Charles Jennens's Marginalia to Mainwaring's Life of Handel

Dean, Winton

doi:10.1093/ml/liii.2.160

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“…BothUrsula Kirkendale79 and Ellen Harris 80 have suggested that this was a thinly-veiled warning to Handel by Pamphilj, given rumours circulating at the time of a romance or at least attraction between Handel and Vittoria Tarquini, a soprano for whom he most likely wrote the cantata Un alma inamorata (HWV173) but a married mistress of Prince Ferdinando de Medici, another powerful patron of Handel's during his Italian sojourn.81 Judith Peraino82 discusses a potential homoerotic reading of this particular cantata, complicating the objective moral stance of poet in relation to composer by seeing something more transgressive in Pamphilj's 'consiglio' or advice, especially when mapped against the Icarus story. Pamphilj's admiration for the young German composer was wellknown and effusive, and Handel in later years told Charles Jennens that Pamphilj was an 'old Fool' who 'flatter'd' him,83 and he perhaps needed to fend off more than mere flattery from the Cardinal during his time in Rome. For Peraino, it is the older Pamphilj rather than Handel who is in danger as an Icarus, and whose 'dangerous attraction' could only enjoy a 'phoenix-like' rejuvenation through the 'middle way' sublimation of Handel's erotically-charged music (Pamphilj's Arcadian nickname was Fenice Larisseo).…”

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‘TROPPO AUDACE’: AMBITION AND MODERATION IN HANDEL'S BILINGUAL REVIVAL OFL'ALLEGRO, IL PENSEROSO, ED IL MODERATO

Zazzo¹

2020

Eighteenth Century Music

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Winton Dean described Handel's 1740 ode L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato (hwv55), with its pastoral texts by Milton, as ‘perhaps the profoundest tribute Handel ever paid to the land of his adoption’. Yet for the first revival in January 1741, Handel prepared Italian-texted movements for this quintessentially ‘English’ ode in order to accommodate his star castrato that season, Giovanni Battista Andreoni. With the help of Paolo Rolli, a librettist long associated with Handel and a respected translator of Milton, Handel reset four English-texted arias and one accompagnato with Italian contrafacta and composed a completely new Italian accompagnato and bravura aria for Andreoni, to be performed before the very last chorus. While these Italian-texted movements in macaronic Handel revivals are often either neglected by Handel scholars or dismissed as unfortunate compromises, a textual and musical analysis of the accompagnato ‘L'insaziabil fantasia’ and the aria ‘Troppo audace’ reveals a quasi-operatic mini-scena that had personal and professional resonances for both Handel and Rolli – an artistic manifesto of sorts on moderation, ambition, imitation and freedom within the transnational mid-eighteenth-century European world of letters and music.

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confidence: 99%