Some Background on Handel's Jupiter in Argos

The Chorale will be giving the North American premiere of this opera—in fact, it will be the first modern performance outside of Germany, and something like the fourth or fifth performance ever. It’s one of Handel’s last operas, written in 1739, and marked a kind of transition for him. In 1720, the Royal Academy of Music—London’s Italian opera company—was established, and Handel became music director. About half of the operas presented by the academy were Handel’s own, and he was also responsible for luring Continental opera stars to England. The venture was fantastically successful. There was such a fad for Italian opera that a rival composer, Giovanni Bononcini was also engaged by the academy. Each composer had fanatical partisans. In this feud, the Prince of Wales backed Handel, and much of the nobility supported Bononcini, so it was all very political. The rivalry became so notorious that John Byrom wrote a satire about it: “Some say, compar'd to Bononcini/That Mynheer Handel's but a Ninny./Others aver, that he to Handel/Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle:/Strange that this difference there should be/Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!” which is in fact the origin of the nursery rhyme characters Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.

By the late 1730s, though, the fanaticism had died down The English were getting rather tired of Italian opera, and Handel’s company wasn’t doing so well. At the same time, he was having increasing success with a form of music he more or less invented—the English oratorio. After the bishop of London made it illegal to perform staged biblical stories, Handel began writing what were basically unstaged opera with biblical subjects. Musically they were a lot like operas, but made more use of the chorus.

By 1738, Handel was concentrating on oratorio. He had just presented Saul and Israel in Egypt, and he probably wasn’t planning to bother with an opera that year. The subscription season had been cancelled because of lack of interest. This changed when he heard that two Italian singers, Constanza Piantanida, known as La Posterla, and her daughter were coming to London. He decided to capitalize on the interest they aroused by creating an opera for them. He didn’t have a lot of time, and so he quickly assembled what is called a “pastiche opera.” This means he took an existing libretto—in this case Giove in Argo, by Antonio Lucchini, which he had heard with music composed by Antonio Lotti in Dresden 20 years earlier. Then, into the libretto, he inserted previously written arias designed to show off the particular skills of the singers he had on hand. Pastiches were fairly common— they were kind of the “juke-box musicals” of their day. Handel had already created several others. They often contained music from a wide variety of composers, but in this case Handel stuck with his own music.

He took arias from his previous works Acis and Galatea, Alcina, Arminio, Atalanta, Berenice, Ezio, Faramondo, Giustino, Parnasso in festa, Scipione, Teseo, and Il Trionfo del Tempo, as well as an opera he was still working on, Imeneo. So if you’ve heard any of these operas, you might recognize an aria here and there—Handel’s audience certainly would have. One of the best-known today is “Tornami a vagheggiar” from Alcina. Joan Sutherland was very fond of this one—in fact when she sang the title role in Alcina, she appropriated the aria, even though it was supposed to be sung by another character. It’s number 21 in our score, and if you’re curious you can hear Joan Sutherland singing it on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIX6ILuSbo0&feature=related). As a rule, pastiches had little or nothing new in them. But Handel didn’t just use familiar material, he also composed new music—three arias from an opera he was still working on, three brand new arias and a couple of ariosos, the final chorus, and the recitatives. Something approaching a third of the opera would have been new to its audience.

Documentation of the first performance is practically nonexistent. It wasn’t advertised as an opera—it was called “a dramatical composition intermixed with choruses and 2 concertos on the organ.” Because of this, some people wonder whether it was staged at all or just performed in concert the way we’re doing it. But most likely it had some staging, since several contemporary letters speak of it as an opera. The first night audience was fairly large because people were curious to hear and see La Posterla and her daughter, who seem to have been the object of a certain amount of tabloid-like gossip. One of those contemporary letters I mentioned was mostly about the rumor that Constanza was trying to convince people her daughter was actually her sister, so she wouldn’t have to admit her age (she was in her forties). Unfortunately the Italian singers turned out not to be as gifted as Handel had been led to believe: the mother, who sang Isis, had a voice too small for the theatre, and the daughter, who sang Diana, was completely inexperienced. After the second performance, they left, and the opera closed.

The score is lost, so for many years no one knew what pieces Handel had chosen to put together his pastiche. And so the work was virtually forgotten. In the 1930s, two variations of the libretto were discovered, and from them, music scholars were able to work out more or less which arias had been used. Guided by the libretto, they began to reconstruct the score. But there were two arias no one could track down. Many of the recitatives were also missing. Just a few years ago, musicologist John H. Roberts solved the mystery of the missing arias, when he discovered them in a manuscript in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. It turned out the arias weren’t by Handel at all. They were what is called “suitcase arias”—pieces the diva brings along with her and makes the composer insert in the opera somewhere—from an opera called Lucio Vero written by Francesco Araia. I admit I’d never heard of Araia, but when I looked him up I discovered that his main claim to fame (other than being included in a Handel opera) is that he brought Italian opera to Russia, where he lived for quite a while and wrote the first Russian-language opera. Constanza had previously sung his arias in St. Petersburg, and now she added them to Isis’s part—“Ombra che pallida” and the accompanied recitative that precedes it (numbers 24 and 25 in our score), and “Questa d’un fido amore” (number 29).

So now the main missing pieces of the opera were filled in. All that was still lost were the recitatives for acts 2 and 3. Two musicologists, Steffen Vos and Thomas Synofzik, leaped in ahead of Roberts with a reconstruction presented (and recorded) in Bayreuth in 2006 (kind of stealing his thunder). Roberts’s own reconstruction was performed in May 2007 at the Handel Festspiele in Göttingen and then in Hanover (and it was recorded as well). Except for these performances, we will be the first to sing this opera in 269 years.

