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Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas

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If you can't read musical notation, if you don't understand talk about chord progressions and deceptive cadences, this book will not be of interest to you. You may be tempted to try to read it by hearing that it discusses the vexed and vexing question of Handel's sexuality, but that discussion amounts to 5% of the whole contents. Even the social history portion of the text, investigating the homoerotically charged ambience of Handel's circles of patrons in Rome, Florence, and London, takes up no more than 15% of the book. "Handel as Orpheus" is an earnestly scholarly inventory of Handel's cantatas, attempting to fix their dates and provenance, providing full translations of them, spotlighting determinable personal allusions in those texts, analyzing their musical structures and the patterns of change they reveal in Handel's evolving style, fitting them into the general drift of musical styles in the early decades of the 18th Century as well as into the shifting paradigm of taste from the flamboyant Baroque to the baroque of the Age of Enlightenment.

In short, this is a book that will be of great interest to musicologists, cultural historians interested in music, and concert performers of the Handelian repertoire, and of no interest to anyone else. If you just want to find out whether Handel was "gay", the best I can do for you is to report that it's open to surmise. Oh, and to say "it really doesn't matter."

This excellent book is vast and touches on many subjects; it is definitely a fruit of many years work and contemplation on the subject; yet because of its volume, I will review only a few points that for me seemed the most interesting. My advice to the readers is to study first Handel's cantatas prior to reading this book, and a few operas and oratorios mentioned; notably Acis and Galatea, Agrippina, Orlando, Hercules, Lucrezia and Esther.

It was amazing to discover that Handel borrowed so much from other composers, especially from his teacher Reinhart Keiser; Handel seems to favor the character of Agrippina - he already used Keiser's music for his own "Ogni vento" in "Agrippina" and the same tune in "Fiamma bella" in "Aminta e Fillide" cantata. We learn on p.235 that Polyphemus aria "O Ruddier that the cherry" incorporates Agrippina music from Keiser's opera "Janus". The book is full of other incredible parallels, extremely interesting to learn.

The book provides very informative insights on the homosexuality in England and protestant Europe and the changing attitudes from 1690s to 1730s with connection to anti-Catholicism. I never realized that persecution of homosexuals in non-catholic countries was another form of protestant fighting with presumably corrupted Catholicism. This idea projects on modernity, when thinking that raising acceptance of homosexuality in America coincided with raise in Catholic influence.

Next, I was astonished to find a homoerotic interpretation of Acis and Galatea opera; I have two recordings and I had read their booklets in detail, but such an interpretation was never mentioned. The author opens us to the homosexual reading of this whole opera, where Acis and Galatea are a pair of same-sex male lovers, while Polyphemus may represent the "monstrous" law condemning men convicted of same-sex acts to death; but even more stunning is an idea that Polyphemus could actually represent an abandoned vengeful woman in the Acis-Galatea love triangle, and that in England witches traditionally sang in basso voice (p. 234).

Then the book speaks at length about the character of an "abandoned woman" and her voice; those are represented by characters as Alcina, Armida, Melissa and Agrippina. The author says that they normally represent female irrationality and its contagious nature to men in love with such women. However with the cross-dressing door opened by the author, one can go further and question if these women are actually women; using the author's own innovative approach, we can speculate that these abandoned women may represent forbidden illicit homosexual male lovers, who must be abandoned, as Alcina is abandoned by Ruggiero, for the sake of lawful, socially approved life, love and marriage. The point is that with the cross-dressing interpretation introduced, it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to truly decide which character represents Handel himself and his own view on sexuality.

I think the author gives a very good hint when she mentions that Handel was a German expatriate in Italy and England; a devout Lutheran in Catholic and then Anglican countries; an artist living through the system of patronage, thus catering to the tastes of his patrons within the boundaries of his own inspiration. To me, he seems to had been successfully adjusting to the tastes of his patrons, and if his Italian padrone were full of homoerotic ideas, he amply supplied for that; then, as if tired of that (Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, for example, was a highly debauched character, yet Handel wrote many cantatas for him), he moved to England and his stories changed, again according to the political climate and the inclinations of his current admirers and supporters. We must not forget that he was also a very successful businessman and judging by the result, i.e. that Handel accumulated a huge fortune and died a very wealthy man, buried with the most pomp in Westminster Abbey, it is obvious that he had never put his private sentimentality or passions above his business interests which were to serve his aristocratic clientele, and he has remained flexible in his artistic expression, as appropriate for his times. Luckily for him in monarchist England, he seems to had been truly inspired by mythological or heroic stories of loves of the gods or royalty; he never changed on that, even if the fashion was changing before his eyes with the triumph of The Beggar's Opera, that is, he was not moved by plebeian life or realism.

