Naxos to release Cecilia's recording of "The Construction of Boston."
The CD of Composer in Residence Scott Wheeler's opera will be released during 2008. The libretto, as well as program notes from the April 2007 concert performance, are available now.

"Teeters and his classy cast and players offered the first truly satisfying performance I’ve heard... If I ever forget what a superb programmer he's been over his 39 years of directing Boston Cecilia, remind me of this concert."

-Lloyd Schwartz, The Boston Phoenix, Apr. 5, 2007. Read the review!

Introducing New Music: Recent and Right Now, presenting the music of up-and-coming composers, in collaboration with Scott Wheeler. Annual series debuts in June 2008!

In December 1722, Francesca Cuzzoni arrived in London from Italy for her debut as part of Handel's opera company. She became an immensely popular artist remaining with the company for six years, and creating some of Handel's most inspired roles. Legend has it that she was not among history's more benign personalities. In that very first opera, Ottone, in which she had the principal soprano role, preparations went badly. When she declared in rehearsal her unwillingness to sing the aria Falsa immagine (Lisa Saffer made no such declaration in relation to tonight's performance!) Handel accused her of being not just a she-devil but Beelzebub himself and swore that if she said any more words he would fling her out the window. Cuzzoni's rivalry, both personal and professional, with another Italian soprano, Faustina Bordoni, who joined the company later, became so open and notorious that the whole town (at least the musical part, the Italian opera partisans) took up sides in vigorous, sometimes volatile defense of one or the other prima donna.

Of far more interest, though, than her temperamental nature is the fact that Cuzzoni must have been a compelling musical artist. Handel created some of his most memorable character portraits, as well as some of his finest music for her. She was the first Cleopatra. Breaking with tradition, Handel gave her eight major arias in that role, an unheard of assignment for a leading operatic character at the time. At an early appearance in London, a cry came out of the top balcony in response to a Cuzzoni aria: "Damn her! she's got a nest of nightingales in her belly!"

It is Handel's devotion to the human voice that marks his career as a composer above any other aspect of the musician's art. It was to Italy that he was irresistibly drawn at the age of twenty-one, to the acknowledged home of the world's greatest singers and the many fine composers who gave them their notes. He needed to find out what they knew. Find out he did, laying the foundation for his entire future life as a composer.

At first glance, the works gathered together for this concert under the title "The Italian Handel" might seem a non sequitur (why those Messiah choruses, for instance?) or even, to some, redundancy — couldn't almost any random selection of his mature works carry that title with some degree of accuracy? The works themselves are drawn from three periods of Handel's life: the slightly more than three-year period from late 1706 to early 1710, when Handel traveled, studied, composed, and performed in the major musical centers of Italy; the 1720s, when, working in London, he created some of his greatest Italian operatic masterpieces; and the year 1741, in London, after the collapse of his operatic enterprise, when his most enduring work, Messiah, was conceived, worked out, and brought to performance.

During his years in Italy the boy became a man, the focus of his art was identified, and the tools for implementing it were acquired. He met the great composers of the time: both Scarlattis, Vivaldi, Corelli, Caldara, Albinoni. He attracted influential patronage within the church and among the nobility. He composed two oratorios based on existing Italian practice that were thus different in style and character from his later London masterpieces. His first great opera, Agrippina, was performed at Venice. And, proving that adversity can be turned to profit, a papal ban on operatic performances in Rome elicited from Handel a staggering number of cantatas, some of which were operas in miniature, some in the nature of operatic scenas. Many of these proved fertile ground thematically and/or dramatically for harvesting later in other works.

Three Latin Psalm settings survive from Handel's Italian years. In addition to Nisi Dominus and Dixit Dominus, being performed tonight, there is a setting of Laudate Pueri (Psalm 113). All purport to date from 1707. They were perhaps included in the Carmelite Vespers for the Feast of the Madonna del Carmine on July 16 of that year. In order to create a complete Vespers service (five psalms and the Magnificat), music of other composers would have had to be included, not in itself an unusual situation. Since the three Handel psalms have substantial stylistic differences among them, it is at least perhaps open to conjecture whether they were composed especially for that event (or even, as some have wondered, in close proximity to each other.)

Nisi Dominus begins with an orchestral figure reminiscent of the 1727 coronation anthem Zadok the Priest, which introduces a chorus in concerto grosso style and includes a psalm tone that will reappear in the final chorus. The work proceeds through solo movements for tenor, alto, bass, and again tenor. Of particular interest are the darting scale passages in the bass aria Sicut sagittae in mano potentis ("Like arrows in the hand of a warrior"), a typical Handelian response to vivid verbal imagery.

Dixit Dominus, though dating from the same year, seems a more mature work, full of memorable gestures and vitality. A particularly poignant moment is the duet for two sopranos, De torrente in via bibet ("He will drink from the brook beside the road") surely one of the most exquisite moments in all of Handel.

Early in 1710 Handel left Italy, working his way eventually to England, which was to remain his home for the next forty-nine years.

By 1741, Handel's hopes for a revival of interest in Italian opera in London had been finally laid to rest. There seems to be no clear reason why he spent the early summer composing Italian duets, but it is characteristic of the man that, pleased with the results, he would make subsequent good use of them. The two duet groups being performed tonight were completed in the first week of July of that year. A month and a half later, he found memorable second use for the material in his most famous work. We are calling them "Messiah" duets, but of course Messiah was still only a gleam in a parental eye at this point. That the music Handel conceived to embellish some relatively benign Italian texts could be reassigned by him to some far from benign sacred texts offers a major lesson in the workings of the mind of the master. It also teaches us something about the attitude of universal adaptability of musical materials that was widely held in the eighteenth century.

As I said earlier, Handel loved the human voice and the singer, even when tempers flared. But his patience had limits. One young tenor threatened to jump on the harpsichord because he thought the composer's playing was too competitive. Handel's reply: "Let me know when you will do that, and I will advertise it; for I am sure more people will come to see you jump than to hear you sing."

- Donald Teeters

The Boston Cecilia performed these pieces at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall in Boston on November 16, 2002.

© 2004 Donald Teeters. All rights reserved.

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