The Alchemist (Handel)

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Title page of Ben Jonson's play, London 1610/1710?

The Alchemist or The Alchymist (German Der Alchemist , HWV 43) is the incidental music that was compiled for the performance of Ben Jonson's comedy The Alchemist at the Queen’s Theater in London on January 14, 1710. This is the work of an anonymous arranger with music by Georg Friedrich Handel .

Emergence

" David Garrick as Abel Drugger in Jonson's The Alchimist", Johann Zoffany , approx. 1770

Although Handel worked as an opera and oratorio composer for the London theaters for nearly fifty years, he wrote little actual incidental music for plays. The only major project was the music to Tobias Smollett's Alceste (see Handel's Alceste ), but the performance planned for 1750 at the Covent Garden Theater never took place. Only three songs for pieces by John Gay ( The What D'ye Call It , 1715), James Miller ( The Universal Passion , 1737) and William Congreve ( The Way of the World , 1740) were composed specifically for English theater and to Handel's lifetime listed. In 1745 he composed the epilogue for a private production of John Milton's Comus (see Handel's Comus ).

However, one of his first opera overtures was used as incidental music for a re-performance by Jonson's Alchemist in 1710. The music consists - according to the practice in late restorative England (approx. 1680–1710) - of nine “nude melodies”, four of which, paired as “first music” and “second music”, were played while the audience took their seats. The other five completed the prologue and the first four acts of the five-act play. Henry Purcell and many other respected composers wrote such nude melodies for contemporary productions, which were also regularly published in print by the London publisher John Walsh around 1700.

Ben Jonson's comedy, written in 1610, was re-performed in January 1710 at the Queen's Theater in Haymarket. The music was composed in Italy, but not by an Italian, because eight of the nine melodies come from the long overture to Handel's first Italian opera Vincer se stesso e la maggior vittoria , which was staged in Florence in the autumn of 1707 and later known under the title Rodrigo (HWV 5).

This was very likely, alongside the aria Ho un non so che nel cor from Agrippina , Handel's first music to be played in England. He was almost certainly not involved in the selection and arrangement, as he did not arrive in England until several months after the performance. So you have to assume that it came to London somehow differently, where it was edited by someone who had ties to the Queen's Theater and perhaps also composed the “Prelude” (No. 2, HWV Anh. B 363), which did not comes from the Rodrigo overture, but is the only number that reflects the apparently hectic atmosphere of the piece. Anthony Hicks and, following him, Donald Burrows were of the opinion that this movement in B flat major did not come from Handel. Recently, however, John H. Roberts pleaded for their authenticity, pointing out that Handel had taken the “Prelude” as the starting point for the march in B flat major in Rinaldo (HWV 7). How Walsh supposedly came into possession of the composition remains unclear. The rest of the music is pure Handel and - whether as an overture to Rodrigo or as inter-act music - very nicely illustrates the new, graceful style that the young Handel had made his own in the first year of his stay in Italy.

John Walsh announced his first edition of Handel's incidental music in July 1710 as

"A New Set of Tunes Compos'd by an Italian Master in the Play call'd the Alchimist."

"A new compilation of melodies by an Italian master in the play called The Alchemist ."

- John Walsh : The Post Man , London, July 8th 1710

on. It appeared in four part books for two violins, viola and bass and was published in a later edition (1732/33) by John Walsh jun. reduced to a three-part cast. As a London newspaper announced when Jonson's comedy was staged again, this piece would feature

"[...] select Pieces of Musick, compos'd by Sig. Corelli, Sig. Vivaldi, Sig. Geminiani, and Mr. Handel, and Entertainments of Dancing"

"[...] selected pieces of music, from Mr. Corelli , Mr. Vivaldi , Mr. Geminiani and Mr. Handel, as well as dances for entertainment"

- The Daily Journal , London, December 20, 1733

given. Handel's part in this later stage music also consisted of six opera arias. Walsh jun. printed these pieces around 1732/33 as The Tunes for the Alchimist and Six songs in seven parts , which Michael Rophino Lacy identified as arias from Giulio Cesare , Poro , Partenope , Admeto , Rinaldo and Riccardo Primo in the 19th century .

The comedy

The comedy The Alchemist is one of the most outstanding satirical pieces of its time: it is about three impostors who claim to be powerful in alchemy and thus exploit the gullibility and greed of their victims. Their deception machinery turns faster and faster until the fraudsters overestimate themselves and the bubble bursts.

