‘TROPPO AUDACE’: THE TEXT

While no longer found in the performing score, the Icarus scena is extant in both an autograph and a secondary source.Footnote ¹⁴ According to the wordbook, the accompagnato–da capo aria sequence – in effect a mini-operatic scena – was performed by Andreoni near the very end of the oratorio, directly before the final chorus, No. 40, ‘Thy pleasures, moderation give’. The wordbook prints Rolli's Italian textFootnote ¹⁵ as below, without any English translation, but I give my own translation opposite:

The Icarus myth referred to by Rolli is, of course, Ovid's treatment in book 8, lines 223–234 of the Metamorphoses, given here below in Latin, then in a 1717 translation by Samuel Croxall (a member of the Kit-Kat club, which included Dryden, Gay and Congreve, all of whom had had texts set by Handel and who jointly contributed to this translation):

Rolli refers to Ovid's account in several ways. The first lines of Andreoni's aria (‘Troppo audace Umano stuolo, / Non alzar cotanto il volo’) echo Ovid's line 223 (‘cum puer audaci coepit gaudere volatu’) (my italics), and Rolli has, like Horace, chosen to describe Icarus’ wings metonymically as ‘penne’ (Latin ‘pennas’ = quills or feathers) rather than ‘ali’ (Latin ‘alas’ = wings). Rolli's closing reference in the recitative to the etymology for the Icarian sea is a final nod to Ovid's own ending of the story.

Rolli's choice of Icarus’ tragic rejection of moderation for his new L'Allegro text not only adheres to Jennens's theme of moderation in the third part, but has the additional virtue of presenting a colourful narrative just where it may have been needed, given the somewhat mixed reception Il Moderato received on its premiere the previous season. In a February 1742 letter to Edward Holdsworth, Charles Jennens himself relates that

Handel had indeed earlier reassured his friend Jennens from Dublin, writing on 29 December 1741 that ‘I opened with the Allegro, Penseroso, & Moderato, and I assure you that the Words of the Moderato are vastly admired’.Footnote ¹⁹ While Ruth Smith has argued convincingly in several articlesFootnote ²⁰ that the text of Il Moderato resonated with mid-eighteenth-century sentiments and thus found favour with many in Handel's audience, she has also called Handel's kind words to Jennens ‘possibly the politest sentence that Handel ever wrote’.Footnote ²¹

Before these Dublin performances of L'Allegro, and only two months after inserting the Italian-texted numbers, Handel had revived the work again in London, removing Jennens's Il Moderato entirely and replacing it with his earlier 1739 Song for St. Cecilia's Day (hwv76), with its text by Dryden. After again restoring Il Moderato for the Dublin performances in December 1741 and March 1742, Handel replaced it once more with the Song for St. Cecilia's Day for all subsequent revivals (1743, 1754 and 1755). This series of changes suggests that Handel was of two minds about Il Moderato, and certainly the fact remains that Handel's settled version of L'Allegro eliminated the Jennens-texted original third part, despite any personal feelings he may have had for its music and text or for his friend Jennens. Might we discern in hindsight, in this new Italian scena inserted near the very end of a possibly weaker (or at least less appreciated) last third of the ode in its first revival, an attempt by Handel, with the help of Rolli, to invoke greater interest in a largely ‘Moderatissimo’, non-Miltonic final portion of the oratorio?

Smith observes that Jennens's text for Il Moderato is a classic eighteenth-century example of imitatio, in which poets simultaneously imitate and improve upon older literary forms. She notes that ‘readers were expected to recognise the model that was being imitated and to have it in their minds while they were reading’.Footnote ²² This would have been even more explicit for the listener-readers of Handel's L'Allegro, since Jennens's Il Moderato was not only an imitatio of Miltonian and Horatian odes, but also an intertextual imitatio of Parts One and Two of the musical work itself.Footnote ²³ Rolli's new Italian texts build on this intertextuality, generating an even more intriguing web of literary associations, both biographical and historical, including an equally complex case of imitatio, since they recall multiple poetic precursors that are themselves part of a chain of poetic echo and allusion.

As noted above, Rolli's most obvious model is Ovid. However, the Icarus myth had over the centuries acquired a rich history as a literary topos, in classical (Ovid, Horace, Lucretius, Virgil), medieval (Chaucer, Dante, BoccaccioFootnote ²⁴) and Renaissance (Petrarch, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, Guarini, Spenser, Dryden and Milton and others) drama and poetry.Footnote ²⁵ The works of most if not all of these authors would have been known to Rolli. While never translating the Aeneid, he published a translation of Virgil's Eclogues in London in 1742, a year after the L'Allegro texts,Footnote ²⁶ so he may have had Virgil in his ear. He had previously edited an Italian translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (1717), and had written dedications and annotations for several editions of Boccaccio's Decamerone (1725) and Guarini's Il pastor fido (1737).Footnote ²⁷ Tasso, Spenser and Milton are discussed and defended liberally in Rolli's 1728 Remarks upon M. Voltaire's Essay, while he provided annotations for a frequently reprinted edition of the Satire e Rime of Ariosto in 1732.Footnote ²⁸ Rolli's synthesis of literary traditions evident in the Remarks, as well as citations from Shakespeare, Petrarch, Chaucer and Boccaccio within the same paragraph in his 1729 ‘Vita di Giovanni Milton’,Footnote ²⁹ strongly suggest that Rolli saw himself within this transnational, pan-European poetic lineage.

