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Acis & Galatea

Georg Frideric Handel

Les Boréades
Suzie LeBlanc
Mark Bleeke
Marc Molomot
Nathaniel Watson
Josée Lalonde
Francis Colpron
Femke Bergsma
Matthew Jennejohn
Debra Nagy
Hélène Plouffe
Chloe Meyers
Susie Napper
Pierre Cartier
Eric Milnes

Absorbing the English pastoral poetry, Handel yet transcended the conventions of the genre in his very first English pastoral. Acis and Galatea is an incomparable masterpiece saturated with exquisite musical poetry.
Paul Henry Lang, Handel, 1966.

At the beginning of the 18th century, James Brydges, Count of Carnavon and Duke of Chandos, had a palatial residence built in Cannons, not far from London. He had been named treasurer and paymaster-general of the army, thanks to the patronage of Queen Anne and of the Duke of Marlborough. Through this position, and his investments in the South Sea Trading Company, he had amassed an enormous fortune.

“Few German sovereign Princes live with that magnificence, grandeur and good order,” wrote Macy in 1722 in his A Journey through England. The chateau at Cannons housed 120 family members and their Swiss guards in ostentatious luxury of a kind rarely seen outside the court. As John Mainwaring put it, several decades later, at Brydge’s residence one saw “much more art than nature, and much more cost than art.”

“Princely Chandos,” as his contemporaries called him, employed a small band of musicians: a choir of men and boys, who sang in his chapel and entertained him while at table; and a small orchestra comprising strings without viola and two woodwind players who doubled on recorder and oboe. John Christopher Pepusch became director of music for the Duke in 1712. George Monroe, harpsichordist, Alessandro Bitti, first violinist, and Francesco Scarlatti (the brother of Alessandro and the uncle of Domenico Scarlatti) were among the musicians.

Handel came to Cannons at the Duke’s invitation around 1717. He stayed just over a year as composer in residence, without any fixed obligations. This stay, doubtless, was a relaxing respite from the struggle he was beginning to wage to mount his Italian operas on the stages of London. While at Cannons he composed pieces for harpsichord, finished his six concertos (opus III), and offered his host a series of 11 anthems (known as the Chandos Anthems) to be sung in the Cannons chapel. He also prepared a small biblical opera for the Cannons musicians—Haman and Mordecai, which he later recycled in his oratorio Esther—as well as the pastoral masque Acis and Galatea, performed in the spring of 1718.

Acis and Galatea was Handel’s most popular work during his lifetime. It was performed over 70 times. Handel directed it for the first time in 1742, during a trip to Dublin. The work was among those which the Baron van Swieten asked Mozart to rescore in 1788. Handel’s first musical setting of the story, which is borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is the cantata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo that he composed in Naples in 1708, during his stay in Italy. Only one aria from this early work was used in the 1718 opera. At Chandos, Handel had the opportunity to meet a number of English poets and writers, including John Arbuthnot, John Hughes, and John Gay. The latter is probably the author of the libretto, derived from Dryden with the possible participation of Pope.

For more than a century, the English had applied the term ‘masques’ to musical productions that were in English and that had evolved in form from the French ballet de cour and from the Italian serenata—a large-scale cantata performed in front of scenery but without any real dramatic action. What characterized the masque was its mixture of dance, spoken or sung dialogues, and airs and choruses, along with its generally pastoral or magical subject matter.

In the Elizabethan era, the masque sometimes served as light relief inserted into a tragedy to break the otherwise insupportable dramatic tension. Later, under the influence of Lully, the masque could stand alone, and simply charm and give pleasure.

A good deal of incidental music and entractes was composed for use in theatrical pieces, including what we might conveniently call Purcell’s semi-operas.

In Acis and Galatea, and maybe in L’Allegro, il Moderato ed il Penseroso, Handel comes very close to his predecessor in finesse and grace. In the 18th century, the masque was developed anew and enjoyed a surge of popularity as an alternative to the recent invasion of Italian opera. With his masterpiece masque Acis, Handel might have been the standard-bearer of this counter-attack, if he had not also been a champion of opera.

A synthesis of British and Italian influences, the work, whose recitatives are kept to a minimum, shows a perfect mastery of English poetry. Far from constraining Handel’s genius, the limited size of the Duke’s orchestra allowed him to create an elegiac, happy work, full of spontaneity and pastoral lightness.

He reworked Acis in 1732, adding new music to Italian texts, but when he came to publish it with John Walsh in 1743, he returned to the original Cannons version. The overture, a sort of concerto grosso movement, leads directly to the first chorus, in which one hears the drones of Calabrian or Sicilian shepherds. Galatea makes her entrance with a bird song. Polyphemus does not appear until the second part, with an outrageous utterance more clownish than frightening.

The choir warns the lovers of the dangers they face, beginning with an old-fashioned fugue as if to symbolize the severity of the fate that awaits them. Then the choir describes the giant with massive, moving chords accompanied by “giant roars.”

The work’s peak moment is surely the trio The flocks shall leave the mountains, in which the young lovers’ calm determination is opposed with striking contrast to Polyphemus’ murderous rage. There is no taint of tragedy when Acis is killed, because Galatea uses her magic power to turn him into a spring from which clear water flows forever.

From his great oratorios we know Handel as a master of epic grandeur and dramatic majesty. Acis and Galatea shows another side to the composer, one of transparent lightness, refined sensuality, and tenderness. Yet whatever the means he employs to his ends, we are ever awed and elated by the unshakable generosity of this great European musician.

— © François Filiatrault, 2003.
Translation: Sean McCutcheon