The winter of 1739–1740 was one of the most bitterly cold in London’s recorded history. The Thames froze over, and the usually busy London theaters were closed for two months. But the ever-industrious George Frideric Handel took full advantage of this enforced hiatus, using it to compose—in an astonishing two and a half weeks!—L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, a beautiful hybrid work in English (despite its Italian title). Set to two lyrical poems by John Milton, it is neither an oratorio nor an opera; instead, it might be called a pastoral ode, harkening back to works by Henry Purcell from half a century earlier. Handel biographer Jonathan Keates calls it “Handel’s most fundamentally English creation … distilling the rural moment in a series of intensely observed vignettes and matching better-known musical instances like Haydn’s The Seasons and Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.” L’Allegro was enthusiastically received at its premiere on February 27, 1740 at London’s Royal Theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Handel regularly revived it for the rest of his career. Today, unfortunately, it has been eclipsed by his operas and oratorios, though treasured by Handel connoisseurs for its inspired and innovative score.
With tastes shaped by his active membership in a prominent London literary society, Handel was a voracious, yet discriminating reader in five languages, despite his heavy accent and occasional malapropisms when speaking English. In 1736, he had set verse by the dramatist John Dryden for the oratorio Alexander’s Feast, and its success prompted his literary colleagues James Harris and Charles Jennens (librettist for Messiah) to urge him to turn to poetry by an even more celebrated British writer, John Milton (1608–1674), the revered creator of Paradise Lost.
They chose two richly pictorial poems, “L’Allegro” (“The Cheerful Man”) and “Il Penseroso” (“The Thoughtful Man”)—verse Milton had written in his youth. Harris had the happy inspiration to interleave these contrasting poems throughout Parts I and II of the new work, thus creating an intimate dialogue between two opposing personality types, one leaning toward extroversion, the other toward introversion. “Without characters playing out a story, the drama of this [work] comes from the tension between L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, the active and the contemplative, and the imagery with which the poetry depicts them,” writes Baroque conductor Martin Pearlman. “Both the poems and the music portray them with subtlety: L’Allegro’s music is not always fast and bright, nor is Il Penseroso’s always slow and dark. The melancholy of Il Penseroso is not the sadness or depression with which it is sometimes associated today. Rather it is related to the Renaissance notion of inspired divine contemplation.”
Not wishing to let either personality have the last say and thus be considered the winner, Handel decided there must be a Part III that would reconcile the two in “one moral design,” as he put it. He wished to use another Milton poem for this. But Jennens chose instead to create his own text, which introduces a third allegorical character, “Il Moderato” (“The Moderate or Rational Man”)—an ideal man for the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, who avoids both extremes. Unfortunately, this choice produced a serious imbalance in the ode’s structure. First, Jennen’s verse hardly rose to the elegance of Milton’s poems; for this reason, Handel sometimes excised “Il Moderato” in his future revivals. And perhaps a greater impediment was that while the moods of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” inspire emotionally vivid music, the subject of moderation does not. Nevertheless, Handel adorned his Part III with perhaps the work’s finest number, the soprano-tenor duet “As steals the morn upon the night.”
Because of the numerous revivals of L’Allegro during Handel’s lifetime, there is no definitive version of the work today. As he did with other works, including Messiah, Handel was continually making adjustments from performance to performance—even writing new arias and cutting others as new singers with different strengths and weaknesses appeared. Rather than assign one singer to each of the personality types, Handel did not treat them as individual characters; instead, he selected the solo voices most suitable to the varied moods described throughout the poetry. Thus, we have a group of sopranos, two tenors, and a bass moving back and forth between portraying L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.
As Simon Heighes writes, “Handel’s imagination was fired by Milton’s bold and colorful imagery and his wide-ranging evocation of English life: from rural merry-making to the bustle of city life; from the evening song of the nightingale to Evensong in a great cathedral.” The work opens without an overture, although Handel often prefaced a performance with one of his organ concertos. Immediately, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso present their arguments, each exaggerating the other’s music in order to dismiss it. Thus, the tenor’s accompanied recitative “Hence, loathed Melancholy” is surrounded by lugubrious bassoons and cellos in minor mode and slowest Largo tempo, while the soprano employs music of frivolous lightness for her “Hence, vain deluding joys.” It will be Handel’s task to describe the actual strengths and complexities of the two types.
