PROGRAM NOTES "Hercules"
Although George Frideric Handel arrived in London in 1710 hoping to build a new operatic empire, audiences and critics resisted the genre’s charm—and by the early 1730s, it was clear that Handel needed to find a new form for his compositions. The oratorio proved the perfect solution. Like opera, the genre relied on the alternation of recitative and aria; unlike opera, oratorios were rarely staged and used the chorus more extensively. In addition, Handel’s oratorios used English texts and were usually based on familiar Bible stories, making them more accessible than operas to audiences who didn’t have the modern benefit of supertitles. As Newburgh Hamilton describes the genre in the preface to the libretto for Samson, “...Mr. Handel had so happily here introduc’d Oratorios, a musical drama, whose subject must be Scriptural, and in which the Solemnity of Church-Musick is agreeably united with the most pleasing Airs of the Stage.” In uniting “the Solemnity of Church-Musick” with the “Airs of the Stage,” Handel created something that appealed to a broad cross-section of London society—and he quickly recognized its potential. In the early 1740s, he stopped composing Italian opera, opening his 1743 season at Covent Garden with his new oratorio, Samson. By the spring of 1744, the rival Italian opera company at the King’s Theater was doing so poorly that their collapse seemed imminent.
Handel’s new formula seemed guaranteed to succeed, but two of his subsequent works—Semele and Hercules—suggest that he may have been striving for more than simply replicating a product that had already met with approval. In 1743, the Italian opera company—facing its potential demise—attempted to commission two new operas from Handel for the fee of one thousand pounds. Handel rejected their offer, choosing instead to write a new work “from Dryden’s words”—a move that angered not only the company, but many of its supporters. Furthermore, Handel’s abandonment of Italian opera—despite its waning popularity—heightened public perception of him as an aggressive competitor; as Horace Walpole wrote after Samson’s premiere, “Handel has set up an Oratorio against the Operas, and succeeds.” His copyist and business manager, Christopher Smith, wondered whether Handel might be alienating a large number of potential audience members, worrying “how the Quality [i.e., the audience] will take it that he can compose for Himself and not for them when they offered Him more than ever he had in his Life.” Smith’s concern may have been well-founded. In 1744 Handel premiered Semele, a work written in English and “performed in the style of an oratorio,” but with a story taken from Greek mythology. Semele was not well-received, in large part because of its secular subject matter. One witness called it “a baudy Opera,” while another reported that although she liked it, “all the Opera people were enraged at Handel,” and that her minister husband would not go to see it, “it being a profane story.”
Despite Semele’s mixed reviews, Handel tried to bring secular elements into the oratorio’s sacred realm one more time. In the summer of 1744, he composed two major works, Belshazzar and Hercules, which he planned to include in an ambitious subscription series featuring 24 performances between that autumn and the following spring. Following poor attendance at the first two productions, Deborah and Semele, Handel hoped that Hercules’ premiere in January 1745 would breathe new life into the series, and even cast Susanna Cibber—well-known not only for her acting skills, but also for a recent sex scandal—in the role of Lichas. Despite Cibber’s attention-grabbing presence, Hercules didn’t do well. In describing the difficulties Handel encountered in his 1744–45 subscription series, Charles Jennings singles out Hercules as one of the season’s main problems:
…instead of an Oratorio [Handel] produces an English Opera call’d Hercules, which he performs on Saturdays during the run of Plays, Concerts, Assemblys, Drums, Routs, Hurricanes, & all the madness of Town Diversions. His Opera, for want of the top Italian voices, Action, Dresses, Scenes & Dances, which us’d to draw company, & prevent the Undertakers losing above 3 or 4 thousand pounds, had scarce half a house the first night, much less than half the second, & has been quiet ever since.
