XXI/XXII (1975/76), 101–159, revised as “Handel and His Italian Opera Texts,” in idem, Essays on Handel and Italian Opera (New York, 1985), 34–79. I have offered possible allegorical applications for Nero, Agrippina, and Silla (Harris, Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas [Cambridge, Mass., 2001], 39–40, 40–41, 184–186, respectively). I have also suggested a political analogy for Partenope in “Partenope: Politics, Virtuosity, and Human Relations,” Program Book for Partenope: Lyric Opera of Chi- cago 48th Season (2002/3), 26–28. 29 Robert Hume, “The Politics of Opera in Late Seventeenth-Century London,” Cam- bridge Opera Journal, X (1998), 42–43.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 436 | ELLEN T. HARRIS enter the debate about maintaining the primacy of the English East India Company; nor do they discuss trade directly or refer to individuals involved in the debate. Nevertheless, Oriental settings obviously held a considerable attraction for the directors during this period and presenting such operas publicly kept the image of the East before those in the audience who were responsible for voting the appropriations necessary to defend British trade and dominion.

images of the east in western form Riccardo primo (1727), Handel’s only opera to depict British historical ªgures, provides a particularly striking example of an opera with an Eastern setting. It premiered one month after the coronation of George II, Handel’s ªrst since the death of George I and the resolution of the various political crises. Riccardo is, of all of the Academy’s operas, the most closely tied, at least superªcially, to a speciªc event. Dedicated to George II, it celebrates the new king “in the person of his famous predecessor,” Richard-the-lionhearted. In that respect, it resem- bles other “commemorative-ceremonial-patriotic works” of 1727. Prior to its revival on the English stage in 1964, Dean even won- dered whether it would turn out in performance to be “something more than [merely] an occasional piece.”30 Yet, it is no secret that Riccardo primo was completed before the unexpected death of George I, and that the dedication to George II, with a sonnet honoring the new monarch by the librettist Rolli, was not integral to the work’s conception. The interpre- tive focus on the post facto dedication to George II detracts from the broader implications of the libretto. The opera was completed May 1727, at the height of the Ostend crisis, possibly planned for a premiere shortly thereafter. However, the opera house closed abruptly, following a ªght between the prima donnas on stage (the theaters would have closed after the King’s death a few days later, anyway). Thus the typical interpretation of Riccardo primo offers a prime example of the problem that Orr describes in relation to Restoration heroic drama—the disregard of the exotic locale in order “to locate political meaning allegorized.”31 The dedicatory sonnet, which seems never before to have

30 Strohm, “Handel and His Italian Opera Texts,” 55; Dean, “Handel’s Riccardo primo,” The Musical Times, 105 (1964), 500. 31 Dean acknowledges that Handel had completed Riccardo primo before George I’s death (“Handel’s Riccardo primo,” 498). Orr, Empire, 3.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 437 been translated in full, falls into the normal Italian pattern of two quatrains followed by two tercets with a major break in the sense (as is typical) following the quatrains: “To the Sacred Royal Maj- esty of George II. / King of Great Britain, France, / Ireland, etc. Elector of the / Holy Roman Empire, etc. // Great King, you who are ready in arms at a glance and hold dominion / Over all the seas and many kingdoms, / This royal drama presents to you your warrior / Predecessor, Richard-the-lionhearted, // Quick as an arrow in works of valor, / Bold, proud, but justly proud, / Great, loving, polite, sincere, / To conquer, quick; to pardon, not slow. // But if, O great King, you desire to be / the living image of that hero so boldly formed; / turn your generous mind to your own likeness, think of yourself: / For you have honor and valor equal to the examination, / And in your hand, the destinies not only / Of the Orient, but of the world, like Jove. // With homage and joy / your most humble and most faithful Servant, / Paolo Rolli.”32 Rolli begins the sonnet by offering to George II the story of his predecessor Richard-the-lionhearted (ªrst quatrain), whom he then describes (second quatrain). “But,” he writes at the beginning of the second half in direct address to George II, rather than con- sidering himself a “living image of that hero,” the king should look to his own affairs (ªrst tercet), for he has “in [his] hands the destiny not only of the Orient (like Richard) but of the whole world, like Jove” (second tercet). That is, the dedication posits that George II should be compared not merely with Richard I, but with Jove. The sonnet gloriªes George II, but, just as important, sets up the cultural conºict at the heart of the drama. Richard I, presented as a symbol of Western monarchy, is quick to works of valor, quick to conquer, not slow to pardon, justly proud, and with the destiny of the Orient in his hands. Opposed to him is Isacius, the tyrant of Cyprus, who, as described in the Argomento, is “puffed up with Pride” (not justly proud), “insolent and cruel.” The Prin- cess of Navarre, Richard’s betrothed, who is appropriately named