More specifically, however, it is Rolli's quite detailed and robust defence of Milton in the Remarks, grounded in his long-term project of producing a faithful yet poetic line-by-line translation of Paradise Lost, that is perhaps most pertinent to his contribution to the bilingual revival of L'Allegro. David Quint details Milton's use of Icarian imagery in his description of Satan's flight in book 2, lines 927–938, demonstrating how Milton's ‘poetic memory’ inspired his oblique references to Virgil's Aeneid and Lucretius’ De rerum natura.Footnote ³⁰ The most famous Miltonian reference to Icarus’ flight may be found in the very first lines of the epic. In the invocation of his poetic Muse, Milton identifies Icarus not with Satan, but with himself (book 1, lines 12–16):

This audacious claim by Milton was obviously known to Rolli as translator of Paradise Lost. As Neil Forsyth notes, ‘Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme’ is a literal translation of a line from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, which itself is a clear reference to the first lines of Horace's Ode 3.1,Footnote ³² and is a link in a chain of less moralistic and more ambivalent allusions to Icarus in the Renaissance, not only by Ariosto and Milton but also by Tasso, Ariosto, Guarini, Sanazzaro, Tansillo and Garcilaso. Undoubtedly inspired, as Horace was, by the double meaning of ‘penne’ first used by Ovid for Icarus’ wings – which in both Latin and Italian signifies not only feather quills but also the writing pens fashioned from them – Icarus’ flight becomes a suitable allegory for the writer's attempt to channel either epic or amorous aspirations. While writers such as Christopher Marlowe (in Doctor Faustus) may have continued to use Icarus more traditionally as a prototype of demonic overreach, the myth was also reinterpreted by other poets as a necessary Promethean challenge, not only to the Gods but, perhaps more pointedly, to their human literary precursors. Milton's own invocation to his Muse suggests that the potential for failure in poetry lies not in the full-hearted pursuit of excellence but rather in its equally risky Daedalian opposite: an artistic ‘middle flight’ that is certainly competent, but half-hearted or unadventurous. In self-referentially glorifying or justifying not only their own poetic aspirations but man's artistic creations in general, Milton and others in this somewhat proto-romantic treatment of the Icarus myth simultaneously acknowledged their debt to an august literary pantheon and placed themselves within it.Footnote ³³

In contrast, Rolli's Icarian texts for L'Allegro adhere to the more straightforward cautionary reading of the myth – if anything, they warn against the Horatian poetic daring of his more immediate model, Milton. His first-person narrator maintains that those poets whose pens (‘penne’) have more modest aims are the wiser, and that he himself is content to watch other poets (and perhaps musicians?) elevate (‘elevare’) themselves too high and fail. This projected poetic humility certainly accorded with the via media theme of Jennens's Il Moderato, and Rolli may have been merely following a brief by keeping to the overall theme of moderation.

Yet there is a distinct autobiographical resonance in the sentiments of his first-person narrator, for Rolli spent most of his career in the shadow of two recognizably greater poets. One was, of course, John Milton, the seventeenth-century poet still considered Britain's greatest throughout the eighteenth, called in 1734 ‘the favourite poet of this nation’,Footnote ³⁴ in 1750 ‘the divine, the immortal Milton, the prince of English poets’Footnote ³⁵ and in 1796 ‘the great English author’.Footnote ³⁶ Rolli's own esteem for Milton was equally explicit and generous: he referred to Milton twice as Britain's ‘Homer’.Footnote ³⁷ As previously mentioned, he spent seventeen years translating Milton's Paradise Lost, and also wrote the libretto for the operatic pasticcio Sabrina, based on Milton's Comus, performed by the Opera of the Nobility in April 1737 at Lincoln's Inn Fields.

The second creative shadow in Rolli's life was a fellow Italian: Pietro Metastasio. A direct contemporary of Rolli's, Metastasio was the most prolific and renowned Italian opera librettist of the eighteenth century. Responsible for hundreds of opera librettos and their variants, he became the Caesarean Poet of the Habsburg imperial court in 1729. Metastasio was perhaps unique at the time in overcoming a perception, even amongst poets, that the versification of opera librettos was unworthy, a view particularly strongly held outside the great Continental operatic centres. Giuseppe Riva, a Modenese diplomat and member of the Italian circle in London in the early 1720s, writes that ‘the operas performed in England, beautiful though they are musically and vocally, are otherwise mangled (‘storpiate’) in their poetry’.Footnote ³⁸ Rolli himself thought the work of a librettist in London was beneath him, at one point referring to his opera librettos for Handel as mere ‘dramatic skeletons’ (‘dramatici scheletri’).Footnote ³⁹ George Dorris suggests that Rolli ‘undoubtedly envied his former colleague [Metastasio] the position of Caesarian Poet . . . the position, wealth, and influence of Metastasio were never to be his, and this knowledge must have galled Rolli's proud nature’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Dorris further describes Rolli, in his last years in London, as ‘tired and discouraged’, his lyric output reduced to a trickle and his only income derived from librettos for the Middlesex opera and occasional translations, before semi-retiring to Italy in 1744.Footnote ⁴¹

