Handel's Path to Covent Garden
BEFORE MESSIAH CAME THE BATTLE FOR LONDON'S OPERA STAGE
George Frideric Handel is celebrated throughout the world for Messiah and his English oratorios. Yet for much of his career, his greatest ambition-and his most perilous undertaking-was Italian opera.
Handel's Path to Covent Garden examines the turbulent period in the 1730s when changing public taste, fierce theatrical competition, political patronage, financial pressure, and Handel's own decisions as composer and impresario placed his operatic career in jeopardy.
As Italian opera declined in popularity, Handel was forced to leave the Haymarket theatre and establish himself at Covent Garden. There he attempted to continue his operatic enterprise while competing against the newly founded Opera of the Nobility, supported by the Prince of Wales and promoted as a fashionable rival to Handel's company.
The struggle involved far more than music. Singers, aristocratic patrons, theatre managers, political factions, national loyalties, newspaper controversy, and the preferences of London audiences all influenced which company would survive.
This study explores:
- Handel's career as an opera composer and impresario
- The decline of Italian opera seria in London
- The collapse and reorganisation of Handel's operatic ventures
- His departure from the Haymarket theatre
- His move to the new theatre at Covent Garden
- The rival Opera of the Nobility
- The role of the Prince of Wales and aristocratic patronage
- Handel's difficult relationship with London's Italian community
- Business decisions that threatened his company and career
- The introduction of French elements and other theatrical innovations
- His efforts to regain a disenchanted public
- The eventual transition from Italian opera towards English oratorio
Handel's musical innovations are considered alongside the commercial, theatrical, political, and cultural pressures that helped produce them. His path to Covent Garden reveals a composer responding to crisis-experimenting with new forms and attractions while struggling to preserve the operatic enterprise to which he had devoted decades.
More than an account of one composer's career, this is a study of eighteenth-century London as a competitive theatrical marketplace where music, fashion, politics, patronage, and personality continually collided.
Handel's Path to Covent Garden will appeal to Handel admirers, opera lovers, performers, students of eighteenth-century music, and readers interested in Georgian London and the history of the theatre.
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