Hercules, complete opera

1738 was a turning point in Handel’s relation to English audiences. Probably the clearest sign was the installation of a marble statue of the composer for the gardens at Vauxhall, near Westminster on the Thames. Rare indeed to have a statue commemorated during one’s own lifetime, but even more striking is the depiction: Handel appears dressed rather informally in the guise of Apollo, god of poetry and music. The year also marked Handel’s move away from Italian opera toward the English oratorio. Of his 40 Italian operas, only the last one was composed after 1738—even though Handel lived another 20 years. On the other hand, all but four of his 24 English oratorios and secular dramas came after this year. A large part of Handel’s shift must be understood as a financial decision. Though he was not in danger of going bankrupt, productions of Italian opera were continually losing money on English stages. The conventional sources for funding opera—patronage and subscriptions—had run dry, and Handel knew it. Plans for a new season were scrapped in mid 1738 due to insufficient subscriptions. Of course, Handel’s operatic muse could not be turned off quite so easily. The fact that oratorios were essentially unstaged operas meant that Handel’s transition to the new genre would be smooth and his fortunes adequately restored over time.
1739 marked Handel’s first “oratorio season,” although the actual designation mattered only to advertisers and fastidious linguists. Some insisted that an oratorio must deal with a biblical subject and carry a moral imperative. The more commonly held view, which applies in Handel’s case, is that an oratorio is a non-staged, English language theater piece. Beyond the labels and the question of staging, there were other substantial differences between oratorio and opera. For instance, the chorus took on increased prominence in the oratorio. At the same time, the backbone of opera—the alternation between recitative and da capo arias—was broken for oratorio. Both techniques were still used, although far less often than in opera.
Handel’s oratorio seasons of the early 1740s grew increasingly successful each year, so he planned to double the number of performances to 24—ambitious, to say the least, for 1745. A likely stimulus for the proposed increase may be traced to venue. In 1745 Handel was back in the King’s Theater, the former bastion of opera in London and the very place that drew Handel to the capital city in 1710 (when it was known, mutatis mutandis, as the Queen’s Theater). It was to be a homecoming of sorts for this journeyman composer, who had passed from Halle to Rome and Venice before the famous theater lured him across the Channel. Now he would retake King’s Theater after several years at Covent Garden, armed with a portfolio of oratorios. In the end, his return must have been bittersweet, if not altogether disappointing.
But all that lay in future. For the moment, excitement induced by heady expectations for the 1745 season carried over into Handel’s compositional process. The first fruit of his labor was Hercules, an English “musical drama” that was neither staged (hence, not an opera) nor particularly sacred (hence, not an oratorio, strictly speaking). Handel completed a draft of the entire work between 19 July and 17 August 1744. (He worked equally quickly on the season’s other new offering, Belshazzar, which took less than two months from start to finish. Handel composed music more quickly than the librettist could supply a text!)
Hercules received its first performance on 5 January 1745, but already the handwriting was on the wall. Handel had overreached in planning so many shows, and he despaired of completing a full season due to fledgling ticket sales. He decided to cut the season short, a resolution he declared in an open letter published in The Daily Advertiser on 17 January 1745—less than a fortnight after Hercules had opened. The letter shows Handel playing martyr to public caprice, and the thinly veiled attempt to elicit further financial promises is hard to overlook. After mentioning his long debt to “the Nobility and Gentry” of Britain, Handel goes on:

I have the Mortification now to find, that my Labours to please are become ineffectual, when my Expences are considerably greater. To what Cause I must impute the loss of the publick Favour I am ignorant, but the Loss itself I shall always lament. In the mean time, I am assur’d that a Nation, whose Characteristick is Good Nature, would entertain them. I am likewise persuaded, that I shall have the Forgiveness of those noble Persons, who have honour’d me with their Patronage, and their Subscription this Winter, if I beg their Permission to stop short, before my losses are too great to support, if I proceed no farther in my Undertaking.

Responses came rolling in. Bolstered by this display of support, Handel reversed his decision and pushed ahead, “let the Risque which I may run be what it will.” By early spring, matters were no better, however, and the 1745 season ended after just 16 shows. Tastes had changed. He never again mounted a season—oratorio or otherwise—in King’s Theater.
As is often the case, the failure of Handel’s 1745 season had less to do with musical merits than with changing tastes and competition. He had been very successful in previous years by dominating the “downtime” of London’s public entertainment, giving oratorios only on Wednesdays and Fridays during Lent. For the 1745 season he started Hercules on successive Saturday evenings, which brought him squarely into competition with “the run of Plays, Concerts, Assemblys, Drums, Routs, Hurricanes, and all the madness of Town Diversions,” as one contemporary put it. Had he been more savvy, perhaps, and less ambitious, the strengths of Hercules might have gained a firmer foothold. Indeed, this musical drama is not lacking in strength—and I’m not referring sardonically to the mythical strongman who is its hero. The piece is a masterful study of individual character.

