Tamerlane

to please you, for my life is only thine." As these two wonderful voices stole aloft tears streamed down the faces of the people. The hardened from the salons, blasé to all sentiment, who yet went to the opera because it was the thing to do, and who normally used the time as an excuse to laugh and joke in an undertone, were softly crying.

The talk about Tamerlane had caused the decaying King to take a new interest in the opera, and the great duet made him cease his idle and disreputable talk to listen. Then the opera had an added interest, because it introduced Handel's new singer Borosini. A curious creature. A man exactly Handel's own age, who had wandered about southern Europe with a tenor voice that created enormous interest for a time, till the repetition of it repelled. Borosini, in the course of these wanderings, had married another singer, Leonore d'Ambreville. When Handel made his contract with Borosini, who was then singing at Prague, he had to engage his wife also. They were neither of them great singers, but their advent interested people as another Handel diversion. For two years they sang for Handel, then their vogue waned, and they disappeared from the country.

Tamerlane had one virtue above most of the Handel operas-it built up carefully to a most tremendous climax. Probably Handel never attained a greater finale than he did in Tamerlane until he left opera for oratorio. The close of the work, the dramatic pathos he reached in his notes when the broken Emperor Bajazet passes to death, was the triumph of one carried out of himself by enthusiasm for his task. Bajazet's song, "Dearest daughter, weep no more," was a masterpiece of attainment. Such a heart-breaking had never been displayed in music before.

Tamerlane sent its audiences weeping into the street when the curtain fell. All through that autumn it held the theatre, and it would have been unquestionably a great financial success but for the extravagance and loose commercial instincts of the Academy directors. It was a paying proposition all the time, but money was being poured down the drain in absurd inconsequent ways, because no one cared very much what happened so long as the Academy's doors were kept open.

Handel was probably the only person who had any thought about this side of the venture. Heidegger was too busy with his masquerades. The various governing peers, now that the novelty of the Academy had worn off, sought other novelties to divert idle lives. The King had fallen irreparably to the lure of the wax-lights, the powdered ladies and the French farces. The dull old fellow's days were waning. He was pushing away constantly recurring illnesses as nuisances, persuading himself that a life of eternal pleasure was not taking its toll. In a couple of years more he was to die a heavy, bent up, crying figure in a coach outside Osnaburg, not a bit regal, not a bit the autocratic adventurer, but terribly humble when Death touched his shoulder.

No sooner had the curtain fallen on the last performance of Tamerlane than Handel was ready with a new opera. He was fighting hard for the falling fortunes of the Academy. If it failed he was conscious that there must come a serious blow to his prestige. Bononcini was like some lowing beast in the wilderness, snapping in frantic frenzy at every Handelian move made by the Academy directors. They were going to destruction with Handel. He told them so. In truth they were, but only because they had not enough commercial instinct between them to keep open the doors of an average shop for a month, let alone a great venture like the Academy.

Handel produced his Rodelinda on 13th February 1725. He only composed the last notes of it on the 20th of January. He knew that the Academy was approaching dissolution unless something important happened to stir the town. In a way he gave the town all it wanted to talk about with his Rodelinda. Haym's Italian libretto, more human than most of his works, and dealing with the emotions of a deserted Lombardian queen, was sufficient excuse for Handel's emotional songs. Although in Rodelinda Handel never reached the powers he displayed in Tamerlane, he produced a fine work. But Cuzzoni provided the diversion. She appeared in a brown silk dress trimmed with silver that caught the town. None of the songs of Handel brought the audiences to Rodelinda; they came to see the brown and silver dress, to talk about it, to copy it. Cuzzoni started a fashion which swept through Society like an epidemic. Though the singer appeared

Cuzzoni Sets a Fashion

very plump and squat in the brown and silver dress, every Society woman in the audience-with that imagination which is truly woman's-foresaw what she herself would look like in such a combination of artistic colour. Handel had made an opera, and Cuzzoni a season's fashion. And the odd thing about Rodelinda is that the fashion Cuzzoni set on that February night in 1725 has lived longer than the beauties Handel put into that work. Considerably more than a century has passed since the world has seen a performance of Rodelinda which was, with its Italian setting, a very beautiful thing. But Cuzzoni's brown and silver dress has run the gamut of Empires, has gone out of fashion and ramped through fashion again, and acquired its place as a delicate thought in colour schemes.

The season ended on the 19th of May. Then for a while Handel was silent. He produced nothing fresh until he began his new opera Scipio on the 12th of March 1726. Scipio was a fiasco. It ran thirteen nights and only had one big Handelian number in it, the march which later on was purloined by the promoters of Polly, the sequel to the Beggar's Opera. Scipio failed, and the failure hurt Handel deeply. He had reached the beginning of a new epoch. All the fires that were to sear the meaning of life into him were beginning to blaze. Success had come so soon.

He was now forty-one; he had reached what we moderns know as mid-channel. It had not been difficult going thus far, considering his times and the wild and wonderful temperaments of others with which he had to deal.

But the world was changing. He was changing. All the melody that he had produced in those forty-one years was as nothing to what was to come. The best of it was to emerge from the vicious and unremitting hurt of the world, driven upon him without flinch or pity. Jealousies, the changing of friends, the foolish quarrels of Kings and their spoiled offspring were to bring him wounds which he never sought or deserved. But out of suffering and hidden lament came his sweeter singing. Had it not been for enmities and disappointments he would have been a lesser voice in universal music. Because he was to endure so did he come to discover the world's grief, its tenderness, and by his divine gift change it into a song of hope.

CHAPTER XI

THE GREAT QUARREL

HANDEL had now been in England sixteen years. The question of his naturalisation had not troubled him; it is doubtful if he ever thought about it. London had accepted a German Court; it possessed a King who even now could only talk execrable English, and who hectored in rapid German his wife and his suite in public at all times. There seemed no reason, therefore, why Handel, whose mode of speech confirmed his German origin, should assume a nationality with which his speech was inconsistent. Yet in everything else he had become English. He had assimilated the characteristics of the English people, which the monarch had never attempted or wished to do.

The Bononcini quarrel had, however, changed matters. The Italian had, by astute propaganda, worked up a case against the German Handel. The knowledge of his German origin had been inconsequent to the London which_prided itself on having captured the greatest musician of Europe. But the stock of the German Court was falling. The King was becoming more and more unpopular. His German mistresses were considered less and less necessary in the salons. The quarrels between the King and the Prince of Wales had reached the stage of blatant discourtesies in public. Nevertheless, it was mainly the Bononcini propaganda that compelled Handel to apply for naturalisation.

At the beginning of February 1726 he made his petition to the Lords, and it ran as follows:

"To the Right Honourable The Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled.

"The Humble Petition of George Frideric Handel sheweth That your Petitioner was born at Halle, in Saxony, out of His