You’ve probably noticed that the plot of Jupiter in Argos is a little hard to follow. Partly that’s because it’s a pastiche, so arias had to be shoehorned in where they didn’t exactly fit. But really, the plot is no more absurd than a lot of Baroque operas. The conventions of the pastoral, where noblemen and women masqueraded as Arcadian shepherds, would have been much more familiar to Handel’s audience than they are to us today. So would the stories of classical mythology. Librettists could afford to be playful with the myths and trust their audience to catch the references. The story of this opera is only marginally connected to its mythological sources, but here’s a little background, so you can see what kinds of fun the librettist was having.

Jove (or Jupiter), the leader of the gods, famously chased after every attractive young thing he saw—in fact, sometimes it seems like that’s all he ever did. The two heroines he woos in the opera are two of his best-known conquests. Isis, in this context, is actually Io, a priestess of Jupiter's wife Juno. After Jupiter had his way with her, she was turned into a cow—either by Juno, who was jealous, or by Jupiter to protect her from Juno, depending on which version you listen to. Juno sent a gadfly to torment the cow, which chased her all the way to Egypt. There she became conflated with the goddess Isis (maybe because Isis often wore symbolic cow horns on her head). As Isis, Io was indeed married to Osiris, who is her lover in this opera. The mythological Osiris was also Isis’s brother, although the librettist has understandably omitted that detail. As in the opera, Io’s father was named Inachus, but he was not a king of Arcadia who was deposed and murdered—he was a river god.

The opera’s version of Calisto (whose name means “beautiful”) matches its source a bit more closely. Her father really was Lycaon, a mythological king of Arcadia, although he didn’t kill anyone to become king. Still, even though he didn’t commit the crimes he’s accused of in this opera, he was not a nice person. He is best known for serving Jupiter a meal of roasted human flesh (possibly from one of his 50 sons) to see if he would notice. Jupiter did notice, and retaliated by turning Lycaon into a wolf. Lycaon's daughter Calisto was a companion of the goddess Diana the huntress, and Diana did make her swear to preserve her chastity, just as in the opera. After Calisto lost her virginity to Jupiter, thus breaking her vow, the angry Diana turned her into a bear. Jupiter later made her a constellation, and she is now Ursa Major, the Great Bear (more familiar to us as the Big Dipper). Handel’s audience would have known the story of Calisto the bear, so they probably would have been amused by the action-packed last scene of the opera, which is set in motion when Isis enters—pursued by a bear.

The audience was even more likely to be amused by the way Jupiter magnanimously renounces his pursuit of both girls in the end, because he is so impressed by their purity. This was not Jupiter’s customary procedure. In the myths, he successfully seduced both our heroines, which is why two of the moons of the planet Jupiter are named Io and Calisto in their honor. (This means Calisto's in the heavens twice.)

This way of using figures of Classical antiquity as characters who are, on the whole, like people of the composer’s own time, is very common in baroque opera. In many other ways, as well, Jupiter in Argos is a typical baroque opera. Its central feature is a string of brilliant da capo arias. These consist of an A section, a contrasting B section, and then a repetition of the A section. This repetition was the singers’ chance to show off, since they were expected to improvise all kinds of elaborate ornamentation the second time around. As a pastiche, Jupiter in Argos is a collection of hit tunes, so the level of vocal fireworks would be particularly high. The words of an aria were just a few lines, repeated over and over, and the texts tended to be somewhat general. Usually they depicted some kind of intense emotional state. This is what made pasticcio operas possible—when an aria is just saying “I’m jealous” or “I’ve been abandoned” or “I shall die bravely” it’s pretty easy to pick it up and move it to another plot where the same emotion occurs. (In contrast, imagine trying to move, say, “Mi chiamano Mimi” into another opera.) The da capo aria dominated baroque opera—ensemble numbers were very rare. Jupiter contains only one, a duet for Aretes and Calisto.

The plot was carried almost entirely by the recitatives, when people explain what’s going on, and converse with each other. There were two kinds of recitative. One is secco, which was used to get through long swatches of speech. It has pitches and rhythm assigned to each syllable, but tries to more or less simulate the pattern of natural speech. It’s accompanied only by a continuo, which is usually a harpsichord, sometimes joined by a bass instrument. The secco recitatives for acts II and III are the one part of Jupiter that seems to be irretrievably lost. In our edition they have been reconstructed by John Roberts.

Then there’s recitativo accompagnato, which is accompanied by the orchestra and more songlike, but still keeps some of the characteristics of speech. The accompagnato sections of Jupiter are all Handel’s, except for the one by Araia. Next is arioso, which lies somewhere in between accompagnato and aria—it’s sung, with orchestration, but doesn’t have the formal structure of an aria. Isis has a couple of arioso pieces—numbers six and seven in your scores. To get the idea of the difference between arioso and accompagnato, think of the beginning of the Messiah. When the tenor sings “Comfort ye my people” that’s arioso. When he reaches “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness” it becomes accompagnato recitative.

Like a typical baroque opera of the period, Jupiter in Argos is mostly made up of these elements, but there are also some ways in which it’s rather unusual. As I mentioned earlier, Handel was moving away from opera and toward oratorio by the time he composed Jupiter. One sign of this is that, unlike most of Handel’s operas, there is no role for a castrato. But the most notable feature of the opera is its unusually large, almost oratorio-like, number of choruses. If you include the two choruses we repeat, this work has ten choruses—more than any other of Handel’s forty or so operas. By including so many choruses, Handel was probably hoping to use the success of his oratorios to revive the public’s waning interest in Italian opera. He could also have been taking advantage of the improved choral forces he had assembled to perform his oratorios. Whatever the reason, it’s certainly nice for us.

--Janet Pascal, Chorale Member and Chorale Music Librarian