Buononcini—Cuzzoni, Faustina, and Senesino—death of George I—The Beggar's Opera—collapse of the Academy.

The opening performance of the Royal Academy of Music was undistinguished; it is hard to understand why the noble directors should have begun their season with Numitor, an opera by Porta, a Venetian composer, who is described in the book of words as "Servant to His Grace the Duke of Wharton." The Duke of Wharton was not one of the directors. The company, moreover, was more English than Italian; it included Baldassari, Durastanti, and a second woman called Galerati, together with Anastasia Robinson, who afterwards became Countess of Peterborough, Mrs. Turner Robinson, wife of the organist of Westminster Abbey, Mrs. Dennis, and Mr. Gordon. Numitor ran for five performances; on April 27 it was succeeded by Handel's new opera Radamisto, in which the same singers took part, except that Mrs. Dennis did not appear, and Mr. La Garde sang the part of Farasmane. It is interesting to note that two of the male parts were taken by women—Radamisto (Durastanti) and Tigrane (Galerati). This looks as if the management had found it impossible to secure a sufficient number of Italian castrati, who probably demanded exorbitant fees.

Radamisto fared little better than Numitor; an enormous crowd came to the first night, and many were turned away, but the opera was not performed more than ten times in the season. It was probably above the heads of the audience, for it is one of Handel's finest works for the stage and a great advance on any of his previous operas. The only other opera performed was Narciso, by Domenico Scarlatti, which was even less successful than the others. Chrysander seems to suggest that Scarlatti came to London with the idea of being a rival to Handel, but it is much more likely that Handel himself persuaded the Academy to invite the friend of his youth.

The season ended on June 25. Radamisto was printed, and was published by Handel himself at his own house.

A really serious rival to Handel appeared in the autumn. Lord Burlington had made the acquaintance in Rome of Giovanni Buononcini, and had heard his opera Astarto. Perhaps he had had enough of Handel after three years of his close company in Burlington House; in any case he probably thought himself a better judge of music than Handel. He secured Buononcini for the Academy, and the season opened on November 19 with Astarto. The dedication to the Earl of Burlington is signed by Paolo Rolli, and no other author's name is mentioned; but the libretto was really by Apostolo Zeno (1708). Astarto had ten performances before Christmas, and twenty afterwards; Radamisto was revived again, but Buononcini established himself firmly in the favour of a large party. Although Burney speaks very disparagingly of the music, it is not in the least surprising that the opera attracted the public. In the first place, it had the advantage of a magnificent cast of singers—Senesino, Boschi, Berenstadt, Berselli, Durastanti, Salvai, and Galerati, and this sudden blaze of vocal splendour would in itself have made the success of any opera, especially of one which opened the season. Besides, Buononcini's music was pleasing and, after a far longer stage experience than Handel's, he naturally wrote what singers enjoyed singing. It must further be added that Buononcini himself was a striking personality; he had produced operas at Berlin and Vienna, as well as in various Italian cities, and was a man of the world, accustomed to the society of courts. Besides, Buononcini was a stranger and a novelty; Handel was becoming an established institution—indeed, he was well on the way to becoming an English composer.

The same singers, with the addition of Anastasia Robinson, appeared in the season of 1721-22. A curious experiment was tried in Muzio Scevola, of which the first act was composed by Filippo Mattei, the second by Buononcini and the third by Handel, each act having an overture and concluding chorus. Some biographers have supposed that this was intended to be a trial of strength, and that the contest resulted in the acknowledged triumph of Handel; but Burney is probably right in saying that the collaboration was merely a device to save time in getting the opera ready, and Burney further points out that Buononcini's position remained as strong as ever. It was in fact due to Buononcinci's next two operas, and not to Handel's, that the Academy was able to declare a dividend of seven per cent.

Handel's Floridante (December 9, 1721) had a moderate success only, and against Handel's one opera (except for a few performances of Radamisto at the very beginning of the season) Buononcini had three works to his credit. The following season brought Handel better fortune, and a decline in the popularity of Buononcini. In November and December, Muzio Sceaola and Floridante were revived; on January 12, Handel produced a new opera, Ottone, with a new singer, Francesca Cuzzoni, who eclipsed all the other women singers completely, until after some years she herself was driven into eclipse by her historic rival Faustina Bordoni.

