Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (review)

The study of Handel changed decisively in 1994 with the publication of Gary C. Thomas's extended essay, "'Was George Frideric Handel Gay?': On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics" (in Queering the Pitch, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas [New York: Routledge, 1994], 155-203). Thomas brought the techniques of cultural studies, as well as recent work on sexuality in the eighteenth century, to bear on the phenomenon of Handel. By closely examining the few contemporary statements about Handel's affections and comparing these to what modern biographers had made of them, he was able to show in a particularly pertinent way how the Handel myth operates, and to what purpose. Turning to Handel's material self, rather than relying on the usual anecdotes, he outlined for the first time a believable context—in both Italy and the early English years—in which Handel established his reputation. He ended with an appeal for a new approach to the musical texts as "part of a whole field of social relations and discourses that participate in a complex and open-ended historical conversation," the sort of conversation, in fact, from which "Handel has remained essentially exempt" (p. 184). This brilliant attack on the status quo remained itself essentially exempt from notice by established Handelian scholars, but it is now bearing fruit, most recently in a superb essay by Suzanne Aspden on the monumentalizing of Handel ("'Fam'd Handel Breathing, tho' Transformed to Stone': The Composer as Monument," Journal of the American Musicological Society 55 [2002]: 39-90).

Ellen T. Harris began her book, as she disarmingly explains, as a straightforward musicological study of the cantatas—"a monograph providing detailed source information, chronology, and descriptive analysis" (p. 1). There is still a good deal here to show for all that: discussion of chronology, formal outlines, and so on, are liberally spread throughout the book. One appendix usefully collects together all the information on chronology, while another provides for the first time texts and translations of the solo continuo cantatas. The music examples are generous and informatively described. This chronology, however, implies something very special: it establishes that all the cantatas were written between 1706 and 1723, not only the period when the young Handel was establishing his brilliant reputation, but when he moved almost exclusively in the courts of the great, both in Italy and England. Moreover, Harris became convinced that not only was the context that Thomas had outlined one to be reckoned with, but that "a close reading of [the cantata texts] in terms of their literary heritage and social environment confirmed a persistent homoerotic subtext" (p. 1). Rather courageously, then, she becomes the first established Handelian scholar to explore this new territory, which she enters by means of a cantata about the composer himself, Hendel, non può mia musa, written during his first year in Rome. An adoring Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili wrote the text, which compares the composer to Orpheus and is sufficiently ambiguous (together with Pamphili's text for Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno of the same year, which includes a reference to Handel as "un leggiadro giovinetto") to suggest the homoerotic undertones for which the Orpheus legend was a frequent marker (on account of his forswearing the love of women for that of boys in Ovid's version). In later life, Handel dismissed Pamphili to Charles Jennens as an "old Fool" for flattering him, but of course by that time Handel was very much implicated, as Harris suggests and Aspden further emphasizes, on refashioning his own image as a "British Worthy" whose music symbolized national and religious aspirations.

But how should homoeroticism be read further into the texts and music of the cantatas? Here Harris benefits directly from the one scholarly book that thoroughly contextualizes part of Handel's output in...