“Rinaldo”, “Ottone”, “Jephtha” and “Occasional Oratorio”:  two operas and two choral works by Handel are about to receive notable performances, all using the Urtext scores from the Complete Edition for the first time.

Although a few popular operas and oratorios, included Serse and Messiah, featured in the early volumes of the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, the publication programme of the new collected edition was initially mainly devoted to Handel’s instrumental music. This is perhaps not surprising, because the large scores in the genres of opera and oratorio presented major editorial tasks, requiring the detailed consideration of many sources and the careful reconstruction of the performance history of the works concerned. An accidental benefit from the delay, however, is that the volumes for the operas and oratorios have been able to benefit from the great advances in Handel scholarship during the last thirty years. The foundation for our modern understanding of the musical sources for these works was established in Jens Peter Larsen’s book about Messiah (1955), but further greatly advanced by Hans Dieter Clausen’s Händels Direktionspartituren (1983) and then the Catalogue of Musical Autographs by Donald Burrows and Martha Ronish (2002), complemented by individual studies of the great eighteenth-century collections of manuscript scores and of published music editions from Handel’s lifetime. Other important developments have included the detailed study of the printed librettos for Handel’s performances, and the inclusion of facsimiles of these texts in the score volumes of the HHA edition, accompanied by modern German and English translations of the full text.   
For the editor of one of Handel’s operas or oratorios, however, an understanding of the sources is part of the broader process of reconstructing the various stages that formed the ‘composition’ of the work - from the initial drafts, through the preparations for the first performance and then subsequent changes in the course of Handel’s presentations of the work, whether in the early stages or for revivals many years later. Most of the large works thus have several different authentic forms, and the modern volumes of the HHA not only aim to include all of the relevant music for the work concerned, but also show how the musical movements fit together in Handel’s various ‘performing versions’. Here again there have been great advances in our understanding since the 1980s. Bernd Baselt’s thematic catalogue (Thematisches-systematisches Verzeichnis) in volumes 1-3 of the Händel-Handbuch (1978-1986) provided a foundation, and the history of individual works was investigated in detail in the magisterial studies of Handel’s oratorios and operas by Winton Dean – a project whose publication covered 47 years, culminating in Handel’s Operas 1726-1741 (2006). Yet every editor has to look at each work anew, so new discoveries and revisions are found for individual works as each volume of the edition is prepared. The Prefaces to the recent HHA volumes have the most up-to-date description of the history of each work in the hands of the composer, thus giving a starting-point for modern performers. The scores themselves present the various performing versions in a way that can be understood by performers, and indeed by anyone with an interest in the work concerned. Very often Handel’s revisions were so extensive that an opera or oratorio has two or more distinctly different versions – almost two different works.

Rinaldo

A particularly interesting example of this is to be found with the opera Rinaldo. This was Handel’s first opera for London, first performed at the theatre in the Haymarket in February 1711. It was strong in both music (including recomposed versions of some movements that Handel had previously written for his operas in Italy) and staging: a contemporary described the opera as ‘filled with Thunder and Lightening, Illuminations and Fireworks’. Twenty years later Handel had the opportunity to revive the opera. Perhaps some of the original stage effects were repeated, but the musical circumstances were different. The cast of singers included none of the original soloists, but instead featured the castrato Senesino and the soprano Anna Strada, and Handel’s own musical style had moved on from the ‘young man’s music’ of the original score. David Kimbell, the editor of the HHA volume, has summarised the changes for the 1731 version as follows:
of some 40 musical numbers in the original Rinaldo, approximately a quarter were preserved essentially unaltered; a quarter were transposed to suit different types of voice; a quarter were more fundamentally revised, or transformed in effect by being reallocated to different characters; a quarter were dropped altogether’.
To compensate for the ‘lost’ music, Handel incorporated arias from some of his more recent operas (especially Lotario), which fitted the drama but displayed his current musical style. The result was effectively a new opera score, different in character from the first version, and worthy of independent revival.

Ottone

Ottone is another opera score with a complex history. Composed in the summer of 1722, it was radically revised before the first performance in January 1733, as described by the editor, Fiona McLaughlan:
In all, Handel rejected … a total of eleven arias and one duet, a movement of the Ouverture and a sinfonia – equivalent to an act of set pieces – and also discarded up to six (apparently) sections and fragments of pieces. 
Much of this alteration was concerned with the music for the characters of Teofane, the first London role for the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni, and Matilda: for the latter, letters written by the singer (Anastasia Robinson) reveal negotiations over the characterisation of her role. Further major revisions were made for different performances in 1723-4, 1726, 1727 and 1733. Ottone has a rich and rather complicated plot based on events in the tenth century when ‘German’ kings had territorial power in Italy, but the libretto stimulated Handel to write some of the most attractive arias from his operas of the 1720s, some of which remained popular as concert pieces in eighteenth-century England long after the opera itself had been forgotten.

Jephtha

While Handel’s Italian operas vanished from the theatre for more than a century after the composer’s death, his English oratorios enjoyed a more continuous history in concert performances, partly on account of the development of amateur choral singing during the nineteenth century and partly because they did not depend so much on castrato roles for the leading male characters. While Jephtha was not as frequently performed as Messiah, Israel in Egypt and Judas Maccabaeus, it nevertheless remained in the repertory with occasional performances, and was especially remembered on account of the substantial role of Jephtha for a tenor soloist. (Jephtha’s  aria ‘Waft her, angels, through the skies’ also became a favourite concert item.) Jephtha was also recognised as significant to Handel’s biography, not only because it was his last original oratorio but because the score was completed in circumstances of personal difficulty as the composer’s eyesight deteriorated. It is a sad irony that the composition was interrupted for that reason during the composition of the powerful chorus ‘How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees’, but this came only at the end of Part Two, and it was something of a triumph that Handel managed nevertheless to complete the rest of the oratorio successfully. Overall, Jephtha is a powerful musical drama whose score reflecs half a century of musical experience on the part of the composer: the ending is serious in tone, but not entirely tragic in mood. It might be expected that Handel’s last oratorio would have an uncomplicated history in terms of composition and revivals, but nevertheless it left some interesting puzzles for the editor to solve when preparing the HHA score.

Occasional Oratorio

The Occasional Oratorio is the English oratorio that received the fewest performances from Handel (six in all, in 1746-7), and has almost certainly been the least-performed since. The small number of Handel’s performances can probably be explained by the nature of the ‘occasion’: it was composed and first performed at a time when London had recently experienced the threat of a Jacobite invasion, and the oratorio was thus tied rather closely to topical events. The limitation on its revival may have been influenced by the circumstance that Part Three the score re-uses music from Israel in Egypt, but more significantly by the relative inaccessibility of performing material: it was the only one from the series of Handel’s oratorios that was never published as a vocal score in nineteenth-century England. The Occasional Oratorio was part of Handel’s contribution to sustaining the morale of contemporary London: he must have been well aware that the outcome of the ‘’45 rebellion’ involved more serious European issues than a local British dispute. The subject of the oratorio is the victory of the righteous, but it is not in itself triumphalist: that mood followed later, with Judas Maccabaeus after the Jacobites had been defeated. Modern revivals have shown that, although it has the character of an extended anthem rather than a conventional drama, the Occasional Oratorio is a coherent work that justifies a proper place in the Handelian canon, and deals with human experience in a way that extends beyond its original context.

Donald Burrows