Ottone contains one number at least which is familiar to everyone who knows the name of Handel—the gavotte at the end of the overture. This spirited piece of music won popularity at the outset, and even to-day it is probably the best known melody of Handel, after the "Harmonious Blacksmith." But the real success of Ottone was made by Cuzzoni.

How Cuzzoni came to be engaged at the opera is not clear. Handel cannot possibly have ever heard her sing; it has been suggested that she was engaged by Heidegger. She was about twenty-two, and had made her first appearance at Venice in 1719, after which she sang in various Italian theatres. She had a voice of extraordinary range, beauty, and agility; she was equally accomplished both in florid music and in airs of a sustained and pathetic character, and she was never known to sing out of tune. In appearance she was anything but attractive: she was short, squat, and excessively plain-featured. She was uneducated and ill-mannered, impulsive and quarrelsome. Her arrival in London was delayed for some reason, so the management sent Sandoni, the second harpsichord-player, to meet her, probably at Dover. On the way to London they were married; Sandoni doubtless had an eye to the money which she was to earn.

Her first air in Ottone, "Falsa imagine," fixed her reputation as an expressive and pathetic singer (Burney); she had at first refused to sing it, on which Handel remarked to her, "Madame, je sais que vous Êtes une vÉritable diablesse, mais je vous ferai savoir, moi, que je suis BÉelzebub, le chef des diables," seized her round and waist, and threatened to throw her out of the window. Handel had similar trouble with Gordon, the English singer who came in for a small part in Flavio, which was given on May 14. Gordon found fault with Handel's method of accompanying, and threatened to jump on the harpsichord.

"Oh," replied Handel, "let me know when you will do that, and I will advertise it; for I am sure more people will come to see you jump than to hear you sing."

Two more operas by Buononcini were given, but his relations with the Academy were not very cordial. He had been taken up by the Marlborough family, and was commissioned to compose the funeral anthem for the burial of the great Duke in June 1722. On May 16, 1723, Mrs. Pendarves informed her sister that the young Duchess had settled £500 a year for life on Buononcini, "provided he will not compose any more for the ungrateful Academy, who do not deserve he should entertain them, since they don't know how to value his works as they ought." The contract, however, seems not to have been carried out by the composer. Mrs. Pendarves evidently took the news from the day's issue of a weekly journal, adding only the name of the Duchess, which the paper had suppressed. What the paper tells us is that the Academy had not engaged Buononcini for the coming season.

Senesino and Cuzzoni had made life impossible for the other singers. Durastanti retired to the Continent; Anastasia Robinson left the stage, and married her old admirer Lord Peterborough. Senesino and Cuzzoni, however, were indispensable to the success of the opera, and probably the ridiculous affectations of the one and the abominable manners of the other were not without their attraction to a public which could enjoy all the pleasure of gossiping about them without having to put up with them at close quarters.

The season of 1723 began in November with Buononcini's Farnace and Handel's Ottone; in January 1724 a new opera, Vespasiano, by Attilio Ariosti, was given, and ran for nine successive nights. Ariosti was never a very troublesome rival to Handel; he was a man of amiable character, and apparently quite content to remain aloof from the party politics of the opera-house. On February 14, Handel produced his Giulio Cesare, one of his finest dramatic works; it has been revived with considerable success in recent years, partly owing to the fact that modern audiences are more familiar with the episode of Caesar and Cleopatra than with the subjects of Handel's other operas. Giulio Cesare had the advantage of a strong cast; Senesino sang the title part, with Berenstadt and Boschi to support him, and the women included Cuzzoni, as well as Durastanti and Mrs. Robinson, who had not yet quitted the opera company.

Another masterpiece of Handel's, Tamerlano, inaugurated the autumn season of 1724 in October; in December appeared Ariosti's Artaserse, in January Giulio Cesare held the stage till the production of another Handel opera, Rodelinda, which came out on February 13, and ran for thirteen nights. Two more operas, by Ariosti and Leonardo Vinci of Naples, completed the season, but it was evidently Handel who scored the greatest triumphs, unless the honours should more properly go to Cuzzoni, as Rodelinda, and her brown silk gown trimmed with silver. All the old ladies, says Burney, were scandalised with its vulgarity and indecorum, "but the young adopted it as a fashion so universally, that it seemed a national uniform for youth and beauty."

