A season of Handel operas, part 1: Acis and Galatea
Polyphème surprenant Acis et Galatée (Polyphemus surprising Acis and Galatea) [detail] by Auguste Ottin, 1863. Fontaine Médicis, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris. Image credit: Daniel Stockman, CC BY-SA 2.0. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.
This year marks the 340th anniversary of Handel's birth. Either by plan or coincidence, in addition to the annual Messiah concerts, welcome as they are, this season has featured some non-perennial Handel vocal works. Over the next several posts I will be covering recent concert performances of three Handel operas, starting with:
Acis and Galatea (1718/1739). Nola Richardson (Galatea), James Reese (Acis), Douglas Ray Williams (Polyphemus), Michael Jankosky (Damon), Agnes Vojtkó (Corydon). American Bach Soloists, Jeffrey Thomas, artistic director and conductor. St Mark's Lutheran Church, San Francisco, 23 February 2025.
In Every Valley: Handel's Messiah, I wrote about how Handel's career composing and staging Italian operas in London came to an end after 30 years. It had begun in 1711 with Rinaldo and had reached several artistic peaks between the mid-1720s and the mid-1730s. But by the end of the 1730s audiences and financial support were dwindling, and with the failure of Deidamia in 1741, Handel finally had to accept that he could no longer continue to produce opera seria.
George Frideric Handel, attributed to Balthasar Denner, 1726–1728. Image source: National Portrait Gallery NPG 1976
But his career writing Italian opera had almost ended 25 years earlier, in 1717, thanks to an argument within the royal family. Had Handel stopped writing Italian opera then, today we would not have many of his greatest masterpieces; I'll be discussing one of them, Giulio Cesare (1724), as the third performance covered in this post series.
Opera was (and is) extraordinarily expensive, and between 1714 and 1717 the Italian opera company in London flourished under the joint patronage of King George I and his son George Augustus, the Prince of Wales. But in 1717, tensions mounted between father and son. An opposition faction began to form around the Prince of Wales, who, in comparison to his father, was relatively popular. Joint patronage of the opera ceased.
Handel was placed in a delicate position. He relied on George I's patronage and supplied music for court and state occasions; that summer he had written the Water Music for a river excursion by the king. At the same time, he could not afford to alienate the Prince of Wales, who was roughly Handel's age and would one day be king. Rather than attending either the king's or the prince's court, by early August 1717 Handel was staying at Cannons, an estate outside London owned by James Brydges, Baron (later Duke of) Chandos.
The Right Hon[oura]ble. James, Earl of Carnarvon, Viscount Chandos of Wilton in Herefordshire, Lord Chandos of Sudley in Glocestershire & Governor of ye Turky Company [i.e., the Levant Company]. Mezzotint by John Simon, published by John Smith, after a Michael Dahl portrait of 1719. National Portrait Gallery NPG D19048
Brydges had three major advantages: he was not active politically, and so associating with him would not offend either king or prince; he was an enthusiastic arts patron, not only of Handel but of the writers John Arbuthnot, John Gay, John Hughes and Alexander Pope; and he had a household musical establishment consisting of about a dozen musicians and four to six male singers (augmented with additional performers for special occasions).
No payments are recorded to Handel in the existing household accounts, and Brydges already had a Master of Music, Johann Pepusch. In his biography of Handel, Donald Burrows suggests that he stayed at Cannons "possibly. . .as an honoured guest rather than as a 'serving musician.'" [1] Even though Handel was a guest, composing and performing were undoubtedly a part of the reciprocal guest-host relationship: more than a dozen new works were first performed at Cannons while he was in residence.
Unknown man, formerly identified as John Gay, attributed to Sir Godfrey Kneller, Baronet, before 1723(?). Image source: National Portrait Gallery NPG 622
The poets sharing Brydges' patronage were strong opponents of Italian opera, the genre that had brought Handel to London. (Gay and Pepusch would go on a decade later to savagely satirize Italian opera in The Beggar's Opera (1728), for which some of Handel's music was borrowed.) Ever adaptable, all the vocal works Handel composed at Cannons had English words: eleven sacred anthems drawn from the Book of Common Prayer (1662) and Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate's New Version of the Psalms (1696); the oratorio Esther (1718) to a libretto likely by Arbuthnot and Pope; and the pastoral opera Acis and Galatea (1718) to a libretto primarily by Gay with additions by Pope and Hughes, adapted from the text of John Dryden's The Story of Acis, Polyphemus and Galatea (1717).
Gay's text for Acis and Galatea draws on Ovid's Metamorphoses for its swiftly-moving tragedy: the shepherd Acis and the nymph Galatea love one another, but the jealous Cyclops Polyphemus kills Acis by crushing him with a boulder.
"Help, Galatea, help, ye parent gods, / And take me dying to your deep abodes." Acis and Galatea, etching and engraving by William Dean Taylor after Richard Cook, c. 1814–1822. Image source: Sanders of Oxford Antique Prints & Maps
The sorrowing Galatea turns Acis' blood into a "gentle murm'ring stream," and Acis himself into its god.
