The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham made several orchestral suites from neglected music by George Frideric Handel, mostly from the composer's 42 surviving operas. The best known of the suites are The Gods Go a'Begging (1928), The Origin of Design (1932), The Faithful Shepherd (1940), Amaryllis (1944) and The Great Elopement (1945, later expanded as Love in Bath, 1956).
Some of the suites were written as ballet scores; others were intended for concert use. Beecham made no attempt to emulate Handel's original instrumentation, and employed the full resources of the modern symphony orchestra, introducing such instruments as trombones, cymbals, triangles and harps into the orchestration. He made recordings of parts or the whole of all the above suites with the two orchestras with which he was principally associated, the London Philharmonic between 1932 and 1945 and the Royal Philharmonic thereafter.
Both at the time and in the present day, Beecham's arrangements of Handel have divided opinion. Some critics have found the 20th-century orchestration inappropriate; others have praised Beecham for unearthing long-forgotten music and bringing it before the public. Recordings of the suites, mostly conducted by Beecham between 1932 and 1959, remain in the current catalogues, but the works have dropped out of the general concert repertoire.
Background After their original performances between 1705 and 1741 Handel's operas had fallen into almost total neglect. Even in his lifetime they had become unfashionable and he had successfully switched to writing oratorios in English.Hicks, Anthony. "Handel [Händel, Hendel], George Frideric", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, retrieved 2 April 2018 After his death the operas were generally forgotten. The writer Jonathan Keates summed matters up:
Audiences in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th were unaccustomed to harpsichord-accompanied recitatives as numerous and lengthy as those in Handel, and the baroque convention that operatic heroes were performed by castrati was viewed with a mixture of horror and amusement.Beaumont, Rachel. " How to Build an Opera Star: The rise and fall of the castrato", Royal Opera House, 21 November 2014; and Rosselli, John "The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550–1850", Acta Musicologica, May–August 1988, pp. 143–179 Keates quotes one Handel scholar as saying, "nowadays there is no humane answer to the castrato problem." There were occasional attempts to revive Handel's operas, but they were rare and were generally regarded as curiosities.Dixson, W. "Handel's Operas", The Musical Times, 1 November 1891, p. 681; and Crowder C. Fairfax. "Neglected Treasures in Handel's Operas", Music & Letters, April 1921, pp. 135–148
Beecham was among the few who were familiar with Handel's operatic works. He owned scores of thirty-seven of the forty-two surviving operas, and annotated them extensively."The Sir Thomas Beecham Music Library", University of Sheffield Library. Special Collections and Archives, pp. 28–38, retrieved 31 March 2018 He frequently programmed individual arias from them in his concerts. In addition to this, he believed that another effective way of bringing Handel's forgotten operatic music before the public was to arrange the best of it into concert or ballet suites for large modern orchestras. Like Mozart before him, he had no hesitation in reorchestrating Handel's music to match the available orchestral forces and current musical tastes:
Beecham, maintaining that Handel "revelled in great demonstrations of sound", said he feared that "without some effort along these lines, the greater portion of his magnificent output will remain unplayed, possibly to the satisfaction of drowsy armchair purists, but hardly to the advantage of the keenly alive and enquiring concertgoer."
Orchestral suites From the 1920s onwards Beecham arranged Handel arias and other pieces into various suites, the best known of which are The Gods Go a'Begging (1928), The Origin of Design (1932), The Faithful Shepherd (1940), and Amaryllis (1944).Melville-Mason, Graham. Notes to Sony Classical CD SMK87780 (2002) The suites are impossible to detail definitively as Beecham was in the habit of adding, dropping or changing the order of movements from performance to performance and recording to recording, and his concert and recorded performances frequently differed from the published scores.
The first Handel-Beecham arrangement was given simply as "Suite – Handel" at a concert in February 1924.Melville-Mason, Graham. Notes to SOMM CD SOMM-BEECHAM-7 (2000) In April of that year Beecham conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a recording of the work. The suite consisted of four movements:
1. Air – Lento 2. Hornpipe – Allegro Allegro 3. Musette – Poco mosso e tranquillo Poco mosso e tranquillo 4. Bourrée – Allegro Allegro.
All four movements were reused in later Handel-Beecham suites. The Air became No 5 ("Change of scene") in The Origin of Design; the Hornpipe (not from an opera but from the Concerto grosso Op. 6/7), Musette (from Il pastor fido) and Bourrée (from Rodrigo) all reappeared in The Gods Go a'Begging.
A piano transcription of the suite, by Giulio Confalonieri, was published by Metzler, London, 1925. WorldCat has no record of a published edition of the full orchestral score.Search for Handel Beecham Suite, retrieved 3 April 2018
The Gods Go a'Begging, 1928 In March 1928 Beecham included three Handel pieces in a concert with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall: the overture to Teseo, the musette from Il pastor fido and a bourrée from Rodrigo. According to the musicologist Graham Melville-Mason, these numbers were the germ of Beecham's ballet score, The Gods Go a'Begging. The ballet was commissioned by Serge Diaghilev for his company, the Ballets Russes; it was choreographed by the young George Balanchine.Lucas, p. 181 Boris Kochno devised a simple scenario on the lines of an 18th-century fête champêtre, in which a shepherd comes across a nobleman's picnic, spurns the attentions of two ladies in the party and dances instead with a serving maid. The picnic party's indignation is quelled when the shepherd and maid reveal themselves as gods in disguise.Golding, Robin. Notes to EMI CD (1990)
For the score, Beecham produced an eleven-movement suite: 1. Introduction (Overture to Act II of Admeto) 2. Allegro (or First Dance or Fugato) (from Overture to Teseo) 3. Minuet (from Alcina) 4. Hornpipe (from Concerto grosso Op. 6/7 5. Musette (from Il pastor fido) 6. Ensemble (or Second Dance) (from Organ Concerto Op. 4/4) 7. Larghetto (or Dream) (from Alcina) 7a. Tambourine (from Alcina) 8. Gavotte (from Alcina) 9. Dramatico (from Terpsicore) 10. Bourrée (from Rodrigo).
