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220 ELLEN T. HARRIS [8 beloved wishes to be reunited with her lover; the quests differ in that Orpheus seeks his own beloved but fails to bring her safely back to earth, while Hercules undertakes the quest for his friend Admeto and succeeds in bringing Alceste back to her husband. Il delirio amoroso diverges from both of these in that Clori’s beloved Tirsi has rejected her love on earth and, in her mind, he continues to turn his back even when she finds him in Hades, yet she forgives him and proves her undying love by leading him from Hades to Elysium. As I have tried to show in Handel as Orpheus, Handel’s cantata texts frequently resonate with multiple meanings, often with overlapping religious, political and personal associations. The text of Il delirio amoroso is no exception. I have suggested previously that the text has religious overtones, perhaps representing a distraught soul who thinks she has been deserted by Christ; she imagines herself descending into Hell, where she still feels rejected; ultimately her journey of faith allows her to be united with Christ in heaven19 . The text might also, in contrast, describe the anguish of a pastor who pursues a lost soul in order to lead him out of darkness into heaven. The quest metaphor also could apply to politics, representing the search for a political union or treaty (perhaps, at this time, relating to the War of Spanish Succession). Obviously, the text could also depict a pursuit or quest within a spectrum of personal relationships, ranging from collegial to intimate. The flexible nature of pastoral texts is, in my view, inherent to their meaning, and just as seeing only the pastoral façade is too general, so too is a single, fixed reading too limited. It is clear that the cantatas often referred to specific individuals. Handel is mentioned by name in the text of Hendel, non può mia musa, also by Pamphili. Ruspoli is mentioned by his Arcadian name, Olinto [Arsenio], in Handel’s cantata O come chiare, which comments specifically on the War of Spanish Succession. Further, the association of the conventional pas- 19 HARRIS, Handel as Orpheus, pp. 81-82.
9] «Cantate, que me veux-tu?», or: Do Handel’s cantatas matter? 221 toral texts with the lives of the authors and auditors is indicated in the watercolor miniatures with Roman backgrounds associated with the cantatas in two manuscripts compiled for the castrato Andrea Adami, a singer in residence at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni from 1686 to 1740 20 . Typically, however, the value of the pastoral resided in its ambiguity and the ability to suggest without naming, an aesthetic apparently shared by the miniatures which imply a Roman analogy without depicting specific people. Ursula Kirkendale, in contrast, has suggested that the couple in Handel’s Arresta il passo specifically portray «Ruspoli, disguised as the shepherd Aminta [who] detains the nymph Phyllis representing Handel» and that the cantata enacts a «playful dialogue» whose «subtext is a serious musical ‘contract’». She uses this interpretation to reinforce her proposed early dating of the cantata to December 1706 21 . However, there is no evidence for this reading, and most of the cantatas describe similar narratives. For example, Il delirio amoroso could equally represent Pamphili as the nymph Clori, pursuing Handel, the recalcitrant Tirsi. Given Cardinal Pamphili’s evident attraction to the young composer, as expressed in two other texts by him that were set by Handel in 1707, Hendel, non può mia musa and Il trionfo del tempo ed il disinganno 22 . it could be tempting, even titillating, to suggest a personification reading that depicts Pamphili’s pursuit, romantic rather than contractual, of the recalcitrant Handel to hell and beyond. Being able to read a hint of homoeroticism, or any other type of per- 20 Ivi, pp. 86-87; see also REINHARD STROHM, Scarlattiana at Yale, in Händel e gli Scarlatti a Roma, ed. Nino Pirrotta and Agostino Ziino, Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 1987, pp. 113-152; Zach Victor is currently undertaking further research into the meaning of these miniatures, and I am grateful to him for sharing with me his unpublished paper The Ink Miniature and the Cantata in Handel’s Italy, presented at the American Handel Society Festival (Santa Fe, 2005). 21 KIRKENDALE, Handel with Ruspoli, p. 306. 22 HARRIS, Handel as Orpheus, pp. 43-45.
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