Librettist Thomas Broughton culled material from Sophocles’s Women of Trachis and Book IX of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The tension in the drama centers on Queen Dejanira, wife of Hercules, and her suspicion that he has been unfaithful with the newly-captured Princess Iole. (The triad of characters clearly recalls the depiction of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, and Cassandra in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.) In Sophocles play, Dejanira’s suspicionis merited, but in Ovid—as also in Broughton—her accusations are misplaced. The outcome in both traditions is the death and apotheosis of Hercules, who perishes frightfully when he puts on a robe sent by Dejanira. The garment, intended to magically restore his marital allegiance, devours his flesh and poisons his soul. Rather than duplicating a step-by-step synopsis, the following remarks will try to highlight certain crucial or affecting moments.
Handel has taken greater pains with the women than with the men in this drama. First, consider Hercules himself. The music played at his entrance is certainly grand, but the ensuing aria, “The god of battle,” adds a touch of pomposity to his characterization. He is a one-dimensional figure who sings strident arpeggios, mostly in unison with the accompaniment—Handel’s attempt to show a lack of reflection. Hercules is all on the surface. The depiction of Hyllus is more sensitive, and his aria “From celestial seats descending” makes clear the depth and verity of his emotion. In the end, however, this drama belongs to the women. Handel is frequently credited with achieving profound insight into female nature. Given that the instances of female nature portrayed here are (a) a mistrusting wife driven to madness by mistakenly murdering her innocent husband, and (b) a beautiful captive/alleged concubine, we might consider that praise with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, successive portions of the drama belong either to Iole or Dejanira. Each woman may be studied in her own right, and the relation between Dejanira and Iole becomes a locus for assessing the dramatic progression.
We mentioned earlier that Broughton followed Ovid in making Iole and Hercules innocent and, hence, Dejanira’s suspicions unfounded. To that end Iole sings an aria, “Ah, think what ills the jealous prove,” in which she warns the Queen about the perils of jealousy and rumor. Handel enjoys a few moments of word painting, with the general melodic traits—angular, skipwise motion with sequential repetition—correlating to the text’s emphasis on “endless pain.”
The first emotional crux arrives with Iole’s aria, “My father, ah, methinks I see,” heard late in the first act. Handel creates here an intense meditation on loss for Iole, a decided improvement upon her role in Sophocles. The steady pulsation of quarter notes, the key (C minor), and repeated, almost insistent use of a rising semitone G-Af—all this combines to set the expressive tone. Handel increases the pathos, too, by a subtle blending of conventions at the start of the aria. A soloist usually begins in imitation of the orchestral opening, and a clear break typically separates the orchestral introduction from the start of the solo section. Handel shirks both expectations, bringing Iole in on a dissonance more appropriate to recitative. It is as if her emotions have driven her to such a state that she begins abruptly, incorrectly, in medias res: throwing conventions aside in favor of immediate expression. Recollections of her father’s demise close in C minor, only to be followed by a more gentle and graceful mood in Ef major invoking “peaceful rest.” By the aria’s end, however, Handel restores the tone of sorrow and foreboding: will Iole, like Cassandra in Agamemnon, be able to see future peril?
Like all good dramas, Hercules maintains several plot lines simultaneously. Alongside Iole’s mourning, we hear about Hyllus’s growing love for the vanquished princess. In addition, we get a window into the mind of Dejanira through her initial on-stage interactions with Hercules. In “Resign thy club,” Dejanira mocks and chides her husband for giving up heroic adventures in favor of love and languishing. Dejanira’s jealousy is speaking here, leading her to deem the once-great, once-faithful King Hercules to be all washed up: ready for retirement beside his captured nymph. Handel sets her comic barbs with detached articulation and fluttering rhythms (anapests and iambs). The noodling melody culminates in a depiction of Hercules at the spinning wheel, his newest “labor” now that sword and shield lie in storage. The aria’s contrasting middle section begins in a martial, tempestuous vein as Dejanira recalls her husband’s glorious past, but the mood quickly (and pathetically) dissolves into a chromatic adagio. Here the thunder of Mars yields to “Venus and her whining boy” (i.e., Cupid) just as Hercules seems to have chosen love-making over war. The entire critique is so stinging that we would hardly fault Hercules for launching out on twelve more labors just to reassert his manliness!
The tense relation between Dejanira and Iole culminates in a duet, “Joys, joys of freedom,” positioned at the end of Act II. This juxtaposition of female leading roles adds a psychological depth to the action. Handel’s London audiences probably relished this musical communion between two characters who should be dire enemies, but who appear reconciled here. Appearances deceive, however, as Dejanira’s recitative just prior to the entrance of Iole makes clear: “Be still, my jealous fears, and let my tongue disguise the torture of my bleeding heart.” Lichas, fatal messenger sent by Dejanira, is already en route bearing the robe that, rather than restoring his love, will end his life in agony. Handel’s gracious and light setting maintains the dissembling of Dejanira entirely, as the furies of death and madness shuffle their feet anxiously in the wings, awaiting the start of Act III.
Words pale in the attempt to describe the Queen’s descent into psychosis in Act III, especially when music is on hand to do the job better. The result, once again, is an increased focus on a woman rather than a man. While we might expect the death and transfiguration of Hercules to take center stage, it is hard to lose sight (and sound) of Handel’s madness music for Dejanira. With the apotheosis of our hero into a heavenly realm, the drama ends on a theme of liberty: Hercules as benevolent guardian and destroyer of tyrannical beasts and men. How far we are from Sophocles! How pertinent to the coming decades of continental and colonial struggles for freedom! And yet the emotional compass points back toward the pole of Dejanira’s unintentional crime, jealous error, and conscience that knows no rest except in suicide. They say that behind every great man is a great woman. In this case, the deaths of husband and wife reach equal degrees of tragedy—since both are the result of an error—but we are correct to be more undone by Dejanira’s sad end.

(c) Jason Stell