However, the text of ‘L'insaziabil fantasia’, if its first-person poetic persona can be read as a projection of Rolli himself, would suggest otherwise. The poet appears to be saying that, after a twenty-seven-year career in both Rome and London, he had not only come to terms with his poetic legacy but saw some virtue in its modesty. Rolli's ‘penna’, although not fated, like Milton's or Metastasio's, to ‘soar above the Aonian Mount’, at least provided him with a secure and comfortable living (‘sicuro in agiato’), even if it included relatively menial tasks such as providing parody texts for Handel at short notice. One could view this brief new Italian text for Handel as an attempt by Rolli to recast his career as ‘skeletal’ opera librettist and translator into a noble, skilled and moderate one, more Daedalian/Ovidian than Icarian/Horatian.

However autobiographical this may have been, Rolli's temperate outlook as expressed in the text also adhered to the tone and message of the rest of Il Moderato. Take, for example, Jennens's text for the first air in Part Three:

While Rolli and Jennens display the expected spirit of moderation in the Augustan Age, there were also contemporary writers who instead followed Milton's lead in tracing the parallel, contradictory strain also found in Horace, which saw Icarus’ flight as a figure for artistic ambition. In the same year as the L'Allegro revivals, David Watson published a translation of Horace's Odes with annotations that give a more spirited defence of artistic pretension. Watson gives the following translation and then a commentary (what he describes as ‘The Key’) to the first fourteen lines of Ode 2.20, one of several in which Horace compares himself to Icarus:

If Watson is referring here to Horace as an artist ‘out of the common road’, he may as well have been referring to the third figure shadowing Rolli's career: Handel himself. The author (probably Robert Price) of the ‘Observations’ appended to John Mainwaring's Life of Handel (1760) sounds like Watson and even refers obliquely to Icarus when placing Handel in a similar category to

It may be argued that the canonization of Handel not only closely followed the composer's death in 1759, but also the publication of Edmund Burke's watershed work on the sublime, his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in which Burke argues that ‘the opposite extremes operate equally in favour of the sublime, which in all things abhors mediocrity’.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, both Todd Gilman and Claudia Johnson have observed that Handel was referred to as a ‘sublime’ composer whilst he was still alive.Footnote ⁴⁵ Johnson argues further that ‘in England, it is in the arena of Handelian commentary that the very notion of the musical sublime emerges for the first time’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Gilman and Johnson also cite the satirical pamphlet Harmony in an Uproar, which predates the 1760 Observations in portraying a Handel who ‘scorn[s] to be subservient to, or ty'd up by Rules, or to have [his] Genius cramp'd’ and contrasts him with the Daedalian ‘ingenius Carpenter[s]’ who may succeed better in mere ‘Composition’. There is even a faint echo of Milton's ‘things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’ when the pamphleteer wonders at a composer who has ‘made such Music, as never Man did before you, nor, I believe, never will be thought of again, when [he's] gone’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1738 a statue of Handel – the first ever of a living composer – was commissioned from Louis François Roubiliac by Jonathan Tyers and erected in Vauxhall Gardens, prompting John Lockman's verses ‘High as thy genius, on the wings of fame, / Around the world spreads thy all-tuneful name’.Footnote ⁴⁸

One can certainly pair a growing cult of Handel with an already established cult of Milton. Just as there was what Joshua Scodel describes as a ‘growing cult of the sublime from the mid-seventeenth century onward, exemplified in georgic and erotic literature . . . [which] provides an early instance of the now common association of great literature with imaginative extremes’,Footnote ⁴⁹ Handel, according to Claudia Johnson (quoting William Hayes's 1751 Art of Composing Music), was ‘a “Man-Mountain”, and as such he towered over other composers just as Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden tower over other poets’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Rolli's text for ‘Troppo audace’ does mention the sublime, but it is a sublime that has prescribed limits for the prudent (‘La Prudenza . . . Sa i confini del sublime, / Del Poter le mete sa’). However, as the concept of the sublime philosophically evolved into a category which by its very nature was ‘boundless’, examples of sublimity became a potential source of anxiety in this age of moderation. In his own overt imitatio – the Imitations of Horace (1738) – Alexander Pope characterizes a current of ambivalence in this period towards artistic daring when he criticizes the ‘people's voice’ that fails to recognize the ‘greater faults’ and ‘greater virtues’ of Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare and, most famously, of Milton's ‘strong pinion’ that dares to elevate Satan (and level God) in Paradise Lost (book 1, lines 93–103):

In 1753 Charles Avison discussed Handel's exceptional nature in a vein of ambivalence similar to Pope's, paying Handel a backhanded compliment and again using the metaphor of flight:

