In 1703, the 18-year-old composer George Frideric Handel took up residence in Hamburg, Germany, where he remained until 1706. During this period he composed four operas, only the first of which, Almira, has survived more or less intact. Of the other three, the music for Nero is lost, while only short orchestral excerpts from Florindo and Daphne survive.
Handel was born and grew up in Halle an der Saale, where he received his early musical education and became an accomplished organist. In Hamburg he obtained employment as a violinist at the Oper am Gänsemarkt, the city's famous opera house. Here, he learned the rudiments of opera composition, mainly under the influences of Reinhard Keiser, the theatre's music director, and Johann Mattheson, its leading vocalist. The Gänsemarkt was largely dedicated to Keiser's compositions; his temporary absence in 1704 gave Handel his chance, and in quick succession he wrote Almira and Nero using librettos by Friedrich Christian Feustking. Almira was successful, Nero less so and was never performed after its initial run of three performances. Handel's final Hamburg operas, Florindo and Daphne, based on librettos by Heinrich Hinsch and originally conceived as a giant single entity, were not produced at the Gänsemarkt before Handel left Hamburg for Italy in 1706.
No music that can be definitively traced to Nero has been identified, although Handel scholars have speculated that some of it may have been used in later works, particularly Agrippina which has a related storyline and some of the same characters. Fragments of music from Florindo and Daphne have been preserved, although without the vocal parts, and some of these elements have been incorporated into an orchestral suite first recorded in December 1997.
Background Halle
Handel was born Georg Friedrich Händel on 23 February 1685 in the German city of Halle. It is unclear what initial musical education he received; his father, Georg Händel, was not a music lover, and did not at first appreciate or encourage his son's precocious talents. Nevertheless, by the age of ten Handel had become an accomplished organist; his playing in the royal chapel at Weißenfels, where his half-brother Karl was in the service of the Duke of Saxe-Weißenfels, impressed the duke, who persuaded Händel senior that the boy should have a proper musical education. As a result, Handel began formal study under Friedrich Zachow, the organist of the Lutheran church at Halle.
Handel's biographer Jonathan Keates writes that: "From [Zachow] Handel learned not only a great deal about the line and shape of an aria, about strong, adventurous bass lines and solid choral writing, but also about those delicacies of instrumental colouring which he later perfected in his own style". Handel's musical development also benefited from an early and lasting friendship with Georg Philipp Telemann, whom he met in 1700. In February 1702 Handel enrolled at the University of Halle, perhaps intending to study law. In March he took up the post of organist at Halle's Calvinist cathedral (Domkirche), a prestigious appointment for one so young and indicative of his burgeoning musical reputation in the city.
At some time, possibly in late 1702 or early 1703, Handel visited Berlin, where his father had held an honorary post as physician to the elector who, in 1701, had become the Prussian king Frederick I. In Berlin Handel first experienced Italian opera, and may have met the Italian composers Giovanni Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti, who were writing operas for Frederick's court. The king heard of Handel's abilities, and wanted him to train as a future court composer, but Handel's horizons had been broadened by his sojourn in Berlin and he was developing his own ideas for his future. He declined the king's offer, and returned to Halle to fulfil his year's contract at the Domkirche. With few career prospects available in his home city, Handel would have liked to go to Italy, but this, he realised, was not yet practicable, since he lacked both cash and contacts. Instead in mid-1703 he left Halle for Hamburg, a thriving free city which housed the leading opera house in northern Germany.
Hamburg
The Oper am Gänsemarkt
The Hamburg Opera, known as the Oper am Gänsemarkt, was the first public opera house to be established outside Italy. The brainchild of the exiled Duke of Schleswig-Gottorf and his Kapellmeister, Johann Theile, it was designed by Girolamo Sartorio, and modelled on the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. Its construction was opposed by the clergy and cathedral hierarchy, but enthusiastically supported by the city's municipal authorities. Built in 1677 on a lavish scale, with a reported capacity of 2,000, it boasted an exceptionally deep stage and was, according to Handel scholars Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp, one of the best-equipped theatres of its time.
Dean and Knapp write that the theatre's history was "enlivened and envenomed by a maelstrom of controversy, pursued in pamphlets, broadsheets, sermons and prefaces to librettos ... and by financial crises which persisted on and off throughout the sixty years of its existence". A preponderance of biblically inspired works in the earliest years was soon replaced by a range of more secular subjects, often drawn from Roman history and myth, or from recent events such as the 1683 siege of Vienna. Performances tended to be of considerable length, often extending to six hours. The 18-year-old Handel entered this hectic environment in mid-1703, to take up a place in the theatre's orchestra as a ripieno (ensemble) second violin.
