Where’er you walk

Allan Clayton (tenor)

Sophie Bevan (soprano)

The Choir of Classical Opera

The Mozartists

Ian Page (conductor)

Esther was probably the work through which John Beard’s vocal and musical gifts first came to the attention of Handel. It had been performed for the Duke of Chandos in about 1720 but afterwards was unperformed for over a decade. A private performance on 23 February 1732, organised by Bernard Gates, featured all ten of his Chapel Royal trebles, including the sixteen-year-old Beard. The anonymous libretto is based on a play by Jean Racine which is itself based on a story from the biblical Book of Esther, in which the eponymous Israelite risks execution in order to persuade her husband, the Persian King Assuerus, to prevent the genocide of her people. “Tune your harps”, in which an Israelite exhorts his compatriots to celebrate their faith, was not sung by Beard in any of the numerous revivals and versions of Esther in which he appeared, but he did perform it as a concert piece at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket on 16 April 1751 in a charity concert in aid of the Fund for the Support of Decay’d Musicians.

Within two weeks of Beard’s official release from the Chapel Royal choir he was appearing in a Handel opera at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, singing the role of Silvio in a revival of Il pastor fido on 9 October 1734. This had originally been Handel’s second London opera, premièred at the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket on 22 November 1712, and based on a well-known pastoral poem by Giovanni Battista Guarini. The role of Silvio – summarised by Charles Burney as “a gay frolicksome swain, much fonder of field-sports than the society of females” – had originally been written for an alto castrato, and this voice-type was retained when the opera was revised and revived in May 1734. However, the inclusion of the eighteen-year-old Beard in the cast for the November 1743 revival necessitated some alterations to the role. Silvio’s first and third arias were replaced by alternative ones, while the Act Two aria “Sol nel mezzo risona del core” was transposed down a fourth and the violin part entirely removed, affording the music a greater freedom and intimacy.

For the 1734-35 season Handel was ousted from the King’s Theatre, which was now occupied by a rival company subsequently nicknamed the Opera of the Nobility; several of Handel’s leading singers had already defected to his competitors a year earlier. John Rich’s recently opened theatre was excellently equipped, however, and Handel was able to assemble an outstanding ensemble of Italian soloists, French dancers and young native English singers – including the young John Beard. The first new opera of the season – and thus the first to feature a role composed specifically for Beard – was Ariodante (composed between 12 August and 24 October 1734 and premièred on 8 January 1735). Beard played the role of Ariodante’s brother Lurcanio, who is in love with Dalinda. His second aria, “Tu vivi, e punito”, comes near the beginning of Act Two when, under cover of darkness, Lurcanio and Ariodante have both just witnessed Polinesso, the wicked Duke of Albany, being admitted to the chambers of Ginevra, Ariodante’s beloved. Assuming the worst, Ariodante is ready to kill himself in despair, but Lurcanio urges him not to.

The score of Alcina was completed on 8 April 1735, scarcely three months after the première of Ariodante, and the work was first performed just eight days later. As with Ariodante, the competition provided by the Opera of the Nobility – combined with the opportunities afforded by the Covent Garden theatre – spurred Handel to create one of his finest masterpieces; it ran for a total of eighteen performances. The plot concerns the predatory sorceress Alcina, who lures men to her enchanted island before transforming them into rocks, trees or wild beasts when she has become bored with them. She has, however, fallen in love with her latest victim, the knight Ruggiero, who rejects her and thereby breaks her spell. Beard sang the role of Oronte, Alcina’s general, who is in love with Morgana, Alcina’s fickle sister. In the final act, Morgana has been unfaithful to him but is now trying to win him back. Left alone, he recognises that he can neither reject nor resist her.

Handel’s setting of John Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Music was first performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden on 19 February 1736. Dryden’s satirical ode had been written in 1697 for an organisation called The Music Society, which had been formed in 1683 to create annual celebrations of Saint Cecilia’s Day on 22 November, and it was first set to music by Jeremiah Clarke (the score has not survived). The text was adapted discreetly for Handel by Newburgh Hamilton, and the cast of soloists was led by John Beard and the Italian soprano Anna Maria Strada del Po (who had been a regular member of Handel’s opera company since 1729 and had created the title role in Alcina). Dryden’s poem explores the ability of music to affect our moods and actions, describing a banquet held by Alexander the Great in the Persian city of Persepolis, which he has just conquered. The musician Timotheus sings and plays his lyre, manipulating various emotions in Alexander until ultimately inciting him to burn the city down in revenge for his dead Greek soldiers. “Happy pair”, the work’s opening vocal number, introduces the hedonistic festivities at which Alexander sits on his imperial throne next to the courtesan Thaïs.