While Avison's partial critique of Handel's ‘incorrect’ execution, like Pope's of Milton, serves as preamble to a defence, there are other contemporary examples of praise for Handel's genius being simultaneously accompanied by accusations of overreach, in personal, artistic and commercial terms. This is consistent with much earlier reactions to Handel and his music: in April 1733 a satirical tirade against Handel appeared in The Craftsman, attributed to Rolli but most likely written by opposition politician Lord Bolingbroke. It describes the immoderate growth in an ‘insolent’ Handel's ‘Power and Fortune’, accompanied by an ‘imperious and extravagant Will . . . without the least Controul’.Footnote ⁵⁴ While the real target for Bolingbroke's elaborate allegory was the overreaching first minister Robert Walpole,Footnote ⁵⁵ the pretext – Handel's doubling of ticket prices for the premiere of Deborah – was still an unpopular financial decision. According to Viscountess Irvine, Handel's decision provoked a small rebellion by aristocratic silver-ticket holders who were refused admission but then ‘forced [their way] into the House . . . and carried their point’.Footnote ⁵⁶

While Rolli was unlikely to have been the author of this tirade, it would have been believable, for it was common knowledge at the time that, despite Rolli's admiration for Handel, the librettist and composer had a complicated relationship. Rolli had previously become estranged from Handel as early as 1729,Footnote ⁵⁷ and by the summer of 1733, the poet was instead engaged to write librettos for the rival Opera of the Nobility, formed by a group of nobleman supported by the Prince of Wales, who resented the ‘Dominion of Mr. Handel’.Footnote ⁵⁸ They managed to convince not only Rolli but also Senesino and a number of other Italian singers to leave Handel's company and join theirs, on the alleged grounds of his high-handed treatment of everyone (‘Handel is become so arbitrary a prince, that the Town murmurs’Footnote ⁵⁹).

In 1735, as it became clear that London could not sustain two opera companies, Sir Henry Liddell blamed the poor quality of the Opera of the Nobility's offerings on a ‘proud and saucy’ Handel who refused at that point to cut his losses and unite with them.Footnote ⁶⁰ Despite a brief reconciliation of sorts after the two companies either consolidated or at least cooperated for the 1737–1738 season, Handel would soon yet again face criticism and competition from disaffected noble patrons. Margaret Cecil, Lady Brown, a fervent supporter of Italian opera in London and a patron of the Middlesex company, became involved in an organized opposition to Handel as early as 1739, when Handel had put himself in direct competition with Lord Middlesex's rival fledgling opera company by presenting a season consisting solely of oratorios.Footnote ⁶¹

The story of Handel's move from opera to oratorio in the 1730s and early 1740s, and the resistance to this move from some in his audience as he realized the new genre's artistic and economic potential, has already been detailed by numerous scholars.Footnote ⁶² It is precisely in the these years surrounding the L'Allegro performances that Handel's attempts to extricate himself from the influence of certain aristocratic opera patrons met with a particularly intense level of opposition and criticism. A letter in the London Daily Post on 4 April 1741 (four days before the last L'Allegro performance of the season) mentions a ‘single Disgust . . . a faux pas’ which Handel committed against certain ‘Gentlemen who have taken Offense’. The writer then makes excuses for Handel's unknown misstep as ‘the natural Foible of the Great Genius’.Footnote ⁶³ Noting Pope's remark in the fourth book of the Dunciad, published in 1742, that Handel ‘was obliged to move his music to Ireland’ because of the aesthetic rejection of his bombastic ‘manly’ oratorio style by ‘the fine Gentleman’,Footnote ⁶⁴ Carole Taylor suggests, with an apt choice of metaphor, that Handel ‘flew in the face of a gentleman's preconceived notions of how a man of his station ought to act . . . His acknowledged genius and emerging status as a cult figure confused the issue and led to attempts, groping yet often painful, to keep him in his place by means both more and less effectual’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Handel himself criticized the Middlesex faction in September 1742 as ‘the gentlemen who have undertaken to middle with Harmony’.Footnote ⁶⁶ An obvious pun on Middlesex and ‘meddle’, Handel's use of ‘middle’ in this context also works literally: a Miltonian critique of the ‘middle’ or mediocre way of music-making by the Middlesex opera composers. Handel's musical risk-taking can also be paired in this period with his relatively precarious financial state: Ellen Harris notes that between March 1739 and May 1743 Handel had neither a bank nor a stock account, this period being a ‘time of many changes and difficulties for Handel’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Handel's entrepreneurial oratorio seasons only began to bear fruit in Dublin in the spring and summer of 1742 and subsequently in fuller oratorio seasons in London from February 1743 onwards, at which point it became increasingly clear to the ‘Quality’ that, save perhaps for the loaning of his score of Alessandro (arranged by Lampugnani as Rossane by the Middlesex opera in 1743), Handel was not willing to write new operas for Middlesex or be involved in the new opera company in any significant way. Led by Lady Brown and Lord Middlesex, aristocratic opposition to and criticism of Handel would steadily increase over the next few years, culminating in 1744 with Lady Brown organizing events to take place on the same nights as Handel's performances, and the Prince of Wales temporarily boycotting Handel's performances after the composer rejected the Prince's personal plea to write for the Middlesex company.Footnote ⁶⁸