Although Jennings cites the lack of staging and the “top Italian voices” as the reason for Hercules’ failure, his comments also highlight a more fundamental problem: as with Semele, audiences didn’t really understand what Hercules was supposed to be. An unstaged work in English that makes extensive use of the chorus, Hercules seems to be in the oratorio tradition. On the other hand, its mythological subject matter and focus on an individual, rather than the fate of an entire group of people, is more typical of opera. Handel himself designated the work a “musical drama,” while Jennings refers to it as an “English opera.” While some scholars interpret this ambiguity as evidence that Handel still longed to produce Italian opera, others suggest that Handel was trying to forge something uniquely his own rather than to create a surreptitious outlet for unfulfilled musical expression. As Todd Gilman has recently written, Hercules consciously brings together several different traditions of music drama: the English oratorio (language, performance style, and use of the chorus); Italian opera (use of arias and aria structure); and English opera (use of exotic people who were “deemed unfit for English spoken drama”). At a time when exactly what constituted “English opera” was still hotly debated, perhaps Hercules represents Handel’s own distinct voice in the conversation.
With a libretto by Thomas Broughton based on Sophocles’s Trachinae (The Women of Trachis) and book nine of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hercules actually centers on the story of Dejanira, Hercules’ wife. Fearing that her husband has fallen in love with Iole, the beautiful princess whom he has taken captive, Dejanira tries to rekindle Hercules’ passion with a robe she believes to be a love charm, but which ultimately brings about her husband’s death. The story’s precise details differ from source to source, and Broughton’s retelling makes several significant alterations that offer interesting insight into eighteenth-century English culture. In Ovid’s version, the question of Hercules’ infidelity remains open, whereas Hercules is undeniably unfaithful in Sophocles’ tale. Broughton takes the issue to an extreme, creating a Hercules who is beyond reproach and is even deified at the end, while Dejanira—whose reactions in other tellings range from oblivious to enraged—appears deluded, even paranoid. Broughton also gives Dejanira a different fate: rather than killing herself, Dejanira succumbs to an insanity that becomes virtually inevitable over the course of the work.
According to Handel scholar David Ross Hurley, the emphasis on Dejanira’s melancholy, paranoia, and ultimate madness showcases the pervasive set of contemporary beliefs about hysteria (also known as hypochondria, melancholy, spleen, or vapors), thought to be one of the most common female afflictions. As one contemporary medical treatise puts it, in the intermediate stages of hysteria women are troubled with
The most insulting Passions of Anger, Jealousy, Suspicion, and whatever else can disturb the tranquility of their peace. Their Breasts are Strangers and even Enemies to Joy, Hope, and Gladness ... . And as they are thus wavering and unsteady in their judgments, neither do they observe a Rectitude in any One Action of Life: now they love a person to excess, presently after they hate him in the other Extreme ... . thro’ the whole Scene of their Lives, you shall observe them constant to nothing but Inconstancy; always wavering, unsteady ...
Dejanira follows a strikingly similar trajectory in Handel and Broughton’s Hercules. Notably “constantly inconstant” in mood, her irrational jealousy and suspicion—which the emphasis on Hercules’ innocence makes even more prominent—provide the catalyst for her ultimate unraveling. Handel’s musical characterization makes Dejanira’s state of mind particularly vivid. We learn of Dejanira’s melancholy right from the start, first through the herald Lichas’s description and then in her dramatic accompanied recitative (“O Hercules! why art thou absent from me?”) and aria (“The world, when day’s career is run”), whose deceptively pleasant opening is undercut with disturbing flickers of chromaticism. In Act II, Dejanira’s sadness progresses to rapidly shifting states of mind as she dramatically confronts Iole, angrily accuses Hercules of infidelity, and then becomes jarringly cheerful upon arriving at a solution to her presumably self-created predicament. Dejanira completes the gamut of emotions at the end of Act II, when she apologizes to Iole and the pair sing an exuberant duet (“Joys of freedom, joys of pow’r”). The joyful mood, heightened by the lively chorus “Love and Hymen, hand in hand,” vanishes at the start of Act III, as we learn of the tragic events that have taken place. Dejanira’s fate becomes clear in the remarkable recitative and aria, “Where shall I fly?” and “See the dreadful sisters rise.” Throughout both recitative and aria, Handel uses surprising changes in meter, tempo, and key to signify her instability, while free repetitions of phrase of text accentuate her obsessive thoughts. Handel also disguises the formal division between the two sections,
perhaps calling attention to Dejanira’s own blurred boundary between reality and insanity. Although Hercules’ conclusion offers an easy resolution of the events that have transpired, Broughton’s portrayal of Dejanira’s descent into madness—and Handel’s masterful musical characterization—ultimately undermines any possibility of an easy peace.
