The Vocal Duets of G. F. Handel and His Italian Contemporaries (c. 1706–1724) Ivan Ćurković The Vocal Duets of G. F. Handel and His Italian Contemporaries (c. 1706–1724) Ivan Ćurković The Vocal Duets of G. F. Handel and His Italian Contemporaries (c. 1706–1724) About the Author Ivan Ćurković teaches musicology at the University of Zagreb (Academy of Music). He studied musicology, comparative literature and Hungarian studies in Zagreb and received his Ph.D. at the Musicology Department of Heidelberg University. His research interests are dramatic vocal genres of the first half of the 18th century with particular emphasis on the works of G. F. Handel and his contemporaries. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is published under the Creative Commons license 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0). The online version of this publication is freely available on the ebook-platform of the Heidelberg University Library heiBOOKS http://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/heibooks (open access). urn: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heibooks-book-290-2 doi: https://doi.org/10.11588/heibooks.290.386 Text © 2017, Ivan Ćurković Layout: Lana Grahek, Zagreb Music engraver: Dario Poljak, Zagreb Proofreader: Claire Holfelder, Speyer Cover image: © The British Library Board. (Bononcini, Giovanni. 1722. Griselda. An Opera as It Was Perform’d at the King’s Theatre for the Royal Academy. London: I. Walsh and Ino. and Ioseph Hare. Shelfmark H.321.b. p. 52) ISBN 978-3-946531-64-7 (Softcover) ISBN 978-3-946531-65-4 (PDF) For Ági Acknowledgments This study is a doctoral dissertation written at Heidelberg University un- der the supervision of Prof. Dr. Silke Leopold and defended on 1 February 2017. It was originally submitted under the title The Vocal Duet and G. F. Handel’s Italian Contemporaries. An Attempt at a Comparisonand it under- went many revisions at the behest of the reviews before it was approved for publishing. The long and arduous process of research and writing was supported, encouraged and aided by a number of persons and institutions. First and foremost, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Leopold for agreeing to supervise the dissertation, for offering advice at different stages of the working pro- cess and for encouraging me to adopt a breadth of scholarly approaches. I owe a tremendous amount of financial and institutional support to my employer, the Academy of Music at the University of Zagreb, since I had the privilege to pursue doctoral studies at Heidelberg University while I held the post of research assistant in Zagreb. The administration of the Academy of Music, all my colleagues from the Department of Musicology, especially the deans Prof. Mladen Janjanin and Prof. Dalibor Cikojević and the heads of department during this period, Prof. Dr. Dalibor Davidović and Dr. Mojca Piškor showed a lot of understanding for my commitments in Heidelberg, encouraging me throughout the process and not losing faith in me in spite of the difficulties. The Musikwissenschaftliches Seminar at Heidelberg University has provided excellent institutional and logistic background to my re- search. I would like to thank both Prof. Dr. Leopold and Prof. Dr. Dorothea Redepenning for the numerous productive discussions they moderated at the Doktorandenkolloquium, and my fellow doctoral students who en- couraged me with constructive criticism and friendly comments. Prof. Dr. Dorothea Redepenning kindly agreed to be the second reviewer of my dissertation and I would like to thank her for this, as well as Prof. Dr. Inga Mai Groote for agreeing to take over the chairmanship of the Doctoral Committee. Dr. Matthew Gardner provided many research tips and I am very grateful to him for this, as well as for the many discus- sions on Handel we had. I would also like to thank the Library of the Musikwissenschaflitches Seminar and its head Dipl.-Bibl. Birgit Becher for providing excellent resources and a pleasant working atmosphere, as well as the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg and its resourceful staff for the same benefits. Their affordable and practical interlibrary loan services enabled me to access numerous manuscript sources on microfilm. During my research trips to London, the British Library provided priceless access to early manuscript and printed sources. Last but not least, the scale of gratitude to my family, my partner and my friends is difficult to put into words. Without your understanding, your help and your support I would not have been able to do this. Contents 1. IntroductIon, 11 1. 