Handel filled the work with beautiful pastoral melodies, and the words "pleasure," "delight," "desire," and "love" recur throughout—as in Acis' Act I air "Love in her eyes sits playing," performed by Paul Agnew accompanied by Les Arts Florissants conducted by William Christie:
But Handel also effectively dramatized the moments of conflict. In an extraordinary trio in Act II, Polyphemus violently interrupts Acis and Galatea's love duet "The flocks shall leave the mountains" with interjections of his jealousy and anger: "Torture! Fury! Rage! Despair! I cannot, cannot bear!" The excerpt below is from the brilliant Boston Early Music Festival production with Aaron Sheehan as Acis/Lord Chandos, Teresa Wakim as Galatea/Lady Chandos, and Douglas Williams as Polyphemus/Alexander Pope:
The cast of the 1718 version requires only five soloists (in 1739 Handel revised the work to reduce the number of soloists to four). The part of Galatea was sung by a soprano hired for the occasion, since Brydges' regular group of singers included no women. Burrows makes the case that the soprano who sang in the first performance was probably Margherita de l'Epine, who had performed in three of Handel's London operas and who married Pepusch, Brydges' Master of Music, around 1718.
Galatea is given some of Handel's loveliest music, as in the air "Heart, the seat of soft delight," here performed by Teresa Wakim accompanied by the Boston Early Music Festival Vocal & Chamber Ensembles directed by Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs:
The modest forces required to perform Acis and Galatea, its compact story (about 90 minutes from start to finish), and the beauty of its music ensured the work's continued popularity. It became the most-performed of Handel's works during his lifetime, and it is still regularly staged (we've seen it four times in the past two decades).
Polyphème surprenant Acis et Galatée (Polyphemus surprising Acis and Galatea) by Auguste Ottin, 1863. Fontaine Médicis, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris. Image source: Pinterest
The concert performance of Acis and Galatea that we attended in San Francisco fully brought out the delightful qualities of its music. As is common practice, the version Jeffrey Thomas presented with American Bach Soloists was a combination of elements from the 1718 version and Handel's 1739 and 1742 revisions. Although the version we heard did not exactly correspond to what any 18th-century audience would have heard—it probably came closest to the version heard in 1742 as a part of Handel's Dublin season—Handel himself frequently altered his works to match the forces at his disposal and, no doubt, his artistic preferences.
As in 1739, the work was divided into two acts, rather than being presented in six continuous scenes as it was originally. As in 1739, Acis' fellow shepherd Damon (Michael Jankosky) also sang the air originally given to the shepherd Corydon, "Would you gain the tender creature," though fortunately Damon remained a tenor (1718) instead of becoming a boy soprano (1739).
"Would you gain the tender creature" performed by Zachary Wilder, accompanied by the Boston Early Music Festival players:
As in 1739, the part of Corydon was cast with a female alto (Agnes Vojtkó) who, alas, only sings in the choruses. And as in 1739, a chorus was appended to Acis and Galatea's duet "Happy we" at the end of the first part.
However, elements of the original 1718 version were also retained. In Act II the air "Cease, beauty, to be suing" by Polyphemus, and the choral part of Galatea's "Must I my Acis still bemoan," were performed (they were cut in 1739). And the ABS orchestra did not include violas, which were only added to the score in 1739. [2]
Acis was ardently sung by tenor James Reese, while his love-rival Polyphemus was commandingly performed by bass-baritone Douglas Ray Williams. Williams is a veteran in the role: he sang it in the Acis and Galatea we saw at the Boston Early Music Festival in 2011, and in the danced Mark Morris version in 2014.
The great revelation for us was soprano Nola Richardson, who sang Galatea with a gorgeous timbre, accuracy of intonation, and in her bird-imitation airs "Hush, ye pretty warbling quire" and "As when the dove laments her love," fleetness of coloratura. Jeffrey Thomas, a former singer himself, always finds excellent vocalists, and we will be watching for Richardson's future appearances in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
Nola Richardson, soprano. Image credit: Suzanne Vinnik. Image source: Schwalbe and Partners
The scholar and critic Stanley Sadie wrote that "Acis and Galatea represents the high point of pastoral opera in England, indeed anywhere," and praised "the elegance and the sensual force of Handel's music in the first act and the elegiac power of that in the second." [3] The ABS concert performance fully confirmed those views.
Next time: Alceste (1750)
- Donald Burrows, The Master Musicians: Handel, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 81.
- Differences between the 1718, 1732, 1739 and 1742 versions are discussed in detail in Peter Holman, "The 1739 Acis and Galatea," The Handel Friends, 1 May 2016.
- Stanley Sadie, "Acis and Galatea," in The Grove Book of Operas, Second Edition, edited by Stanley Sadie, revised edition edited by Laura Macy. Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 2.
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