Keiser and Mattheson Handel joined the Hamburg opera company when it was experiencing a period of considerable artistic success. This blossoming followed the arrival of Reinhard Keiser, who had become musical director at the Gänsemarkt in about 1697, and in 1703 succeeded Johann Sigismund Kusser as the theatre's manager. Born in 1674, Keiser had studied under Johann Schelle and probably Johann Kuhnau at the St. Thomas School, Leipzig. In 1694 he was employed as a court composer at Brunswick, where in three years he composed seven operas, at least one of which (Mahumeth) was performed in Hamburg. According to Handel's biographer Donald Burrows, Keiser was a good judge of popular taste, with a flair for writing Italian-style arias. Between 1697 and 1703, prior to Handel's arrival, about a dozen more Keiser operas had been staged at the Gänsemarkt. Despite his on-stage successes, Keiser was an unreliable general manager, with expensive private tastes and little financial acumen, often at odds with his creditors.
It is possible that Keiser, who had connections in the Halle area, had heard of Handel and was directly instrumental in securing the latter's post in the Gänsemarkt orchestra; certainly he was a considerable influence on the younger man in the three years that Handel spent in Hamburg. Another important Gänsemarkt colleague was the house composer and singer Johann Mattheson, who noted Handel's rapid progress in the orchestra from back-desk violinist to harpsichord soloist, a role in which, said Mattheson, "he showed himself a man—a thing which no one had before suspected, save I alone". Mattheson was less complimentary on Handel's early efforts at composition: "He composed very long, long arias, and really interminable cantatas", before, it seems, "the lofty schooling of opera ... trimmed him into other fashions".
Almira In 1704, Keiser, seeking refuge from his creditors, temporarily left Hamburg for Weißenfels in Saxony, near to his hometown Teuchern. He took with him his donkey and his most recent opera composition, Almira, a setting of a libretto by Friedrich Christian Feustking, thus denying this work to the Gänsemarkt—Keiser produced it in Weißenfels in July 1704. In these circumstances the temporary management turned to the 19-year-old Handel and requested a fresh setting of Feustking's libretto. Handel complied; his version was premiered at the Gänsemarkt on 8 January 1705, and ran for 20 performances—a marked success.
The fictional plot appears to have originated from Giuseppe Boniventi's opera, L'Almira, with a libretto by Giulio Pancieri, performed in Venice in 1691. The relatively light-hearted story, typical of 17th-century dramatic conventions, is told in three acts and records the machinations surrounding the newly crowned queen Almira's secret love for her secretary, Fernando, in opposition to her dead father's dying wish that she marry someone from the family of her guardian Consalvo. Keates writes of the work: "The whole thing belongs very much to its Venetian baroque world ... full of intrigue interlaced with comedy and ballet." These features, even the mixture of languages between Italian and German, often recur in Handel's later work. The music, which has been preserved largely through a conducting score prepared by Telemann, reflects Handel's debt to Keiser and displays a variety of traditions: a French-style overture, German-influenced orchestration, and Italianate vocal writing. Dean and Knapp summarise the score as "very uneven in style, quality and technique, with abundant promise but intermittent fulfilment".
Lost works
Nero
General The success of Almira prompted the Gänsemarkt management to follow it almost immediately with a second Handel setting, ("The love obtained through blood and murder; or, Nero") generally known as Nero, again based on a Feustking libretto. The libretto survives intact, but the music is entirely lost. Dean and Knapp record that a copy of Handel's manuscript score was held in the library of the Hamburg impresario J.C. Westphal until 1830, when it was sold and thereafter disappeared. The whole work incorporates 20 ensembles and 57 arias.
Libretto Feustking's libretto was written entirely in German, its probable sources being the ancient histories of Tacitus and Suetonius. The text has been widely criticised for its low quality; Friedrich Chrysander wrote of it: "There is no spirit in the verse, and one feels vexation in setting such stuff to music". A later critic, Paul Henry Lang, cites the "miserable quality" of the libretto as the principal reason for the opera's failure. Dean and Knapp suggest that the main fault is that Feustking fatally over-complicates the main story by incorporating sub-plots, unnecessary extra characters, and "every stock device known to the operatic repertory". These intrusions include disguises, mistaken identities, a much-ridiculed philosopher, a comic servant and a play within the play. Many of the characters are historical, including Nero, Octavia, Poppea, Nero's mother Agrippina, and Seneca the philosopher. Several of these appear in Handel's later (1709) opera Agrippina. Another real-life figure who appears in Nero is Anicetus, who historically is held to have murdered Agrippina on Nero's behalf. Described in the libretto as ("The emperor's little one, or darling"), Anicetus is Handel's only openly gay operatic character.
Characters As listed and described in Burrows et al.: George Frideric Handel: Volume 1, 1609–1725: Collected Documents (2011). Nero, Roman emperor Agrippina, the emperor's mother Octavia, the emperor's wife, subsequently repudiated Sabina Poppea, a Roman noblewoman, Nero's mistress Tiridates, Armenian crown prince Cassandra, crown princess of Media, in love with Tiridates Seneca, Imperial privy counsellor Anicetus, Nero's "mignon" or favourite Graptus, the late emperor Claudius's freedman A flamen or priest Choruses of priests, Roman people Dances of combatants, arsonists, Harlequins and Punchinellos, knights and ladies
Plot