32 Dean, “Handel’s Riccardo primo,” 498, quotes the second quatrain in Italian, which he describes incorrectly as a parallel between George II and Richard I, and rather sarcastically comments that as far as George was concerned at least “ ‘Amoroso’ was not far off the mark.” Strohm, “Handel and His Italian Opera Texts,” 55, quotes the ªrst quatrain in Italian. Knapp, “The Autograph of Handel’s Riccardo primo,” 334, and Gibson, Royal Academy, 261, mention the sonnet and leave it at that. I am grateful to Amneris Roselli for help with the translation.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 438 | ELLEN T. HARRIS Constantia in the libretto, arrives in the midst of a “strong and violent tempest,” while Richard’s ships struggle at sea. Orontes, prince of Syria, who is at ªrst a confederate of Isacius, changes al- legiance to Richard when he experiences the treachery of the one and the valor of the other. Meanwhile Isacius forcibly woos Constantia who vows that only Richard or death will have her (Act III, iv).33 The crisis comes to a head at the beginning of Act III, in a scene added to the Italian source libretto during the revisions for the premiere that strengthens the opera’s connection to England. Richard gathers his men about him for an attack on the city walls and calls on the men of Britain to “follow your king” in “subject- ing these savage lands to tameness” (as translated in the original libretto.)34 The visual requirements of showing Richard’s ships ap- proaching a rocky coast on a “tempestuous sea,” his encampment on “a pavilion” near the “rivers of Limissus,” and his storming of the city walls at the head of his soldiers were spectacular, and Jo- seph Goupy, the Royal Academy’s scene painter, created all new sets to meet them. Unfortunately, no drawings of these sets survive, though Goupy’s later set of four panoramic views of the Port of Valletta, at Malta, might provide some sense of his backdrops for the coast of Limassol at Cyprus, if not his designs for the sideºats and machinery. This suite of paintings was often engraved, and Handel himself owned a copy.35 Handel also owned an engraved set of Six Sea Pieces by Sam- uel Scott and George Lambert, depicting “the more important settlements in the East Indies and on the route to them: Bombay, Telicherry, St. Helena, Fort St. George (Madras), Fort William (Calcutta), and the Cape of Good Hope.” The East India Com- pany commissioned the original paintings (now part of the Orien- tal & India Ofªce Collections at the British Library). Commenta- tors on Handel’s art collection are often puzzled that Handel chose

33 All quotations and paraphrases from the libretto are taken from Harris, The Librettos of Handel’s Operas (New York, 1989), V. 34 This scena with its ªendishly difªcult aria for Richard was splendidly performed by Jeffrey Gall at the concert organized as part of the Opera and Society Conference. 35 Handel’s set was engraved by Antoine Benoist (1721–1770) or C. L. Benoist (b. 1712), London, c. 1745–1760. See Thomas McGeary, “Handel as Art Collector: His Print Collec- tion,” Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, VIII (2000), 157–180. See also Alison Meyric Hughes and Martin Royalton-Kisch, “Handel’s Art Collection,” Apollo, CXLIX (1997), 17–23.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 439 to acquire these engraved sets of Eastern views, “since there is no known personal association Handel may have had with any of these places.” The very pervasiveness of Oriental imagery in Lon- don, however, tells its own story. Lambert, like Goupy, was a scene painter, and he frequently created Oriental sets for a rival theater, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Handel may have had a professional association with Lambert, but Goupy is known to have been one of Handel’s two most intimate friends. The other was James Hunter, who made his living selling scarlet-dyed broadcloth to the East India Company for export. Hence, for a variety of personal, professional, and aesthetic reasons, the Orient must have been an integral part of Handel’s visual imagination. But he was hardly alone in that trait; the East India trade touched most London citi- zens, either directly or indirectly.36 Unlike the Oriental images and artifacts that proliferated throughout London, Oriental music was largely absent; Handel’s operatic scores offer little or no hint of Eastern inºuence. Vizioli uses Handel’s Tamerlano to illustrate how little the music of Persia and the Orient had penetrated eighteenth-century Western culture, observing that “from the introductory symphony to the concluding chorus,” Tamerlano contains no other stylistic elements than those of a “consolidated and formalized Western composi- tional practice.” He concludes that in the eighteenth century, “musical language [was] codiªed independently of the Oriental ambience of the dramatic subject.” The same argument could have been made using Riccardo primo as a case in point.37