Cuzzoni created a further sensation in the summer by giving birth to a daughter. Mrs. Pendarves made much fun of the event. "It is a mighty mortification it was not a son. Sons and heirs ought to be out of fashion when such scrubs shall pretend to be dissatisfied at having a daughter; 'tis pity, indeed, that the noble name and family of the Sandonis should be extinct! The minute she was brought to bed she sang' La speranza,' a song in Otho."

Revivals of Rodelinda and Ottone took place in the following season, and, in March 1726, Handel produced Scipio, in which the famous march was heard for the first time on the rise of the curtain.

But Cuzzoni's throne was soon to be sharply contested. Ever since 1723 the directors of the opera had been trying to secure Faustina Bordoni, and at last, with a promise of £2,500 for the season (Cuzzoni received £2,000), they succeeded. Faustina was born of a patrician family at Venice in 1700; she had been brought up under the protection of Alessandro Marcello, brother of the well-known composer, and had made her debut at Venice at the age of sixteen. She sang mostly at Venice for several years, and in 1718 she appeared there in Pollaroli's Ariodante, along with Cuzzoni herself. She sang at Munich in 1723, and in the summer of 1725 she went to Vienna, where she stayed six months, enjoying an extraordinary success. Nearly forty years afterwards the Empress Maria Theresa recalled with pride how she herself, at the age of seven, had sung in an opera with Faustina. At the end of March 1726 she left Vienna for London, where she made her first appearance, on May 5, in Handel's new opera Alessandro, which had been designed especially to show off both Faustina and Cuzzoni in parts of exactly equal importance and difficulty. The immediate result was to divide London society into two parties: young Lady Burlington and her friends supported Faustina; Cuzzoni's admirers were led by Lady Pembroke. Lady Walpole succeeded in getting both to sing at her house; neither would sing in the presence of the other, but the hostess tactfully managed to draw first one and then the other out of the music-room while her rival enchanted the guests. Mrs. Pendarves also contrived to be on good terms with both. She heard Cuzzoni in November privately, or perhaps at a rehearsal, and writes, "my senses were ravished with harmony." The opera was expected to begin about the middle of December, "but I think Faustina and Madame Sandoni [i.e. Cuzzoni] are not perfectly agreed about their parts." The opening, however, was delayed by the absence of Senesino, who had gone to Italy and did not return until fairly late in December.

It was probably owing to this fact that opera in English was offered at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where Marcantonio Buononcini's Camilla, first given in London in 1706, was revived by a mainly English cast of singers. Mrs. Pendarves went to see it, and her criticisms are significant for the taste of the time. "I can't say I was much pleased with it, I liked it for old acquaintance sake, but there is not many of the songs better than ballads."

Faustina—"the most agreeable creature in the world in company"—dined with Mrs. Pendarves for a small musical party on January 26. On the previous day there was the first rehearsal of Handel's Admeto. It was the moment, says Burney, of Handel's greatest prosperity and English patronage. Admeto exhibited conspicuously what Dr. Burney called Handel's "science "; it was evidently considered to be complicated in style, though at the same time both pathetic and passionate. "Music," says Burney, "was no longer regarded as a mere soother of affliction, or incitement to hilarity; it could now paint the passions in all their various attitudes; and those tones which said nothing intelligible to the heart began to be thought as; insipid as those of 'sounding brass or tinkling cymbals.'" These words of Burney make one realise that Handel's London operas must have affected their audiences almost in the way in which the operas of Wagner startled the audiences of the nineteenth century. Handel himself, like Wagner, was steadily developing his own dramatic powers, and it is important to bear in mind that it was only those marvellous singers of Handel's day, such as Senesino, Cuzzoni, Faustina, and Boschi, who could inspire him to the creation of such music as they only were competent to interpret.

