Acis and Galatea
PROGRAM NOTES
While George Frideric Handel is best known for the music he composed for public performance, including his oratorios, operas, and music for royal occasions, his works for private settings—particularly those written during his early years in Italy and England—reveal a different facet of the composer’s personality. In recent years, Ellen Harris and other scholars have scrutinized Handel’s compositions for private use and discovered fascinating connections between Handel’s social circle and the “depth and richness of [his] musical expression.” Probably composed in its original form in 1718 and subjected to numerous revisions, Acis and Galatea—which Handel termed a “Serenata, or Pastoral Entertainment”—brings together the public and private aspects of Handel’s art.
Shortly after Handel’s arrival in London in the fall of 1712, the Earl of Burlington—whose circle included some of the city’s most creative minds—invited Handel to live with him at Burlington House. During his three years at the residence, Handel made many influential connections including the poets Alexander Pope and John Gay. (Burlington House had another sort of reputation as well: Burlington was well known for his sexual exploits, and sometimes went by the name “Mr. Buck.”) When the Earl left for the continent in 1717, Handel moved to Cannons in Edgware, north of London, and accepted the position of resident composer for James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon (later Duke of Chandos). He completed Acis and Galatea while there, in the spring of 1718. As a visitor to Cannons wrote in May 1718,
…he [the Earl] has a Chorus of his own, the Musick is made for himself and sung by
his own servants, besides which there is a little opera now a making for his
diversion whereof the musick will not be made publick. The words are to be furnished
by Mrs. Pope and Gay, the musick to be composed by Hendell; It is as good as
finished and I am promised some of the Songs by Dr. [John] Arbuthnot who is one of
the club of composers…
Although it is certainly charming and brief, Handel may have intended Acis and Galatea to be more than a pleasant diversion. In her book Handel as Orpheus, Harris links the work to the Scriblerus Club, a group headed by Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot that aimed to “expose pedantry and pretense through satire” and “maintain and improve literary standards through a close association with the classical tradition.” Based on Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 13), Pope and Gay’s libretto for Acis and Galatea indeed adheres more closely to Ovid than many other adaptations of the time. Harris suggests that Handel’s 1718 version of the work also invites an interpretation that would have been obvious to those in Handel’s social circle, i.e., a homoerotic reading in which Galatea is actually a male beloved, while the monster Polyphemus is really a vengeful woman in disguise. Although we cannot know Handel’s exact intent or how his friends might have interpreted the work, Acis and Galatea seems to have evolved in large part from the personal aims of Handel’s friends and patrons.
Despite its private origins, Acis and Galatea soon grew into a public phenomenon. Many of the songs were published (without attribution to Handel) in 1722, and in 1727 parts of the work were performed in Bristol. The first public performance took place in 1731, when Acis was mounted in London without Handel’s involvement. Thomas Arne revived the work in 1732 (again without Handel) at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket “with all the Grand Chorus’s, Scenes, Machines, and other Decorations; being the first Time it ever was performed in a Theatrical Way.” No doubt annoyed by his competitor’s attempts to capitalize on his fame, Handel quickly arranged Acis as a three-act serenata in Italian and English for his Italian company, incorporating a great deal of material from an extant cantata on the same topic, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, which he had written in 1708. (Harris points out that Handel excised many of the homoerotic elements present in the Cannons version of Acis for the 1732 performance, particularly an obvious reference to a famous poem describing same-sex love by Alexander Pope.) Handel returned to the Cannons version for subsequent performances, however, as it enabled him to rely on a small number of local musicians rather than hiring Italian singers. The version most frequently performed today—and the one heard tonight—is an amalgam of the 1718 original and its subsequent revisions.
Perhaps because of its simplicity, beauty, and the small number of singers it required, Acis and Galatea continued to be extremely popular long after Handel’s death. Other famous composers took note of the work as well. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arranged Acis at the request of Baron van Swieten, a wealthy Viennese aristocrat who had a keen interest in the music of Bach and Handel, and who assembled a group of musicians —including Mozart—to perform these composers’ music on a regular basis in his home. In 1828, Felix Mendelssohn revised the work for the Singakademie in Berlin, and in 1858 Giocomo Meyerbeer planned a staged performance in Berlin, although it never actually took place.
Synopsis
Acis and Galatea tells the story of the half-divine Galatea, whose love for the shepherd Acis is threatened by the monster Polyphemus. It is not known whether the work was originally staged, although legend has it that it was performed outside Cannons on the terraces overlooking the garden.(Scholars have pointed to the discovery of piping to supply an old fountain, suitable for the closing scene, in support of this theory.) It appears that staging continued to be minimal; as Handel described the setting in an advertisement for the 1732 performances, “There will be no Action on the Stage, but the Scene will represent, in a Picturesque Manner, a rural Prospect, with Rocks, Groves, Fountains and Grotto’s; amongst which will be disposed a Chorus of Nymphs and Shepherds, Habits, and every other Decoration suited to the Subject.”
As Part I begins, nymphs and shepherds revel in “the pleasure of the plains,” which the chorus describes in vivid detail. Galatea tries to silence the “pretty warbling quire,” however, since their beautiful song reminds her of her love for the shepherd Acis. Acis and Galatea are soon united, and their individual songs of desire ultimately culminate in a duet (“Happy we!”).
At the beginning of Part 2, the chorus brings the amorous mood to an abrupt close with “Wretched lovers,” warning of the jealous “monster Polypheme” who approaches with “ample strides.” Polyphemus makes his gruesome entrance with an extremely dramatic—and partly comic—accompanied recitative (“I rage, I melt, I burn”), in which we learn of his feelings for Galatea. He goes on to describe his unrequited emotion at length in the famous air “O ruddier than the cherry.” After Polyphemus implies that he might try to win Galatea’s love by force, the shepherd Damon advises him to try more gentle tactics first (“Would you gain the tender creature”). Acis vows to defend Galatea against Polyphemus’s “hideous love” (“Love sounds th’ alarm”). Acis and Galatea pledge eternal devotion to one another (“The flocks shall leave the mountains”), but their duet quickly becomes a trio as the enraged Polyphemus bursts on the scene, ultimately crushing Acis with a “massy ruin.” The chorus, along with Galatea, mourn Acis’s demise (“Must I my Acis still bemoan”), but soon remind Galatea of her divine powers: “Call forth thy pow’r, employ thy art, the goddess soon can heal thy smart.” Galatea turns Acis into a fountain (“Heart, the seat of soft delight”), and the chorus celebrates his newfound immortality.
