Mirth, melancholy and moderation — Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato

by Anthony Hicks

George Frideric Handel. Engraving in a programme for The Concert of Antient Music, The AAM’s 18th-century predecessor

Handel composed this delightful English choral work, his first setting of words by the poet John Milton, in 1740. He had introduced English oratorio to London with a revised version of Esther in 1732, and followed it with other oratorios, but the more immediate predecessor of L’Allegro was the ode Alexander’s Feast, a setting of a poem by the admired poet John Dryden and already recognised as a classic in it’s own right. It was a great success, and the combination of great music and fine poetry set Handel’s friends thinking what next he should do. Their thoughts quickly turned to the ‘sublime’ Milton. Recent research into correspondence in the archives of the Earl of Malmesbury has greatly illuminated what happened next. In November 1739 the Earl of Shaftesbury organised an evening gathering in which Milton’s Samson Agonistes was read, and Handel improvised at the harpsichord at pauses during the reading, ‘his harmony’ (according to Shaftesbury) ‘perfectly adapted to the sublimity of the poem’.

That particular encounter with Milton was later to bear fruit in the oratorio Samson (1741/42), but meanwhile another friend in Shaftesbury’s circle, the philosopher James Harris, had the idea of combining the texts of two of Milton’s shorter poems, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. They are complimentary works, one celebrating the personality of ‘The Merry Man’ (the extrovert) and the other that of ‘The Thoughtful Man’ (the introvert). Harris saw the possibilities of using extracts from the poems as a kind of dialogue suited to the musical depiction of contrasting characters. Handel himself adjusted Harris’s first draft of a libretto and asked another friend, Charles Jennens, to add a final section which would unite the whole into ‘one Moral design’. Jennens accordingly introduced a new character, ‘Il Moderato’ or ‘The Moderate Man’, who advises against excess of merriment or melancholy and advocates a balance of both, governed by reason.

Milton, led by the muse Calliope, presenting his works to Handel. This previously unnoticed engraving is the frontispiece to Henry Roberts’ The New Calliope (1743), a rare copy of which has recently been acquired by the British Library (press-mark E.889.aa; reproduced by permission).

Handel’s setting divides the Allegro and Penseroso texts between various singers, but in the first version of the work, performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 27 February 1740, he kept a semblance of dramatic structure by allocating the Allegro solos to three male singers (boy treble, tenor and bass) and those for Penseroso to a single female soprano (originally Elisabeth du Parc, known as La Francesina). The following year he expanded the work with several new numbers, but his cast involved the soprano castrato Giovanni Andreoni, who had to sing his part in Italian. Later revivals in London were wholly in English. In 1743 Handel dropped Jennens’s Moderato section and presented the work in two-act form, adding his setting of Dryden’s Song for St Cecilia’s Day to complete the evening. Modern revivals seeking to include all of Handel’s settings of Milton’s words from both 1740 and 1741 as well as Jennens’ Moderato section are thus something of a compromise, but it is possible to keep the sense of the original design without losing any of the music.

Much of the charm of the work lies in Handel’s alert response to the many images drawn from an idealised view of English life, both rural and urban. Allegro enjoys the singing of the lark at dawn, the sounds of the hunt, the view of a broad landscape, dancing ’in the chequer’d shade’, populous cities, pageantry, and stage comedy; Penseroso takes pleasure in the nightingale on a moonlit night, the far-off curfew (the practice of ringing ‘the evening bell’), the night sky and its mysteries, stage tragedy, cool woods and the ‘pealing organ’ in a great and ancient cathedral. For all of these images Handel creates music of just the right mood, perhaps with a greater intensity of feeling in the Penseroso numbers. Jennens’ words in the final part do not match Milton’s, but the duet ‘As steals the morn upon the night’, in which Allegro (tenor) and Penseroso (soprano) harmoniously unite, is one of Handel’s most beautiful movements. Handel was just as capable of being Allegro as Penseroso, and through his music expresses the ideal of a balanced personality.