Berenice was Handel’s third new opera of the 1736-37 season, following Arminio and Giustino. Its draft score was completed by 27 January 1737, but the work was not premièred at Covent Garden until 18 May. The libretto, adapted from Antonio Salvi’s Berenice, Regina d’Egitto, recounts the story of the eponymous Queen of Egypt, who is urged by the Roman envoy Fabio (sung by Beard) to marry Alessandro in order to secure political amity between their two nations; she is already engaged to Prince Demetrio, though, and therefore rejects the plan. Demetrio, however, is secretly in love with Berenice’s sister, Selene, and has been plotting to overthrow Berenice and place Selene on the throne in her place. When their treachery is discovered, Berenice pardons both Demetrio and Selene, but chooses the loving Alessandro as her husband. In his first aria, Fabio tries to persuade the rejected Alessandro to forget Berenice and turn his attentions to her sister instead.

Following the success of his settings of Dryden in Alexander’s Feast and the Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day, Handel was encouraged by his friends to turn his attentions to John Milton. The philosopher James Harris set about the task of preparing a libretto based on Milton’s two complementary poems L’Allegro (‘The cheerful one’, or Mirth) and Il Penseroso (‘The pensive one’, or Melancholy), and this text was further refined by Charles Jennens (the librettist of Saul and soon to be the author of Messiah) in close consultation with Handel himself. It was Jennens’ idea to add a new third part, Il Moderato (‘The moderate one’), in which an intervening new character mediates and reconciles Milton’s two opposing factions. Both libretto and music were prepared at a prolific rate, and the work’s first performance took place at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 27 February 1740. The final part of the ode climaxes in the sublime duet “As steals the morn”, for which Jennens crafted a text inspired by Prospero’s speech from the final act of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (V, i, 64-68); the rational clarity of the rising sun finally triumphs over the passing fancies of the night, as the contrasting personalities of Mirth (sung by Beard) and Melancholy (sung by the soprano Francesina) are fused into a blissfully concordant whole.

Beard was a good friend of the composer William Boyce (1711-1779), whose serenata Solomon was completed in March 1742 and probably first performed later that year by the Apollo Academy, directed by Maurice Greene. Unlike Handel’s later oratorio of the same name, Edward Moore’s libretto is an essentially secular poetic sequence about erotic love drawn from the Song of Solomon; it does not present any dramatic narrative or feature character development – instead the lyrical poetry of the source is absorbed into a sequence of sensual exchanges between the two soloists, who are called merely ‘He’ and ‘She’. It is unknown if Beard took part in the serenata’s first performance, but he certainly sang in at least three subsequent revivals of the work.

After Deidamia was premièred at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre on 10 January 1741 Handel abandoned Italian opera entirely, instead concentrating almost exclusively for the rest of his career on developing annual concert series of English oratorio-style works. Handel’s 1743 Lenten oratorio series at Covent Garden began with the première of Samson, the second of his two great settings of Milton, which he had actually begun before his departure to give a series of subscription concerts in Dublin in 1742 (this series had included the first performance of Messiah). The libretto was based on Milton’s Samson Agonistes – a closet drama developed from the biblical story of Samson and Delilah – and the librettist Newburgh Hamilton also drew extensively from at least fifteen other Milton poems; the radiant portrayal of sunrise in stanza XXVI of the Christmas ode On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity provided the basis for the blinded Samson’s final air, exquisitely depicting his reconciliation with God and his newfound humility and serenity.

Judas Maccabaeus was completed on 11 August 1746, less than four months after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite rebellion had been defeated at the Battle of Culloden. Thomas Morell’s libretto was derived from the two Books of Maccabees in the Apocrypha and from Flavius Josephus’ The Antiquities of the Jews, and its portrayal of a military leader’s triumphant restoration of his nation’s liberty is concerned more with the public display of patriotic unity than with the emotional conflicts and moral dilemmas which dominate most of Handel’s dramatic oratorios. The work was an immediate success at its première on 1 April 1747, and Handel revived it in all but one of his subsequent oratorio seasons. The title role was written for John Beard, and calls for extensive virtuosity and heroic belligerence as he summons the strength to vanquish the enemies of Israel.