Connecting this to the debate of his erotic inclination, it is possible to imagine that he was inspired not by the idea of the same-sex powerful male patrons, but by ladies of noble blood, by queens as well - it is well-known that he was very much attached to Queen Caroline and took her death as a personal loss. It could be speculated that he did not get married not because he was a homosexual, but because the woman of his desire was unattainable - even a composer of his status could never marry someone highly aristocratic in those times in England. Obviously he did not condescend to what was available to him as a man of his profession, that is, singers and actresses.

Yet an erotic ideal of an aristocratic lady would still qualify for an impossible, unattainable love, as among male members of Arcadian Society, it would be perfectly heterosexual, though. His view on heterosexual love, even taken from his opera Orlando that the author uses to illustrate the point of weakening effects on man, seem to be very favorable. The author claims on p.79 that "the idea that by loving women the man is subdued, weakened, ... and that Handel musically depicts such "effeminate" love madness in a man by giving Orlando the voice of an abandoned woman." But we can argue that a lover's voice in Handel's operas is always high; it is rarely a tenor (Jupiter in "Semele"), never a baritone or a basso; in "Orlando" the chosen lover, Medoro, has a soprano voice. Another interpretation could be that Orlando is a battlefield hero, full of arrogance, cruelty and selfishness, and such a coarse man is not fitting for love as he is not gentle or "effeminate" enough to be chosen by a woman, as Angelica the Queen demonstrates. She sings that love cannot be won by demands or gratitude for past valor, and instead she is falling in love with a humble and beautiful Medoro, who is a wounded soldier and whose wounds she heals. While Orlando demonstrates his true character when in a rage he attempts to kill Angelica. Why would a violent destroyer be awarded the love of a queen? In my opinion, the author misses such points and her view is somewhat one-sided to prove an improvable.

The theme of love triumphant is quite prominent in Handel's operas; perhaps another emphasis could be made that truly worthy women, as queens and goddesses, prefer to chose tender and devoted men over boastful heroes full of themselves. And perhaps Handel desired women like that - to me, using the author's words, he musically adorns such women and the love duets with their lovers with the most beautiful music. It seems to me that he favors loves between wise kings and beautiful sensual faithful queens, as in "Floridante" between Elmira and Floridante; in "Solomon" the great duet between Solomon and his Queen; and in "Rodelinda" clearly Queen's love for her husband prevails; not to forget the great Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, and even a knight and his bride, as in "Rinaldo" between Rinaldo and Almirena, whose love wins over the sorceress Armida. However a brute like Hercules - another personage used by the author to show the irrationality of his wife Dejanira - is conspicuously a basso; according to the author, this voice could mean an abandoned revengeful woman, as it was with Polyphemus; but even if we do not resort to cross-dressing, it is obvious that Handel uses the musical language to show another hero, not a lover, a man crude and tough, unbending and insensitive and who therefore perishes.

With Handel's vast legacy, any erotic theory could find enough support in his works, as any character, from the most vicious to the most noble, is to be present in Handel's oeuvre. This is another confirmation of him to be such an incredible genius, and this will also keep the question of his erotic inspiration debatable for the foreseeable future. Comparing Handel to Orpheus, we should remember that we know Orpheus first of all for his musical genius, while his sexuality is subject to many interpretations. In Monteverdi's Orfeo he is an inconsolable lover of Eurydice, and this side of him should not be omitted when we compare Handel to the mythical musician.

The question of Handel's possible homosexuality is interesting, if not necessarily crucial to an appreciation of his art. This book analyses, in "graduate student" style, certain aspects of the Italian cantatas that seem to reflect a homosexual environment. The thesis would gain from more context drawn from biography, literature and social history. A good editor would have pruned heavily. Nevertheless, worth reading if you are interested in Handel the man, a complex and fascinating figure as well as a great genius.