The topicality of the plot is hard to beat, even if some motifs can be traced back to the Mostellaria , Plautus ' ghost comedy . The action takes place in the chic Blackfriars district in London, where Jonson himself lived. Action time: 1610 during a plague epidemic - the year the comedy was written. This contemporary London setting revolves around the alchemy that many believed in at the time, as well as magic and witches. Jonson mercilessly ridicules those contemporaries who fall for the deceitful "alchemist" Subtle. As in Volpone , Jonson is concerned with the cathartic display and exposure of the folly that judges itself. The fraudsters are no longer punished in the first place. In The Alchemist , Jonson dispenses with the warning finger raised and instead lets the action on stage speak for itself. This is conveyed through the grandiose variety of different ways of speaking, ranging from rhetorical pathos to crooks. At that time only Shakespeares had such language power . In this linguistic and dramaturgical respect, Jonson and Shakespeare were rivals. Perhaps it was only the fundamentally different nature of her works that saved her friends from becoming competitors.

First performed in Oxford in 1610 by the most successful London theater company of the time, The King's Men , the play is widely known as Jonson's best and most distinctive comedy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that it had one of the three most perfect plots in literary history by its time. The play fulfills the classical requirements of the theater of the Renaissance in an exemplary manner and the lively representation of human stupidity made it one of the few plays of the time that (apart from the works of Shakespeare) have secured a permanent place on the stage to the present day .

music

The performance of the incidental music (1710) is 15 to 16 minutes. The sentences:

orchestra

Two oboes , strings, basso continuo .

Discography

literature

  • Anthony Hicks : Theater Music Vol. II . Translated from the English by Henning Weber, L'oiseau-Lyre (Decca) DSLO 598, London 1982.
  • Bernd Baselt : Thematic-systematic directory. Stage works. In: Walter Eisen (Ed.): Handel Handbook: Volume 1 , Deutscher Verlag für Musik , Leipzig 1978, ISBN 3-7618-0610-8 . Unchanged reprint, Kassel 2008, ISBN 978-3-7618-0610-4 .
  • Otto Erich Deutsch : Trade. A documentary biography , Adam and Charles Black, London 1955. (English)
  • Curtis A. Price: Handel and The Alchemist. His first contribution to the London theater. In: The Musical Times , Vol. 116, London 1975. (English)
  • William Charles Smith: Trade. A Descriptive Catalog of the Early Editions , Cassell, London 1960. (English)
  • Albert Scheibler: All 53 stage works by Georg Friedrich Handel, opera guide. , Edition Cologne, Lohmar / Rheinland 1995, ISBN 3-928010-05-0 .
  • Peter Zehfuß: Fraud and self-deception. Ben Jonson's comedies “Volpone” and “The Alchemist” against the backdrop of Elizabethan-Jacobean society and its significance for the present. Susanne Roderer Verlag, Regensburg 2001. (= theory and research; 698; literary studies; 30), ISBN 3-89783-217-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Anthony Hicks: Theater Music Vol. II . Translated from the English by Henning Weber, L'oiseau-Lyre (Decca) DSLO 598, London 1982
  2. ↑ a b c Bernd Baselt : Thematic-systematic directory. Stage works. In: Walter Eisen (Ed.): Handel Handbook: Volume 1 , Deutscher Verlag für Musik , Leipzig 1978, ISBN 3-7618-0610-8 . Unchanged reprint, Kassel 2008, ISBN 978-3-7618-0610-4 , p. 504.
  3. ^ John H. Roberts: Souvenirs de Florence: Additions to Handel Canon . In Handel-Jahrbuch 57 , Bärenreiter-Verlag , Kassel 2011, ISBN 978-3-7618-1451-2 , pp. 211 ff.
  4. ↑ Hans Joachim Marx, Steffen Voss: The compositions attributed to Handel IV . In: Hans Joachim Marx (Ed.): Göttingen Handel Contributions XIV , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-525-27831-4 , p. 169
  5. ^ Göttingen Handel Contributions XIV . books.google.de. Retrieved March 4, 2013.
  6. ^ Mareike Kruse: Analysis of the space and time structure of 'The Alchemist' by Ben Jonson . Student thesis , GRIN Verlag, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-640-46330-7 .
  7. ^ Theo Stemmler: Shakespeare's rivals Marlowe and Jonson . Universal Lexicon . universal_lexikon.deacademic.com. Retrieved March 5, 2013.