A Sarabande movement was included in Beecham's recording of the suite with the LPO; he later used it in Amaryllis.
The ballet was premiered in July 1928 at His Majesty's Theatre, London, under both the English title and the French – Les dieux mendiants.Lucas, p. 182 Beecham conducted, and Alexandra Danilova and Leon Woizikovsky danced the leading roles."The Russian Ballet", The Times, 17 July 1928, p. 14 It was a considerable success and became a mainstay of the Diaghilev company's repertoire until its disbandment after Diaghilev's death in August 1929.Lucas, pp. 181–182 The work was then presented by Wassily de Basil's company.
A new production was staged by the Vic-Wells Ballet at Sadler's Wells Theatre in 1936 with choreography by Ninette de Valois."A Handel Ballet At Sadler's Wells", The Times, 11 January 1936, p. 10 This version was frequently revived, most recently by the London City Ballet in 1982.Percival, John. "Dance – The Gods Go a'Begging", The Times, 9 December 1982, p. 9
Recordings Beecham made three recordings of excerpts from the score.
The Origin of Design, 1932 In 1930 a suite based on Ariodante was announced, but did not appear. Melville-Mason suggests that Beecham used much of it instead in a ballet score for the Carmago Society, A Woman's Privilege, choreographed by Trudl Dubsky. It was a comedy about exchanged brides, and featured what The Musical Times described as "a pair of low comedy aunts" reminiscent of pantomime dames."Camargo Society", The Musical Times, 1 January 1932, p. 70 The Daily Telegraph described it as "amiable nonsense full of sprightly movement, grotesquely at variance with the beauty and texture of the music".Horsnell, Horace in The Daily Telegraph, quoted in Walker, Kathrine Sorley. "The Camargo Society", Dance Chronicle, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1995), pp. 1–114 After the first performances, at the Savoy Theatre in November 1931, the ballet was not seen again.Walker, Kathrine Sorley. "The Camargo Society", Dance Chronicle, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1995), p. 44
Much of the score for A Woman's Privilege was reused in The Origin of Design, first given at the Savoy in June 1932. The ballet, choreographed by de Valois, and starring Lydia Lopokova and Anton Dolin, had a slender plot inspired by designs by Inigo Jones and adapted by de Valois from Carlo Blasis's treatise The Code of Terpsichore. The god Eros inspires the young Dibutade to draw for herself an image of her lover, Polydore – human kind has discovered art. In the second scene the drawing is carried to the court of Apollo and offered to the god in the presence of the nine Muses. The critic in The Times commented that the plot ran out long before the music."The Camargo Society", The Times, 14 June 1932, p. 12 The New York Times said that the piece showed once more Beecham's "rare tact in translating old wine into new bottles."Bonavia, Ferruccio. "The future of opera in London", The New York Times, 24 July 1932, p. 4
Beecham's musical assistant, Henry Gibson, worked with him on many of his arrangements, and is credited in the published score of this suite as the compiler and orchestrator. That score contains thirteen movements, of which Beecham and his newly-founded orchestra, the London Philharmonic, recorded ten in December 1932. They made further recordings from the score in 1933 and 1934. The main sources for this score were Ariodante, Il pastor fido, Rinaldo and the ballet music for Terpsicore.
Movements in the 1937 published score. Scene 1 Eros and Dibutade – Origin of Design 1. Prelude – Allegro moderato 2. Musette – Lentemente (Andante) 3. Rondeau – Entrance of Eros and attendants Moderato giusto 4. Pas de deux – Eros and Dibutade – Allegro moderato 5. Air Lento– Change of scene – Lento espressivo Scene 2 The Court of Apollo – The Dedication 6. Ensemble and fughetta – Dibutade discovers Polydore at the Court of Apollo – Allegro; Presentation of Dibutade and her design to Apollo and the Muses – Allegro scherzando 6a Rondeau – Dance of Eros, joined by Polydore and Dibutade – Moderato 7. Andante quasi allegretto – Polydore, Dibutade and their friends with the attendants on Eros 8. Polydore's dance – Andantino 9. Scherzo – Dibutade's dance – Vivace – Allegro (in this suite the movement is arranged for woodwind and pizzicato strings) 10 Siciliano – Polydore and Dibutade – Andante; Gigue – Eros and attendants with Friends of Dibutade – Allegro 11 Dance of the Muses – Allegro con brio 12 Finale: The Court of Apollo – Allego – piu mosso – presto.The Origin of Design, contents page
This contrasts with the suite recorded by Beecham with the LPO in 1932:
1. Bourrée (from Ariodante) 2. Rondeau (from Ariodante) 3. Gigue (from Terpsicore) 4. Minuet (from Il pastor fido) 5. Scherzo 6. Sarabande 7. Ensemble 8. Musette (from Ariodante) 9. Battle (from the "Sinfonia Bellica", Giulio Cesare and "Or la Tromba" and "Battaglia", Rinaldo) and Finale (from Ariodante).
The Faithful Shepherd, 1940