L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato
English oratorio in three parts
Words adapted by Charles Jennens from John Milton
First performance: London, February 27, 1740
Program Notes by Martin Pearlman
At the time that Handel composed L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato, in the beginning of the year 1740, London was in the grip of one of the worst cold spells in its history. The Thames was frozen over and the public theaters were closed for two months. To promote the premiere on February 27, the London Daily Post announced, "Particular care is taken to have the House secur'd against the Cold, constant Fires being order'd to be kept in the House 'till the Time of Performance."
The concert was a great success, and Handel subsequently performed the work many times. The success of L'Allegro was especially important for him, coming, as it did, after his low fortunes of the past several years. His opera company had collapsed, many of his recent works had failed, and he himself had suffered a stroke.
During the late 1730's and early 1740's, Handel gradually turned from Italian opera, which was losing popularity, toward the kind of oratorio for which he was known in his later years. L'Allegro, belonging to this transitional time, is not an easy work to classify, and Handel himself never referred to it as an oratorio, an ode, a serenade, a mask, or any other type of work. It is perhaps its uniqueness, the fact that it is not one of the operas or one of the oratorios, that accounts in part for why the work is not better known today, that as well as the fact that it makes too little use of the chorus to find its way into the normal repertoire of choral societies -- and that its Italian title disguises the fact that it is in English.
L'Allegro is, however, one of Handel's most consistently inspired and inventive works, and his orchestration is unusually colorful. There are important solos for a wide range of instruments: flute, horn, bells, cello, oboe, bassoon, organ; there is a continuo aria, and even the string writing has more varied coloration than in many of his works. No doubt all this was inspired in part by the imagery in the poetry, as are the wonderful depictions of the cricket on the hearth, the hunt, the warbling bird, "the busy hum of men," the tongue-in-cheek portrayal of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and many other images. The most famous characterization is perhaps that of "Laughter ho-ho-holding both his sides." The late eighteenth-century tenor, Michael Kelly, described his own performance of that aria: "I laughed all the way through it, as I conceived it ought to be sung, and as must have been the intention of the composer: the infection ran; and their Majesties, and the whole audience, as well as the orchestra, were in a roar of laughter, and a signal was given from the royal box to repeat it, and I sang it again with increased effect."
The libretto
The texts of Parts I and II are based on the two delightful companion poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso written in the previous century by the 22-year-old John Milton. The first of these poems depicts the joys of the active or extroverted life, the second the joys of the contemplative or introverted life. Milton's poems were adapted for Handel's use by Charles Jennens, the librettist who also supplied Handel with texts for Messiah, Saul, and other works. Although Jennens' reputation has suffered because of his ostentatious lifestyle and his high opinion of himself, there is no denying that his librettos were well worked out and inspiring to Handel. For Messiah, written in 1741, Jennens was to select and arrange biblical quotations. Similarly, in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, he selected and arranged lines from Milton's poems (omitting about a third of the total number of lines) that he felt to be best suited to a musical setting. Rather than keep the two poems as separate companion pieces, he alternated sections from each of them, so that Parts I and II of the oratorio contain elements of both L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, thus allowing for more frequent changes of character in the music.
While for the most part, Jennens limited himself to omitting some of Milton's lines and interspersing sections from the two poems, he did occasionally change the poetry. The original line, ''Towered cities please us then," was altered to the more prosaic "Populous cities please us then." Some changes are even greater:
But, first and chiefest, with thee bring
Him that yon soars on golden wing,
Guiding the fiery wheeled throne,
The Cherub Contemplation.
These lines of Milton are condensed in Jennens' libretto to:
First and chief on gold wing,
The cherub Contemplation bring.
But then Jennens did something which he did not dare to do with the biblical text of Messiah. He added after Milton's poetry a final section of his own, which he called Il Moderato to represent the rational golden mean between L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. But Jennens' poetry was, of course, insubstantial next to the genius of Milton's, and, to his chagrin, some wags in the audience dubbed his portion of the work Il Moderatissimo.
