ruptcy, using his genius for twenty years in the paradoxical task of thrusting on London a shaky and shallow Italian opera, which could not live under a sun and in a climate unsuitable to it. At the end of this strife, enraged, conquered, but invincible, sowing on his way all his masterpieces, he reached the pinnacle of his art—those grand oratorios which rendered him immortal.
After a voyage in Germany to Hanover, to Halle, to Düsseldorf, and to Dresden, to recruit for his troupe of Italian singers,[1] Handel inaugurated at the Haymarket Theatre the London Opera of April 27, 1720, with his Radamisto, which was dedicated to the King.[2] The rush of the public was very great indeed, but it was due more to curiosity than to the turn of the fashion. Soon the snobbishness of the amateurs could no longer content itself with Italianized German as the representative of Italian Opera, and finally Lord Burlington, Handel's former patron, went to Rome to induce the king of the Italian style, Giovanni Bononcini, to come over.[3]
Bononcini came from Modena. He was about fifty years old,[4] son of an artist of great merit,
- ↑ This voyage took place from February, 1719, to the end of the same year. When Handel was staying at Halle, J. S. Bach, who was then at Cothen, about four miles away, was informed of it, and went there to see him, but he only arrived at Halle the very day when Handel was about to leave. Such at least is the story of Forkel.
- ↑ The poem was by Haym. From 1722 the work was given at Hamburg with a translation of Mattheson.
- ↑ Before him Domenico Scarlatti had already visited London, where he had given unsuccessfully an opera, Narcissus, 1720.
- ↑ He was born in 1671 or 1672, for his first opus appeared in 1684 or 1685, when he was little more than thirteen years old.
Giovanni Bononcini was far from being well known. He was not a celebrated musician, on which account there are many disagreements. Bononcini was the name of a long string of musicians, and one has been frequently confounded with the other. Such mistakes are found even in the critical work of Eitner (where they rest on a great error in reading) and in the most recent Italian works, as that of Luigi Torchi, who in his instrumental music in Italy, 1901, confounds all the Bononcini together. Luigi Francesco Valdreghi's monograph I Bononcini in Modena, 1882, is more reliable, although very incomplete.