Throughout his struggle with the opera faction, it is important to note that Handel continued to receive unambivalent praise from his supporters. One defender of Handel, in an anonymous poem published around the time of Handel's 1739 performances of Israel in Egypt, portrays the composer as an oppressed genius, using biblical imagery that invites a faint, if inverted, echo of the Icarus myth. Handel is Daedalian if, like Moses, he delivers his Israelite audience through the desert via a ‘flying Muse’ (God's ‘pillar of cloud’ in Exodus 13:21). In contrast, his critics are more Icarian if, like Pharaoh's army, they are ‘quickly drown'd, / Their own dull Weight shall sink ‘em in the vast Profound’.Footnote ⁶⁹ An equally glowing poem in April 1744 in The London Magazine praises Handel's setting of Milton's Samson Agonistes Footnote ⁷⁰ in his oratorio Samson in terms which echo the opening to Paradise Lost: ‘Rais'd by his [Handel's] subject, Milton nobly flew, / And all Parnassus open'd to our view’.Footnote ⁷¹

Keeping in mind Handel's professional situation at the time of the January 1741 revival of L'Allegro, an examination of his music for Rolli's new texts gives ample evidence that the composer, like Milton, may have identified more with his ‘audacious’ Icarian protagonist than with Rolli's ‘secure’ and more ‘moderato’ narrator.

‘TROPPO AUDACE’: THE MUSIC

The scena opens with an accompagnato, ‘L'insaziabil fantasia’ (Example 1) that begins in G major with a descending arpeggiated seven-semiquaver figure passed from first violins to seconds to violas and bass, obviously foreshadowing Icarus’ fall. With a third-inversion B major seventh chord instead of the expected B minor in bar 5, the activity in strings and bass leads to a rapid but now expected harmonic move to E major in bar 9, followed by a calmer A minor/D major passage in bars 9–14, during which the poet/singer describes his own secure and comfortable state, accompanied by tied semibreves in the strings. However, instead of the expected circle-of-fifths progression to G major, the rising vocal line on ‘vedrò l'Icarie altrui penne cerate fino al sole elevate’ (shall see the waxed quills of other Icaruses raised to the sun) is answered in bar 16 by a leap in the first violins of a major seventh to c♯³, over a first-inversion F sharp major chord, reaching B minor in bar 18. The string lines fall first slowly in slurred quavers, then more precipitously in bars 18–19, using the opening falling-semiquaver motive, the first violins descending to a g♯ in bar 20 as Icarus falls into the ‘salty waves’ on ‘sal'onde’,Footnote ⁷² to finish with a slightly unstable cadence on a first inversion chord of B major in bar 21.

Example 1 Handel, accompagnato ‘L'insaziabil fantasia’, January 1741 L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, ed Il Moderato. In Three Parts. Set to Musick by Mr. Handel (London: J. and R. Tonson, 1741). GB-Lbl R.M.20.f.11, 1r–2r, transcription Lawrence Zazzo

In the next section (bars 21–30), Handel begins resetting Rolli's second quatrain, as if he (or Icarus) has had a second bout of inspiration. The singer's line rises again on the text ‘vedrò l'Icarie altrui penne cerate fino al sole elevate’ in bars 21–23, this time in E major, with violins surging upwards more insistently with dotted quavers on an arpeggiated E major seventh chord in bars 23–24. The vocal line also becomes more active, with an octave leap on ‘fino al sole elevate’, briefly reaching the expected A major in bar 25. The slurred quavers in the strings in the same bar – more conjunct than their first appearance in bar 16 – suggest that Icarus’ daring may have succeeded, and that he is temporarily enjoying his flight. However, a diminished-seventh chord over a bass A♯ in bar 26 again forecasts the imminent danger of the melting sun's rays (‘sciolte dai raggi’) and interrupts the expected circle-of-fifths progression.

Falling semiquavers in the strings return even more persistently in bar 27, the first violins falling below both seconds and violas to a low A, with a pictorial octave plunge in the vocal line on ‘precipizio’ (precipice) in bar 28. Under this, the chromatic progression in the bass in bars 23–30 (G♯–A–A♯–B–B♯–C♯) drives the rapid if troubled harmonic sequence from A major to B minor and to a final cadence, via a tonicized C sharp major chord, in F sharp minor, the mediant minor of the following aria (‘Troppo audace’, D major). The accompagnato is pictorially and harmonically exciting, and ends a world away, geographically and tonally, from the earthbound G major tonality with which it began.