Unfortunately, the music to Il Moderato has sometimes been ignored because of the less inspired poetry. Handel did later omit that section of his oratorio from his performances, but the miracle of this short third part of the work is that, despite the poetry and despite the difficulty of making Moderation interesting, Handel's setting remains on the high level of the first two parts. The chorus, "All this company serene," is certainly on the level of the best choruses in the first two parts; and in the aria, "Each action will derive new grace," the angular displaced bar lines at the words "order, measure, time, and place" and at "due proportion" are an inspired touch. The highlight of the third part, though, is the duet, "As steals the morn upon the night," the only ensemble piece in the entire work, which is not only the culmination of the oratorio but also one of the sublime moments in all of Handel's oratorios. The final chorus in praise of Moderation, which follows this moving duet, seems at first a curiously subdued ending, but it is ultimately effective, returning to the middle ground and making use of the Dorian mode, a scale which Aristotle calls the sedate mean between the extremes of the other modes.
Mirth and melancholy
Without characters playing out a story, the drama of this oratorio comes from the tension between L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, the active and the contemplative and the imagery with which the poetry depicts them. Both the poems and the music portray them with subtlety: L'Allegro's music is not always fast and bright, nor is Il Penseroso's always slow and dark. The Melancholy of ll Penseroso is not the sadness or depression with which it is sometimes associated today. Rather, it is related to the Renaissance notion of inspired divine contemplation, aspiring, as the poem says, "to something like prophetic strain." It is reminiscent of Dürer's portrait of Melencolia. The opening recitative of Part II makes clear that it is related to the mystical Hermetic tradition of the Renaissance. Toward the end of Part II, Melancholy is associated with the spiritual power of music:
And let their sweetness through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heav'n before mine eyes.
Although it is Saturnian and belongs to the night, Melancholy is ecstatic. The Mirth of L'Allegro, on the other hand, can become quiet and slow at times, such as at the end of Part I, where night falls and everyone goes to sleep; yet, despite its subdued character, this is still the world of L'Allegro, the world of the physical, which is active only in the sunlight.
In this oratorio, we feel the presence of both Milton and Handel, who were not only a century apart but were also quite different personalities. It is tempting to suggest that, while the poet may have leaned temperamentally in the direction of Il Penseroso, the composer may have leaned more toward L'Allegro.
Concerti grossi
Handel's concerts were very long by modern standards. He normally performed a concerto grosso before Part I of L'Allegro, another concerto grosso before Part II, and an organ concerto before Part III. Eventually he dropped Part III, but, in order to make sure that the audience got its money's worth, he ended the concert with a performance of another large work, the Ode for St. Cecilia.
Since the oratorio has no overture and begins with a recitative, it seems advisable to follow Handel's practice of preceding it with an instrumental piece. In the year before he wrote L'Allegro, he composed the twelve concerti grossi of his Opus 6, some of which he later used as overtures or interludes in his oratorio performances. It was no doubt for that purpose that he wrote out oboe parts for four of them (nos. 1, 2, 5, and 6) -- even though the printed edition of the concertos was for strings alone. The first concerto of Opus 6 in particular was one that Handel often used as an overture to L'Allegro.
Instruments
Handel used both harpsichord and organ as continuo instruments, and some descriptions of his oratorio performances tell us that he could call on a violone to double the cello and keyboard at the lower octave for recitatives. Knowing that he himself would be at the organ, Handel also left room to display his own celebrated powers of improvisation. In the chorale, "There let the pealing organ blow," each phrase is followed by an empty measure with the indication "Organo ad libitum." And in the following aria, "May at last my weary age," the score indicates that the organ should improvise on the fugue subject that would then be heard in the next chorus. It is a fascinating but daunting challenge for organists.