1. Handel in Italy, Handel and Italy, 11 1. 1. 1. Contact with Italy: Biographic Aspects, 14 1. 1. 2. Italian Influence or “What Did Handel Learn in Italy?”, 18 1. 1. 3. Questions of Parody, 22 1. 1. 4. The Case of Alessandro Scarlatti, 25 1. 1. 5. Selection of Italian Composers for Comparison, 27 1. 2. The Vocal Duet, 36 2. Chamber duet, 43 2. 1. Definitions and Typologies, 43 2. 2. Agostino Steffani as a Forerunner, 52 2. 2. 1. Playfully Equal Voices, 56 2. 2. 2. Attempts at Dramatization, 59 2. 2. 3. Elaborate Duets for Unequal Voices, 62 2. 2. 4. Saldi marmi: An Atypical Case Study, 68 2. 3. Handel’s Chamber Duets, 74 2. 3. 1. From Italy to Hanover, 79 2. 3. 2. Hanoverian Maturity, 87 2. 3. 3. London in the Span of Two Decades, 95 2. 4. Chamber Duets by Handel’s Italian Contemporaries: G. Bononcini, F. Gasparini, A. Lotti, F. Durante, 105 2. 4. 1. Hybrid Chamber Duets, 109 2. 4. 2. Chamber Duets by Giovanni Bononcini, 116 2. 4. 3. Further Solutions to the Problem of the Genre: Lotti, Gasparini, 130 2. 5. Conclusions on the Comparison of Chamber Duets, 150 3. DramatIc duet, 157 3. 1. Definitions, Typologies and Methodology, 157 3. 2. Beginnings of Italian Opera in London before the Advent of Handel (1706–1711), 171 3. 2. 1. Camilla (1706), 175 3. 2. 2. Thomyris, Queen of Scythia (1707), 184 3. 2. 3. Pyrrhus and Demetrius (1708), 193 3. 2. 4. Almahide (1710), 206 3. 2. 5. Idaspe fedele (1710), 215 3. 3. Differing Conceptions of Italian Opera (1711–1717), 222 3. 3. 1. Gasparini’s Dramatic Duets, 225 3. 3. 1. 1. London Pasticcios Antioco (1711) and Ambleto (1712), 228 3. 3. 1. 2. Later Italian Cantatas and Operas, 236 3. 3. 2. Pasticcios (1712–1717), 248 3. 3. 3. Handel’s Early Dramatic Duets (1706–1715), 268 3. 3. 3. 1. Dramatic Duets Written in Italy (1706–1710): Roots of Handel’s Opera Duets, 269 3. 3. 3. 2. First London Operas (1711–1715), 284 3. 4. The Royal Academy of Music (1720–1724) with Emphasis on Bononcini and Handel, 306 3. 4. 1. Bononcini’s Dramatic Duets, 306 3. 4. 1. 1. Development before London, 309 3. 4. 1. 2. The Rival’s Duets, 335 3. 4. 2. Handel’s Duets for the Royal Academy of Music before the Departure of Bononcini, 364 3. 4. 2. 1. Competing with Bononcini (1720–1722), 367 3. 4. 2. 2. Finding One’s Own Way (1723–1724), 381 3. 5. Conclusions on the Comparison of the Dramatic Duet and Overall Conclusion, 396 4. LIst of musIc exampLes, 407 5. BibLIography, 408 5. 1. Primary Sources, 408 5. 1. 1. Musical Sources, 408 5. 1. 1. 1. Manuscripts, 408 5. 1. 1. 2. Facsimiles, 409 5. 1. 1. 3. 18th-Century Editions and Their Reprints, 410 5. 1. 1. 4. Modern Editions, 412 5. 1. 2. Textual Sources, 415 5. 1. 2. 1. Libretti, 415 5. 1. 2. 2. 17th- and 18th-Century Writings and Their Modern Editions, 419 5. 2. Secondary Sources, 420 5. 2. 1. Textual Sources, 420 5. 2. 2. Recordings, 432 1. Introduction 1. 1. handeL In ItaLy, handeL and ItaLy The place of George Frideric Handel in music histories has not been ques- tioned much since his musical “canonisation” in Britain and Germany in the 19th century. He is regarded not only as a “famous composer of Baroque music”, but also as one of “Western civilization’s greatest com- posers” (Buelow 2004, 476). Manfred Bukofzer’s Music in the Baroque Era sees a culmination of the tendencies of “late baroque” in the opus of Handel and J. S. Bach (Bukofzer 1948, 210–349). However relative the definition and periodisation of baroque music has come to be regarded lately (as outlined in detail in Leopold 1994), Handel, as shall be shown later on, is often sin- gled out among the group of composers born in the last two decades of the 17th century for his conservative traits, i. e. his adherence to earlier musical traditions and his reluctance to wholeheartedly adopt some aspects of the emerging style galant. The question that this study will attempt to answer in its modest way (focusing on the highly particular form of the vocal duet) is which Italian composers from his immediate temporal (and to a certain extent, spatial) context would be the most suited for comparison with the master from Halle. In the period under examination in this study—from Handel and Italy Italy, / 1. Handel in Handel’s stay in Italy to Giovanni Bononcini’s dismissal from the Royal Academy of Music (from roughly 1706 to 1724)1—departures from a “ba- roque style” (if there is such a thing in the first place) are less or not at all pronounced in Handel’s works, which will facilitate a selection of Italian composers to compare him with. Although, especially in earlier music histories, most of Handel’s and 1.