Winton Dean suggested that one feature of Handel's experimental tendencies during his transitional period from opera seria to oratorio in the late 1730s and early 1740s was an avoidance of da capo arias, noting that L'Allegro has only two, both of which are ‘unorthodox examples of the technique’.Footnote ⁷³ The first is the soprano air ‘Sweet bird’ in Part One, and the second the aria-accompagnato-da capo sequence ‘Straight mine eye / Mountains on whose barren breast’, newly written for the January 1741 revival with an English text but performed instead in Italian by Andreoni as ‘Dilettoso sol tu sei / Alte montagne’ (delightful are thee only, / high mountains), and most certainly not originally intended as a da capo. Dean was perhaps unaware of the temporary third da capo in this L'Allegro revival: ‘Troppo audace’ (Example 2), which followed the accompagnato ‘L'insaziabil fantasia’. A 6/8 Allegro in D major, it is the expected coloratura tour de force for the soprano castrato, with running semiquavers in the voice and violin which alternate between conjunct and disjunct movement, simulating Icarus’ audacious and wind-borne flight. Even when the vocal line judders (bars 37–40, 50–52) or descends slowly by step (bars 25–27, 54–55) on the text ‘la caduta appresso sta’ (the fall is near), perhaps simulating Icarus’ difficulties, the unison violins continue to soar. In a contrasting B section, Handel has made the extremely unusual choice of a change in both key and time signatures: from a two-sharp 6/8 to a one-flat 4/4.Footnote ⁷⁴ Opening on a D minor chord and cadencing in A major, this contrasting section switches to four-part string writing, opening serenely and piano on the text ‘La prudenza’ (prudence). However, at the mention of ‘limits’ (‘mete’) in bar 74, the continuo begins to bristle with figures as the harmonic complexity increases, soon wrenching both sharpwards and flatwards with a series of third-inversion dominant-seventh chords. While this section appears to veer into greater harmonic extremes than either accompagnato or A section, the juxtaposition of D minor, B flat major and E major harmonies can be seen on a larger scale as minor subdominant, Neapolitan and dominant inflections of a conventional cadence in A major, preparing the da capo. Is this Handel, as happened in the accompagnato, enacting Icarus’ dangerous flight even while confidently displaying his harmonic control, ironically testing the surety of a text that extols prudence and an awareness of limits? Or is this B section instead a display of Daedalian control, testing the limits of harmony but not breaking them? This is, of course, a matter of interpretation, but I would suggest that Moderation's counsel in this B section, whether ironically undercut by the music or not, is certainly undermined by the return to an A section in a da capo in which Andreoni, with his flight of even more embellished Icarian coloratura, presents a challenge to, if not outright subversion of, Jennens's and Rolli's central message of moderation over audacity in these January 1741 performances.

Example 2 Handel, aria ‘Troppo audace’, January 1741 L'Allegro. GB-Lbl R.M.20.f.11: fols 2v–4v, transcription Lawrence Zazzo

This potential dissonance between music and text – and perhaps between librettist and composer – may be the result of the contrasting temperaments and life stories of these two ‘transnational’ artists. The image that Rolli projected as a modest poet and translator vis-à-vis both Milton and Metastasio has already been discussed, as has Handel's disdain for the ‘middling’ efforts of the Middlesex opera in the winter of 1740–1741. However, there is further textual and musical evidence to suggest that Handel's musical depiction of this Icarus scena in L'Allegro may not only be a reflection of recent events in his professional life but also a kind of retrospective – echoing, perhaps unconsciously, a musical treatment of the Icarus myth at the very beginning of his career.

The soprano cantata Tra le fiamme (hwv170) was copied in July 1707 for one of Handel's principal Italian patrons, the Marquis Ruspoli, and it most likely served as Handel's contribution to a weekly ‘quota’ of music furnished for Ruspoli in return for hospitality during his multiple stays in Rome between 1707 and 1710. The first aria of this richly scored cantata, bearing the alternative title Il consiglio, warns of the dangers of the heart's attraction to ‘fair beauty’ (‘vaga beltà’), using the commonplace metaphor of moths or butterflies burning themselves in the flame of a candle. In the succeeding recitatives and arias, the author of the text, Cardinal Pamphilj, naturally switches to the related topos of self-immolation through imprudence: the Icarus myth. Using language quite similar to that in the A section of ‘Troppo audace’, the singer warns his listener that, for those not born as birds, the ‘too bold flight’ (‘volo . . . troppo ardito’) is exhilarating but foolish, and falling is customary (‘Per chi non nacque augello il volare è portento, / il cader è costume’).Footnote ⁷⁵ Both Ursula Kirkendale and Ellen HarrisFootnote ⁷⁶ have suggested that this was a thinly veiled warning to Handel by Pamphilj, given rumours circulating at the time of a romance or at least attraction between Handel and Vittoria Tarquini, a soprano for whom he most likely wrote the cantata Un alma inamorata (hwv173) and who was a married mistress of Prince Ferdinando de Medici, another powerful patron of Handel's during his Italian sojourn.Footnote ⁷⁷

Judith Peraino discusses a potential homoerotic reading of this particular cantata, complicating the objective moral stance of poet in relation to composer by seeing something more transgressive in Pamphilj's ‘consiglio’ or advice, especially when mapped against the Icarus story.Footnote ⁷⁸ Pamphilj's admiration for the young German composer was well known and effusive, and Handel in later years told Charles Jennens that Pamphilj was an ‘old Fool’ who ‘flatter'd’ him,Footnote ⁷⁹ and he perhaps needed to fend off more than mere flattery from the Cardinal during his time in Rome. For Peraino, it is the older Pamphilj rather than Handel who is in danger as an Icarus, and whose ‘dangerous attraction’ could only enjoy a ‘phoenix-like’ rejuvenation through the ‘middle-way’ sublimation of Handel's erotically charged music (Pamphilj's Arcadian nickname was Fenice Larisseo). In a musical reading of Tra le fiamme similar to mine for ‘Troppo audace’, Peraino suggests that, in the unusual indication by Handel of a return at the very end of the cantata to the initial aria depicting moths dying in erotic flames, Handel creates a ‘large-scale da capo form’ through which he ‘resurrects artist and audience and sends them on infinite flights of fancy and hubris’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In responding to Peraino's reading, Ellen Harris acknowledges the potential homoerotic subtext but reinforces her earlier biographical reading by inverting Peraino's mapping, seeing Pamphilj instead as a Daedalus who, unlike the inexperienced Icarean Handel, is ‘able to return safely from any amorous liaison’.Footnote ⁸¹