For the aria and chorus at the end of Part I, "Or let the merry bells ring round," Handel is known to have used some sort of keyboard instrument that played bells or bars of metal. It is no doubt the same instrument that Handel had had constructed for his oratorio Saul one year earlier. His librettist, Charles Jennens, obviously not taken with it, described it in a letter:
Mr. Handel's head is more full of maggots than ever. I found yesterday in his room a very queer instrument which he calls carillon and says some call it a Tubelcain, I suppose because it is both in the make and tone like a set of Hammers striking upon anvils. 'Tis played upon with keys like a Harpsichord and with this Cyclopean instrument he designs to make poor Saul stark mad.
Although Handel evidently did use a "carillon" in this piece, neither of his scores has a part for such an instrument. Some modern performances have used a carillon-like instrument to double the first violins, while some have turned to a more elaborate part for the instrument found in one contemporary manuscript. (It is reprinted in the Hallische Handel Ausgabe.) As for the actual instrument, what it was remains a matter of speculation. It does not survive, and Jennens' description of it is hardly enough to reconstruct it. But whether a modern-day performance uses a newly created instrument or a more traditional orchestral solution, such as celesta reinforced by glockenspiel, it clearly needs to have a strong enough sound to be effective in places where it doubles the violins or the chorus.
The other unusual instrument in L'Allegro is a contrabassoon which Handel specifies for a mere eight bars of the chorus, "There let the pealing organ blow." Some years later, the historian Charles Bumey reported that, although the instrument was built for Handel, it did not work, since no one in England at the time could make a reed that would play reliably in such a low range.
Performing version
Handel performed so many different versions of L'Allegro that Messiah, with all its variants, looks simple by comparison. Arias were added or omitted in later performances, and the order of pieces was changed. Pieces were transposed from one voice range to another, or rewritten to suit the voice of a particular singer who happened to be working with Handel in a given season. A few arias were even added in Italian at one point for the newly arrived Italian castrato, Andreoni. Most of these changes were opportunistic, made for the singers who were most interesting to the public and available to Handel at a certain time, but with others, Handel appears to have been trying to improve the work on musical grounds. No doubt altering the music for different performances was easier for a work like this that has no clear story line to preserve. The greatest single revision came in some later performances, when Handel omitted Part III, Il Moderato, and, in order to avoid ending with an Il penseroso praise of Melancholy, he changed the order of Part II and ended with a L'Allegro chorus.
It is impossible to come up with a definitive version of L'Allegro from the manuscript sources or, for that matter, even with a version that represents a fixed stage in Handel's performing practice, as we can with the several well known versions of Messiah. Of the several manuscript sources, the most important are Handel's autograph, which is not entirely complete, and a manuscript by his copyist J. C. Smith, both of which Handel used in his own performances. Within each of them, we find different forms of the same aria, changes in the order of pieces, additions and deletions.
In these manuscripts, we also often find the names of several different singers written next to a single aria, telling us that, in various performances, Handel used different types of voices for the same aria. One piece may have been sung sometimes by a boy soprano, sometimes a female soprano, or by a tenor. Another aria may have been sung by a soprano or sometimes by a bass, and a third by a soprano or an alto. A few general observations about Handel's soloists seem clear: for one, he appears always to have used more than one soprano soloist, an understandable choice, since not only are there many soprano arias, but also because the soprano is the only voice to have both Allegro and Penseroso music. Together with the women sopranos, Handel sometimes included a boy, and, in the 1741 London season, he included as one of his sopranos the Italian castrato, Andreoni (whose arias were sung in Italian translation). Handel's earliest performances had no alto soloist, but on his visit to Dublin in 1741, he contracted the mezzo-soprano Susanna Cibber to sing the alto solos in several of his oratorios, and from that time, his L'Allegro scores include alto versions of certain arias, as well as the name of Mrs. Cibber (listed as a contralto).
Boston Baroque Performances
L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato
October 9, 1981
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
Soloists:
Nancy Armstrong, soprano
Susan Larson, soprano
Jeffrey Gall, countertenor
Karl Dan Sorensen, tenor
John Osborn, bass