36 McGeary, “Handel as Art Collector,” 170, 172 (Figure 1). The paintings (1732) by Scott (ca. 1702–1772) and Lambert (1710–1765) were engraved by Elisha Kirkall or Gerard Vandergucht. All six are reproduced in Mildred Archer, The India Ofªce Collection of Paintings and Sculpture (London, 1986), plate xvii (no. 90), plates xx-xxii (nos. 91–95). See her detailed discussion of these works, 69–72. McGeary, “Handel as Art Collector,” 161; Hughes and Royalton-Kisch, “Handel’s Art Collection,” 20. For Goupy, see Jacob Simon, “New Light on Joseph Goupy,” Apollo, CXXXIX (1994), 15–18; for Lambert, see Archer, India Ofªce Col- lection, 69. The point about Handel’s friendship with Goupy comes from Sir John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (London, 1853; orig. pub. 1776), II, 912. See also Harris, “James Hunter, Handel’s Friend,” Händel-Jahrbuch, XLVI (2000), 247–264. Colley, Britons, 56, estimates that “perhaps one in every ªve families in eighteenth-century Britain drew its livelihood from [international] trade and distribution,” a signiªcant proportion of which was trade to the East through the Levant or East India Companies. 37 Giulio Cesare may offer an exception to the lack of Eastern inºuence. For an informed discussion of the Orient in Handel’s librettos see Peter Bachmann, “ ‘From Arabia’s Spicy Shores’—Orient in Händels Textvorlagen,” Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, VIII (2000), 1–14. Bachmann mentions a number of Handel’s operas, including Alessandro, Poro, Giulio Cesare,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 440 | ELLEN T. HARRIS Handel’s contribution to the Orientalism of Riccardo is to offer the musical equivalent of the visual spectacle. After the overture, the curtain opens on a raging storm, the roiling waters depicted with unusual violence by a concatenation of small motifs. Con- stantia’s opening line of recitative and her dialogue with her advi- sor, Berardus, breaks into this tumult and continues as the storm fades into the background. No other Handel opera begins in such manner. This opening depiction of Richard riding out a violent storm provides the fundamental image not only of the opera but also of Britain’s place internationally, holding “dominion over all the seas.” The ªrst Earl of Halifax (father to the Academy director) in the 1690s described Britain’s “blue sea policy” of free trade and a strong navy as far more important than its “land conquests”: “England hath its root in the Sea, and a deep root too, from whence it sendeth its branches into both Indyes.”38 Once the scene is set musically, Handel’s attention turns to the characters, and he provides each of them with appropriate musical dress. Richard is the most commanding, with elaborate musical runs, spectacular leaps, wide range and powerful orchestration, his rousing speech to the troops providing the clearest example of his character. Immediately following this aria is the briefest of arias for Constantia, modeled by Handel out of recitative text (“Morte, vieni”). With its soft dynamic, muted timbre, slow tempo, hesi- tant rhythms, and plangent melody, the aria is the aural embodi- ment of threatened virtue. By contrast, the tyrant Isacius blusters loudly in lines that turn and repeat but fail to coalesce into true forward drive. The Europeans enjoy the riches of orchestral variety: from the bass ºute and sopranino recorder for Constantia to two trumpets and timpani for Richard’s battle aria as he attacks the walls of the city, expanding to three trumpets when the victory is assured. When Oronte, prince of Syria, converts to the British cause, his new mantle of “Valour, Justice, and fair Truth Trium-

and Tolomeo, but he chooses to focus on two oratorios and one opera—Solomon, Alexander Balus, and Tamerlano. Francesco Vizioli, “A proposito del Tamerlano di Haendel: Oriente e Persia nell’accezione di musicisti e musicologi occidentali del Settecento,” in Michele Bernardini (ed.), La Civiltà Timuride come fenomeno internazionale. I. Storia—I Timuridi e l’Occidente in Oriente Moderno, XV (1996), 344. I am grateful to Beatrice Manz for this reference. See also Manz, “Tamerlane’s Career and Its Uses,” Journal of World History, XIII (2002), 1–25. 38 George Savile, “A Rough Draft of a New Modell at Sea,” in Mark K. Brown (ed.), The Works of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax (Oxford, 1989), I, 294–295, as quoted in Orr, Empire, 39.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 441 phant” accords him two horns in his following aria. Isacius re- ceives only the most standard string and oboe accompaniment. Nineteenth-century depictions of the Orient tended to reºect the “luxuriant” East with rich orchestrations and sinuous chromaticism. Handel himself offers what might be early anticipa- tions of this topos in two separate works depicting different Egyp- tian Cleopatras—the opera Giulio Cesare (1724) and the oratorio Alexander Balus (1747). Handel’s score for Riccardo primo, however, transferred the musical depiction of luxury from the East to the West. He dressed Richard I and his betrothed, not the Cyprian tyrant or the Syrian prince, in his musical riches. Instead of depicting the lure of the East through a romantic female protagonist, Riccardo presented to an audience of royalty, aristocrats, parliamen- tarians, and wealthy merchants the aural image of a culturally tamed despotic East ceding its material riches to the splendor of Western honor and virtue.39