Certainly, both erotic interpretations are valid, and such hermeneutical freedom is not only particularly Arcadian, but perhaps here amplified by the ambivalent status of the Icarus myth within the early eighteenth-century literary tradition already discussed above. However, explicitly erotic readings can easily distract from one that is more literal, and equally Arcadian as well as biographical. In a self-aware metaturn in the second half of the text, Pamphilj suggests that flying poetic thoughts are more sublime than the metonymic ‘feathers’ (‘piume’) of the writer's (or composer's) pen that produced them:

Pamphilj here taps into the same Horatian double meaning of ‘piume’ (feather or writing quill), as do Rolli and Milton (who uses the Latinate ‘penns’ and ‘pennons’ in Paradise Lost for feathers or wingsFootnote ⁸³). Like Milton (but unlike Rolli), Pamphilj subscribes to the Horatian reading of the myth and suggests that high flying is indeed possible, but perhaps only through the God-given gifts of poetry and music.

Despite these textual resonances, it must be admitted that there is very little musical resemblance between Handel's earlier treatment of the Icarus myth in Tra le fiamme circa 1707 and his later 1741 Icarus scena for L'Allegro. First, there is an overall difference in tone: Pamphilj's witty text in 1707 is preponderantly amorous and is given a correspondingly lighter treatment, with a first aria that delights in the flight of moths in a lilting 3/8 scored for flutes and viola da gamba as well as strings, its delicate, amorous soundworld ironically flouting the violent imagery of self-immolation. Handel reused the opening bars in Partenope (1730, revival 1737) for the bittersweet closing number of Act 2, ‘Qual farfalletta’, in which the queen Partenope admits her conflicted love for Arsace using a similar moth-to-the-flame metaphor.

Similarly, Icarus’ doomed journey itself is only briefly described musically in the cantata using simple word-painting in the first secco recitative, with short bars of ascending running quavers for his ascent on ‘volare’ (flying) and descending dotted quavers for his descent on ‘cadere’ (falling), while the second aria, ‘Pien di nuove’, is also light, even jocose, depicting Icarus’ flight and the murmuring sea beneath him with inégal dotted quavers and triplets. The third and last aria in Tra le fiamme, ‘Voli per l'aria’, again bears a textual affinity to ‘Troppo audace’, but any musical borrowing may have been avoided by Handel as he had already put this material to new use in a reworked aria for bass, ‘Nel mondo e nell'abisso’, in Riccardo Primo (1727) and then in Tamerlano (1731).

There is, however, one kernel of musical resemblance between Tra le fiamme and the 1741 L'Allegro scena that is surprisingly fruitful. In the first aria of the cantata, Handel employs a hemiolic gesture of conjunct ascending semiquavers grouped 3 + 3 within 3/8 bars (Example 3) that also features prominently in both string and vocal writing in ‘Troppo audace’, but integrated into a compound 6/8 metre (compare Example 2, bars 1–10, 30–31 and 67–68).

Example 3 Handel, ‘Tra le fiamme’, Tra le fiamme, hwv170, bars 42–51. GB-Lbl R.M.20.d.13, fol. 2v, transcription Lawrence Zazzo

The musical resemblance between these two passages accords with the pictorial: in ‘Tra le fiamme’, the coloratura occurs on ‘bel-TÀ’, perhaps depicting the flames of beauty which deceive and lead moths to their death, while in ‘Troppo audace’ Handel sets it to either ‘au-DA-ce’ or ‘al-ZAR’, enacting Icarus’ audacious and dangerous flight. It is worth comparing this with Handel's use of an almost identical motive in ‘Non le scherzate’, the first aria from Udite mio consiglio (hwv172), another early Italian cantata probably written around the same time as Tra le fiamme (Example 4).

Example 4 Handel, ‘Non le scherzate’, Udite il mio consiglio, hwv172, bars 9–30. GB-Lbl R.M.20.d.12, fol. 2v, transcription Lawrence Zazzo

One of Handel's earliest, it was recopied for the Marquis Ruspoli in May 1707, and, like Tra le fiamme, it features a narrator who warns those shepherds who are ‘inexperienced in love’ (‘inesperti d'amor pastori’) of the seductive qualities of a particular little shepherdess (‘picciola pastorella’) who is as cruel as she is false and sly (‘È al par di lei cruda fallace e scaltra’). Comparisons with ‘Troppo audace’ become even more interesting in the B section of ‘Non le scherzate’, which, like ‘Troppo audace’, changes to 4/4 time and also opens rather unusually on a parallel-minor chord before some similar harmonic wandering takes place. Could Handel, in consulting his copy of Tra le fiamme when he was composing the L'Allegro scena in late 1740, have also come across (and been inspired by) this other early ‘consiglio’ cantata?