Admeto was received with respect, and although the partisans of the "rival queens" were noisy in their applause, no actual disturbance took place until Admeto was followed by Buononcini's Astyanax on May 6. On the first night of the new opera each side did its best to drown the opposite party's favourite with a chorus of catcalls. The behaviour of the audience became more and more disgraceful as the opera was repeated, until on the last night (June 6), when the Princess of Wales was present, Cuzzoni and Faustina delighted the sporting instincts of the nobility and gentry of England by indulging in a free fight on the stage.

Five days later George I died suddenly at Osnabruck. George II was crowned on October 11, to the music of Handel's Coronation Anthems. The opera season reopened a month later. Apparently the quarrel between Cuzzoni and Faustina had been patched up; probably neither of them wanted to lose their English contracts. They appeared together in Handel's Riccardo Primo, and again in Siroe (February 5, 1728), as well as in Tolomeo (April 30), but the battle seems to have been won by Cuzzoni, who obtained the more important parts. We hear of no more disturbances; the fact was that the audiences were too thin to be noisy.

Mrs. Pendarves, always a devoted supporter of Handel, was pessimistic from the beginning of the season. "I doubt operas will not survive longer than this winter," she wrote on November 25; "they are now at their last gasp; the subscription is expired and nobody will renew it. The directors are always squabbling, and they have so many divisions among themselves that I wonder they have not broke up before; Senesino goes away next winter, and I believe Faustina, so you see harmony is almost out of fashion."Admeto was revived on June 1, 1728; this was Faustina's last appearance, and the last night of the Royal Academy of Music. The opera was announced for June 11, but Faustina declared herself indisposed. The opera was shut up and the company disbanded. Faustina went with Senesino to Paris, and thence to Venice, where Cuzzoni also made her appearance, and continued in the local dialect the campaign of slander against Faustina's alleged immoralities.

There were many reasons for the collapse of the opera. It had been carried on with reckless extravagance, and the noble directors were in all probability not very expert men of business. The scandalous behaviour of all concerned in Astyanax may well have caused a falling-off in the subscriptions. Mrs. Pendarves, who was a lady of unimpeachable conduct, continued to go to the opera, but she was a serious lover of music and a personal friend of Handel. The failure of the Academy is generally attributed to the success of The Beggar's Opera, which had been brought out at Lincoln's Inn Fields on January 29, 1728, and at once took London by storm. A letter of Mrs. Pendarves, dated January 19, but evidently continued later, tells us that she went to a rehearsal of Siroe: "I like it extremely, but the taste of the town is so depraved, that nothing will be approved of but the burlesque. The Beggar's Opera entirely triumphs over the Italian one." Even Mrs. Pendarves could not help enjoying it, once she had seen it.

It is probable that Handel himself had contributed to the downfall of the Academy. Out of the 487 performances given between 1720 and 1728, Handel's works obtained 245, Buononcini's 108, and Ariosti's 55. The great singers had drawn the public to listen to Handel's operas, but it is clear from many contemporary allusions that Handel's music was too severe to be an attraction in itself, except to cultivated musicians like Mrs. Pendarves. The same accusations were made against Handel that were made in later years against Mozart and Wagner—that his operas were noisy and overloaded with learned accompaniments. The Italian opera was killed, not so much by the fact that The Beggar's Opera made its conventions ridiculous (for its conventions could at that time have been ridiculous only to quite unmusical people), as by the incontestable attraction of the new work itself. It was witty and outspoken, with abundance of topical satire; its music consisted of the tunes that everybody knew, and it presented the public with the irresistible fascinations of Lavinia Fenton, who was soon to become the Duchess of Bolton.

Handel may well have resented the success of The Beggar's Opera, but the collapse of the Academy was in reality no great disaster for his own interests. In the first place, he had done very well out of it from a financial point of view; the noble directors might have lost their money, but he had been only their paid servant, in which capacity he had accumulated enough to invest no less than £10,000 of his own in the next operatic venture. He obviously realised the strength of the position which he had built up for himself both as a composer and as a man of business. The most important result of the Academy's career had been to provide Handel with the opportunity of consolidating his own style as a composer of musical drama. Like all the court composers of his age he had provided whatever his patrons required—chamber music, water music, minuets for court balls, Church music for royal ceremonial; but the music on which his own heart was set was that of the theatre.