In the ravishing air “Come rather, goddess sage and holy” for soprano, Il Penseroso reveals the genuine pleasures of divine contemplation; her languishing suspensions lend this calm state a sensuous glow. Countering her, L’Allegro summons the chorus to bolster his argument with the vivacious dance “Come and trip it” and its ingenious laughing coloratura. The chorus expands this into dazzling contrapuntal laughter, which at its premiere so delighted George II and the Royal Family that they burst out laughing as well—and demanded an encore.
Rising to the challenge, Il Penseroso unfurls the work’s most beautiful and arresting da capo aria, “Sweet Bird.” Wandering in the moonlit evening, she summons contemplation and silence to accompany her. She is answered by the night bird, sung by an enchanting solo flute. Time seems to stand still as she matches the bird’s song with her own silvery coloratura.
In a sequence of numbers beginning with the words “Mirth, admit me,” L’Allegro now celebrates the joys of the countryside for the extroverted temperament. First the bass soloist lustily sings of the joys of the hunt; Handel provides him with the customary prancing 6/8 meter and a particularly brilliant horn solo, representing the traditional hunting instrument. Il Penseroso also loves country living, but in a less boisterous way. In her becalmed aria “Oft on a plat of rising ground,” she relishes the peace of a hillside far from the village below. Gentle violins surround her, while plucked cello and viola softly mimic the sound of the faraway curfew bell.
In Part I, L’Allegro has the final say. For the soprano’s aria “Or let the merry bells ring round,” Handel employs the traditional descending pattern of English church bells to create a dance of shimmering joy.
From the delights of the countryside, Handel moves to the pleasures of the city, specifically London’s theaters and taverns that he knew so well. This lively world is the territory in which L’Allegro thrives, but Il Penseroso also quietly appreciates the theater’s more substantial offerings. In the soprano’s majestic “Sometimes let gorgeous Tragedy,” she extolls the solemn joys of the great classical tragedies, but also finds a moment to acknowledge more recent fare, that “though rare, ennobled hath the buskin’d stage”—could some of Handel’s operatic masterpieces be among them?
The male soloists representing L’Allegro offer a lustier, less discriminating view of the London stage. Singing “Populous cities,” the bass launches a spectacular da capo chorus accompanied by full orchestra. Here buzzing low strings conjure the bustling hum of London’s streets, while trumpets and drums salute the splendid processions of knights and barons, still a feature of British royal occasions today. Accompanied by gentler strings and oboes, the B section describes the ladies who adorn the theater galleries to “judge the prize of wit.”
Later the tenor soloist returns to the theater with a brisk appreciation—and contrasting musical portrayals—of the plays of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare (“I’ll to the well-trod stage”). Complementing this is the soprano’s lovely legato aria “And ever against eating cares,” whose flowing lines for voice, violins, and oboes embody the soothing sounds of the musical theater. L’Allegro wraps up its case for being the superior temperament with a spirited trumpet aria for the tenor (“These delights”), followed by an even more brilliant chorus to the same words that showcases the instruments in Handel’s large, colorfully stocked orchestra, especially in its wonderful concluding postlude.
Completing its argument of providing deeper satisfactions than does the mirthful mood, Il Penseroso turns to the solace of religion and its splendid cathedrals and music. Here Handel spotlights his own instrument, the organ, and the ecclesiastical splendor of the choir singing a majestically slow four-part fugue (“These pleasures, Melancholy, give”). As the various fugal entrances pile atop each other, this greatest of the work’s choruses needs no trumpets to prove its case.
Complaints about the inferiority of Charles Jennens’s poetry for Il Moderato from London’s literary connoisseurs caused Handel to frequently omit this third section. Only in more recent times has it regained its place, beginning with Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s performances in the 1980s. Handel’s music here is more than competent, though thwarted from reaching the power of Parts I and II by Il Moderato’s smothering temperance. However, in the penultimate number of this section—a tenor-soprano duet titled “As steals the morn”—Handel created a magnificent reconciliation between L’Allegro and Il Penseroso that fulfills his “moral design” in the highest degree. Jennens paraphrased its words from Prospero’s Act V, Scene 1 speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Over a steady walking bass, oboes, bassoons, and violins launch a sublime melody in B-flat major; its beautiful curving lines intertwine gracefully with those of the two singers as they enter. Considered by many to be L’Allegro’s finest piece, it is also arguably the most magical duet Handel ever wrote.
—Janet E. Bedell