The depiction of the East in Western artistic forms, presenting, as in Riccardo primo, the Eastern surrender of political power and material riches to the West, was not incongruous with the East India Company’s outlook, as manifested in the architecture and décor of its London headquarters. The East India House was formally insti- tuted on Leadenhall Street in 1710, the year following the merger of the Old and the New East India Companies, when the ªrm “was anxious to project itself as a sound and ºourishing Company with a digniªed and stable image.” The Leadenhall Street house, previously owned by the Royalist, Lord Craven (1606–1697), was of Elizabethan construction, and its Western appearance was important to its image: “An India House, seated in the centre of the British Metropolis, may surely be allowed to indulge in any of the grateful ornaments of Greece and Rome: to have been purely Asiatic in its construction and decorations would have been un- suitable to the convenience of English merchants, and uncouth in its appearance.”40 In order to distinguish itself from other buildings (or, in modern terminology, in order to create its “graphic identity”), the

39 Dean explicitly makes this point about Handel’s two Cleopatra works in Handel’s Dra- matic Oratorios and Masques (London, 1959), 492–493. 40 The description of the ªrst East India House in this paragraph relies on Archer, India Ofªce Collection, 1. The Beauties of England and Wales: London and Middlesex (1801–1816), as quoted in ibid., 3.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 442 | ELLEN T. HARRIS Company “embellished the façade with carvings and paintings”: “Above the windows was a painting which represented a ºeet of merchantmen tossing on the waves. The whole was surmounted by a colossal wooden seaman, who from between two dolphins looked down on the crowds of Leadenhall Street.” Since the dolphins seem to have been removed before 1711, the representative image of the Company in the 1720s would have been the ºeet of ships tossing on the waves, the very image that was recreated, perhaps by design, in the opening scene of Riccardo primo: “The Coast near Limissus, a tempestuous Sea, with Ships bulging amongst the Rocks.”41 Highlighting the potential connection between the iconogra- phy of Riccardo primo and East India House, the East India Com- pany chose to improve and enlarge its house at exactly the same time that Handel’s librettos for the Royal Academy began to feature only Eastern locales, between 1726 and 1729. Among the many renovations was a “particularly grand” Directors’ Room, and in 1728, the directors commissioned a new, sculpted marble ªreplace for it. Notably, Michael Rysbrack, an Antwerp artist who had come to England in 1720 and a close associate of Goupy, was hired to do the work. Archer provides a description of his cre- ation: “Britannia, seated on a globe under a rock by the sea shore is looking towards the east. Her right hand leans on a Union shield and her left holds a trident. She wears a naval crown. Before her stand three female ªgures: India offering a casket, Asia leading a camel and Africa a lion. On the left two putti pour out treasures from a cornucopia. On the right Father Thames in the form of a reed-crowned river-god leans on the rudder of a ship. In the background mercantile labour and commerce are symbolised by ships and a man cording a bale. Rysbrack’s scene depicts the outcome of Richard I calling upon the men of the Thames to follow him and tame the savage East. Rysbrack’s sculpture and Han- del’s Riccardo primo equally celebrate the mercantile and colonialist ascendancy of Britain.42 In the contemporaneous merger of art and commerce, the di-

41 Archer, India Ofªce Collection, 1, identiªes this descriptive quotation as by Thomas Babington Macaulay, with no further reference. See also William Foster, The East India House: Its History and Associations (London, 1924), 128–129. 42 Rysbrack and Goupy were members of an elite artists’ club. See Hilda F. Finberg, “Gawen Hamilton: An Unknown Scottish Portrait Painter,” Walpole Society, VI (1918), 51– 58. Archer, India Ofªce Collection, 102, and plate xxxi (no.147).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219506774929863 by guest on 25 September 2021 HANDEL’S ORIENTALIST OPERAS | 443 rectors of the Royal Academy of Music chose Oriental librettos to keep the concerns of the East India Company in front of their audience at the same time that the directors of the East India Com- pany chose to assert their elite market status through the commissioned work of ªne artists and architects. The employment of a German-born composer, a set designer of French heritage, an Ital- ian librettist and Italian singers, and a Flemish-trained sculptor to celebrate England’s mercantile supremacy over all other European claimants to the Eastern trade routes also highlighted the city of London as a European center of international culture. Handel’s Oriental operas, unlike Rysbrack’s sculpted chimneypiece, did not allegorically represent trade. Rather, like Goupy’s paintings of Malta or Lambert’s paintings of the important English settlements in the East Indies, they provided a diorama of the Eastern scenes that England increasingly sought to control. Offering opera by night to keep the eyes of the audience on the East and its ears in the West, the Academy directors certainly reºected, and probably inºuenced, the parliamentary debates by day that determined government support for the supremacy of England against its Euro- pean rivals for the East India trade.

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