Handel used such triple-metre hemiolic gestures in various permutations throughout his vocal writing – for example in an Act 2 aria for Unulfo in his 1725 opera Rodelinda (‘Fra tempeste’), two arias from Deidamia (‘Si, m'appaga’ and ‘Come all'urto’) that premiered only weeks before this revival of L'Allegro, and an alto aria from Messiah (‘O thou that tellest’), written the following summer (Examples 5–8).Footnote ⁸⁴ Of these four, only ‘Si, m'appaga’ from Deidamia has potentially pejorative connotations. Achilles pretends to reject the pursuit of love in favour of the hunt, the hemiola figure enacting the broken promises of women (‘ch'ei promette e poi non dà’), but given the generally lighter tone of Deidamia, it could be construed as being delivered in an equally light-hearted, ironic vein. The other three arias that use this figure, however (‘Come all'urto’, ‘Fra tempeste’ and ‘O thou that tellest’), are unequivocally positive, and, like the Icarus scena, use water metaphors (torrents, storms) and height or upward movement (ascending a hill or mountain, a star breaking through clouds) to refer respectively to a military triumph, the optimistic resolution of a crisis and the arrival of the Messiah.

Example 5 Handel, ‘Fra tempeste’, Rodelinda, hwv19, Act 2, bars 88–99. GB-Lbl R.M.20.c.4, fols 48v–49r, transcription Lawrence Zazzo

Example 6 Handel, ‘Si, m'appaga’, Deidamia, hwv42, Act 2, bars 90–97. GB-Lbl R.M.20.a.11, fol. 55r, transcription Lawrence Zazzo

Example 7 Handel, ‘Come all'urto agressor’, Deidamia, hwv42, Act 3, bars 94–101. GB-Lbl R.M.20.a.11, fol. 67r, transcription Lawrence Zazzo

Example 8 Handel, ‘O thou that tellest’, Messiah, hwv56, Part One, bars 3–12. GB-Lbl R.M.20.f.2, fol. 22v, transcription Lawrence Zazzo

There are further striking similarities between the Messiah aria ‘O thou that tellest’ and ‘Troppo audace’, despite a difference in tempo markings (a difference arguably negligible in actual performance). They share not only the hemiola figure in both string and vocal writing but also a D major key, a 6/8 metre and a descending scale of quavers in the voice from b¹ to a held c♮¹. Most interesting is a shared flirtation with the subdominant via its dominant seventh over a pedal d/D in the bass under upper-string harmonies outlining a dominant-seventh chord, which in both cases only briefly resolves to G major before returning to the tonic D major (Examples 9a and 9b).

Example 9 (a) ‘Troppo audace’, bars 54–57; (b) ‘O thou that tellest’, bars 90–93. GB-Lbl R.M.20.f.2, fol. 24r–24v, transcription Lawrence Zazzo

In ‘Troppo audace’, Handel sets this gesture to the ominous text ‘la caduta appresso stà’ (the fall is near), but in the Messiah aria it is the triumphant ‘glory of the Lord’. This stark contrast between texts is either a case of Handel redeeming profane material in L'Allegro for sacred use in Messiah, or, as argued here, the reverse: if we read the exultant jubilant energy of ‘O thou that tellest’ back into ‘Troppo audace’, it strengthens a case that Handel's musical rejoicing in Icarus’ flight indicates at the very least some dissonance with Rolli's cautionary Icarian text.

When suggesting links between such potentially generic figures, used not only by Handel but other composers of the period, one must proceed with caution. However, I would like to suggest that this chain of musical resemblances between c1705 and 1741, goal-posted by two similar Icarian texts as well as significant events in the composer's life, may not be merely accidental, but a musical representation, however unconscious, of a current in Handel's professional and personal lives. The composer appears to have followed Pamphilj's advice, and that of the unknown writer of Udite il mio consiglio, on both romantic and artistic fronts. He never married, and there is no record after Vittoria Tarquini of any romantic relationships, despite continuing curiosity and speculation on the part of Handel scholars. Whatever relationships Handel had, if any, were remarkably discreet. In terms of patronage, when Handel left Italy he also left behind his weekly musical ‘quota’ for the Marquis of Ruspoli, who is curiously never mentioned by Handel, or by Mainwaring, Handel's earliest biographer. Instead, Mainwaring remarks on Handel's ‘noble spirit of independency, which possessed him almost from his childhood . . . never known to forsake him, not even in the most distressful seasons of his life’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Handel did find in England the ideal royal patrons – first Queen Anne and then the two Hanoverian Georges and their families – who combined generous financial subsidies with enthusiastic artistic support and, in the case of the princesses, even mutual affection. Awarded a series of pensions and salaries which amounted to £600 per year from 1723,Footnote ⁸⁶ his positions as Music Master to the royal children and Composer of Musick were relatively light-touch posts that simultaneously gave Handel some measure of financial stability (Rolli's ‘sicuro in agiato’) whilst allowing him to exercise his ‘noble spirit of independency’ in pursuing his adventurous and often loss-making operatic and oratorio seasons in London.