Jephtha was Handel’s last original oratorio. He began drafting the score on 21 January 1751, but at the end of February the onset of blindness forced him to abandon work until 18 June; he eventually completed the oratorio on 30 August, and it was first performed at Covent Garden on 26 February 1752. The plot was adapted by Thomas Morell from Chapters X to XII of the Old Testament Book of Judges: the outcast Jephtha (sung by Beard) has been made commander of the Israelite army, and in advance of a fierce battle against the Ammonites he vows rashly that if they are victorious he will sacrifice to God the first thing that he sees on his return; to his horror, this transpires to be his own daughter, Iphis. Part III begins with a sorrowful soliloquy for the grief-stricken Jephtha, who knows that he must make the sacrifice at dawn and therefore begs the sun not to rise; when it does, he prays that angels will conduct Iphis safely to heaven. Handel’s last major scene created for Beard exquisitely achieves the transition from disconsolate anguish to a halcyon vision of solace and eternity.

John Christopher Smith the younger (1712-1795) was the son of Handel’s principal copyist, assistant and treasurer (who had moved from Ansbach to London in 1716). By 1725 Smith junior was receiving composition and harpsichord lessons from Handel, and two years later he joined his master’s team of copyists. In 1733 Smith wrote the English opera Ulysses, based on the final eight books of Homer’s The Odyssey, but this closed after only one performance and he did not write for the London stage again for twenty years. In the early 1750s, however, he became Handel’s permanent amanuensis and assisted in the direction of his oratorio seasons, and in 1754 he was commissioned by the celebrated actor David Garrick to write the music for The Fairies, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was premièred at Drury Lane on 3 February 1755. Running for eleven performances during its first two years, The Fairies was considered a success, even reaching New York in 1786. Beard created the role of Theseus, whose vivacious hunting song “Hark how the hounds and horn” proved immensely popular. The following year Smith was to compose another Shakespearean opera, The Tempest, which also featured Beard in its original cast.

Thomas Arne’s Artaxerxes was premièred at Covent Garden on 2 February 1762, just over two months after Beard had taken over the management of the theatre following the death of his father-in-law John Rich. The work remained in the repertory until the late 1830s, receiving a documented 111 performances before 1790, and the young Mozart almost certainly became acquainted with the work when he came to London in the mid-1760s. Haydn was also introduced to it, enthusing that he “had no idea we had such an opera in the English language”. Metastasio’s popular Italian libretto had already been set by over forty composers – including Vinci, Hasse, Gluck, Jommelli and J. C. Bach – before it was adapted and translated into English by Arne himself. Beard played the role of the villainous Artabanes, who has murdered King Xerxes and his heir Darius with a view to placing on the throne his own son Arbaces. Even when Arbaces has been falsely implicated of the murders and sentenced to death by Artabanes himself, the overweening father still clings to a delusional vision of his innocent son triumphantly ascending to the throne.

William Congreve’s libretto for Semele, based on a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was written for a 1707 opera by John Eccles which, in the event, was abandoned before it could reach the stage of the Queen’s Theatre. Thirty-six years later it was adapted for Handel, who completed his score on 4 July 1743, and the work was first performed as part of the oratorio season at Covent Garden on 10 February 1744. Such a profane classical myth could clearly not be termed an oratorio – the printed libretto described it simply as “The Story of SEMELE” – and the original audiences seem not to have known what to make of it. As Winton Dean memorably wrote, “Where they expected wholesome Lenten bread, they received a glittering stone dug from the ruins of Greek mythology”, and the work only received four performances. The following December Handel prepared an altered version for two further performances at the King’s Theatre; this involved the addition of various arias in Italian, to please the opera lovers, and the exclusion of sexually explicit lines, to appease the church-goers. Unsurprisingly this proved even less successful, and the work then fell into a prolonged period of neglect before re-emerging, fresh and sparkling, in the twentieth century. John Beard played the role of the god Jupiter, who falls in love with the mortal Semele. Wary of the relentless ambition that will eventually lead to her undoing, Jupiter has built Semele a palace on the slopes of Mount Cithaeron, and when she expresses her discontent that he has not made her immortal he seeks to placate her by transforming the palace into an Arcadian paradise and magically summoning her sister Ino to keep her company. The text for “Where’er you walk”, which is not in Congreve’s original libretto, is actually lifted directly from Alexander Pope’s youthful pastoral Summer (lines 73-76), but it fits the dramatic context perfectly.

Notes and translations © Ian Page, 2016