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230 ELLEN T. HARRIS [18 to illustrate the quiet nobility of Esilena’s decision to cede her husband to his mistress in order to avert civil bloodshed. As Winton Dean and J. Merrill Knapp write, «‘Per dar pregio’ allows the singer to show off her coloratura in competition with a solo violin and cello, but at disastrous cost to dramatic consistency; the interminable divisions strike a note of inanity, if not of self-parody» 37 . This comparison, too, points to the precedence of «Un pensiero», but the most significant proof of the relative chronology of these two arias lies in the autograph of Rodrigo itself. The autograph of Il delirio amoroso does not survive; it is not possible therefore to compare the arias in autograph, which might clearly have demonstrated which was the composing score and which the copy. Nevertheless, the Rodrigo autograph provides enough documentation to decide the question. The aria «Per dar pregio» appears in the original foliation of the autograph, so it represents the earliest layer of the opera’s composition. Nevertheless, it is not written out exclusively by Handel, but in tandem with Giuseppe Antonio Angelini, the primary copyist of Handel’s cantatas for the Marquis Ruspoli. Their respective roles are clear: everything that is different from «Un pensiero» (including the opening ritornello, the vocal line where it needs to be adapted to a different text, the addition of a solo cello part, the entire B section) is written by Handel; Angelini copies the rest, which is unchanged from «Un pensiero». As John Roberts has shown, Angelini failed to apply the revision from the opening ritornello to the closing ritornello, forcing Handel to make a metrical alteration to the beginning of the B section 38 . Angelini also copied the closing vocal cadence exactly from «Un pensiero», which Handel was forced to correct (writing directly 37 WINTON DEAN and J. MERRILL KNAPP, Handel’s Operas: 1704-1726, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987, p. 102. 38 JOHN ROBERTS, A New Handel Aria, or Hamburg Revisited, in Georg Friedrich Händel – Ein Lebensinhalt: Gedenkschrift für Bernd Baselt (1934- 1993), ed. Klaus Hortschansky and Konstanze Musketa, pp. 113-130 (117).
19] «Cantate, que me veux-tu?», or: Do Handel’s cantatas matter? 231 over Angelini’s original version) to accommodate the new text. The evidence of the score (paper and watermark) strongly suggests that Rodrigo was composed in Rome in 1707 39 , and Angelini’s participation in the copying of «Per dar pregio» follows from his having copied the original score of Il delirio amoroso for Pamphili in May 40 . Kirkendale’s suggestion, based on her hypothesis that Rodrigo was composed before Handel came to Rome, that Handel first «enlisted Angelini’s services in Florence […] and then brought his trusted copyist with him when he moved» to Rome flies directly in the face of the evidence of the autograph 41 . Overall, Handel’s cantatas claim our attention in a number of ways. First, the cantatas call to us for the overriding reason that they are beautiful: variously dramatic, wrenching, lyrical or witty, Handel’s extraordinary settings reach the height of musical expression. In addition, by exploring the cantatas we can learn a great deal about Handel’s stylistic development during a critical period of his life, during which the Frenchinfluenced German sphere of influence of Hamburg was modified by his Italian experience. Moreover, the cantatas contain the origins of a significant amount of music in Handel’s later 39 See DONALD BURROWS and MARTHA J. RONISH, A Catalogue of Handel’s Musical Autographs, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 64-65, 332. The paper is associated with Roman works in the years 1707-1709, but as Rodrigo was certainly not composed later than 1707, when a documented performance took place, the time and place of composition can be more closely determined. 40 MARX, Giustificazioni, p. 179. Alessandro Ginelli copied out the performing parts in February, see Ivi, p. 177). 41 KIRKENDALE, Handel with Ruspoli, p. 336. I have only dealt here with evidence from Il delirio amoroso itself in refuting Kirkendale’s suggested redating of Rodrigo; much other evidence exists that is equally strong. To take only one example, the description of Handel in Rome published anonymously in 1737 (reprinted and discussed in KIRKENDALE, Orgelspiel) has Handel going to Florence after being in Rome in 1707 and composing an opera (the syntax leaves open whether this refers to an opera in Florence or elsewhere in Italy, so it could refer to Rodrigo or to Agrippina) that was generally applauded.
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