Handel’s Italians

There is a question that accompanies every modern performance of the music written in the eighteenth century for the castrati: what is it that we are listening to?

Not their voice, clearly. Of that we possess descriptions, treatises, chronicles, caricatures; above all we possess the music composed for particular performers, from which we may deduce ranges, tessituras, technical habits and — with far greater caution — a few clues about the instrument itself. In the extreme and very late case of Alessandro Moreschi there is even a phonographic document, but it belongs to another era, another aesthetic and a practice of singing that rules out its use as a time machine: Moreschi leads us back to Senesino no more than a photograph from 1900 allows us to reconstruct the face of a contemporary of Bach.

Between the eighteenth-century castrato and today’s countertenor there is therefore no physiological equivalence, nor could there be. It is from this absence, however, that Handel’s Italians draws much of its interest. Not because it attempts the impossible resurrection of those voices, but because it follows the traces they left in the writing of Georg Friedrich Handel.

The subtitle, Italian Castrati in the London Oratorios, defines the enquiry precisely. This is not an anthology of Handel’s most celebrated arias for the high male register, nor a recital built solely to display the soloist. The programme spans nineteen years of London oratorio, following four singers — Francesco Bernardi, known as Senesino, Giovanni Carestini, Giovanni Battista Andreoni and Gaetano Guadagni — and, by reflection, watching Handel as he modifies his own writing according to the performers before him.

The perspective reverses the customary one. Normally we begin with the work and look at the singers who served it. Here, instead, we begin with the singers and observe what the composer did when he found them in front of him.

And it is precisely this reversal that makes the recording something more than a well-constructed recital.

A porous border

The rise of oratorio in English did not produce an abrupt break with the world of Italian opera. For years the two universes coexisted and, above all, shared their performers. The Italians did not disappear when Handel turned to the oratorio public: they entered the new system and helped to determine some of its features.

Senesino, the leading figure of Handel’s operatic seasons in the 1720s, sang Ahasuerus in the Esther of 1732 and Barak in the Deborah of the following year. Carestini entered this laboratory immediately afterwards, taking over Barak in the Deborah of 1734 and sustaining the part of Joad in the London Athalia of 1735. In 1741 Handel adapted the part of David for Andreoni in the revival of Saul. Different again, and chronologically remote, is the case of Guadagni, bound to the late season: the Messiah of 1750, Theodora in the same year, Belshazzar in 1751.

The recorded programme conveys this mobility well because it avoids the undifferentiated label of “arias for castrato”. We hear compositions born in different circumstances, adaptations, substitutions, numbers linked to specific revivals. The history of the oratorio thus becomes also the history of a theatrical pragmatism: the score is not an untouchable relic but material that Handel goes on reworking whenever the concrete conditions of performance change.

This is an essential point. Handel does not write for an abstract category called “castrato”. He writes for Senesino, then for Carestini, then for Andreoni, then for Guadagni. And those names correspond to different vocal instruments.

Two numbers bear witness to the permeability of these borders with particular eloquence, and they are the ones the recording presents as first recordings in their respective Italian versions: Più bella spoglia sarà fral, Barak’s aria written for Carestini in the Deborah of 1734, and Di Jonathan lo stral portò, intended for Andreoni in the Saul of 1741. In the Athalia of 1735 Italian returns with Cor fedele spera sempre and Angelico splendor, both for Carestini’s Joad.

The fact is worth more than mere documentary interest. It reminds us how porous was the border between genres, languages and conventions that a later historiographical ordering inevitably tends to harden. The English of the oratorio and the Italian of the opera are not two separate continents: they are neighbouring territories, crossed by the same singers and governed by the same man of the theatre.

Four instruments, not a category

Here it is worth being concrete, because the project allows it and current practice too often avoids it.

Of Senesino we know, through the testimony of Johann Joachim Quantz later taken up by Charles Burney, that he possessed a contralto voice that was powerful, clear, even and sweet, secure in intonation and endowed with an excellent trill; that his declamation was held to be exemplary; that in adagios he did not overload the line with ornaments and that in allegros he was able to combine fire with articulation in the divisions. Quantz also recalls a noble and natural stage presence.

What emerges is the portrait of a singer in whom authority, clarity of the word and control of coloratura appear to count at least as much as range.

The writing for Barak in the Deborah of 1733 appears consistent with this profile. All danger disdaining is a number of declared energy; In the battle, fame pursuing arranges the divisions according to a logic that makes clear how concretely Handel knew the possibilities of the performer before him.

Carestini is another matter. Burney describes him as a voice born a powerful and limpid soprano, later transformed into a contralto of particular fullness and depth. The celebrated episode of Verdi prati, which Carestini is said to have initially refused, judging it ill-suited to his own capacities, and Handel’s consequent fury, now belongs to the canonical anecdotage of eighteenth-century operatic history; but it also tells us something about the relationship between composer and virtuoso.

The numbers of Athalia seem to ask for a different breadth from those linked to Senesino: more expansive lines, greater amplitude, a conception of virtuosity less exclusively founded on impulse.

Of Andreoni we know far less. He sang in London in the early 1740s, inherited the David of Saul, and then the documentation thins out. The recording devotes a single aria to him. It is almost an apparition and, for that very reason, performs an unintentionally significant function: it reminds us that not all the protagonists of the eighteenth-century stage have reached us with the same historiographical sharpness.

Guadagni, finally, belongs to a world already changing. He arrived in London young and still inexperienced. Burney recalled having been called upon to help him in the study of the Handelian parts, including those derived from material originally intended for Susannah Cibber. David Garrick, according to the same testimony of Burney, took pleasure in forming him as an actor. His story would continue well beyond Handel, as far as the decisive encounter with Gluck and the creation of Orfeo.

The Handelian numbers destined for Guadagni already testify to an ever closer relationship between singing, word and dramatic action.

Four instruments, then, not a category.

And it is here that the project becomes truly interesting.

The voice that runs through them

Carlo Vistoli faces a paradoxical task: to traverse with a single modern instrument music in which four different historical instruments have been deposited.

The risk of such a programme is obvious. A recital built around a performer of so recognisable a personality could easily turn into a self-portrait, leaving Handel and his singers in the background.

That is not the impression Handel’s Italians gives.

Vistoli confirms here the traits that in recent years have established his name among the most authoritative in contemporary baroque singing: technical solidity, musicality, stylistic control, attention to the word and a virtuosity that never seems an end in itself.

This is perhaps the point to underline.

A beautiful voice is not enough in Handel. An agile voice is not enough. Even the sum of the two qualities may not be enough if the coloratura remains separate from affect and from the word. In Vistoli, by contrast, virtuosity tends to retain a discursive function.

It is not only a technical question, but a cultural one.

The generation of countertenors to which Vistoli belongs has long since passed the phase in which the register was in itself an event. The countertenor no longer needs to be justified as a curiosity, an exception or a reconstruction. He can finally be judged for what he is: a singer.

And it is precisely as a singer that Vistoli convinces. His presence rests not on the display of a vocal anomaly but on the continuity of the musical discourse. The register naturally remains recognisable, but it does not become the content of the interpretation.

What remains is Handel.

Senesino, or authority

The recording opens with the Overture from the Concerto grosso in D minor, Op. 6 No. 10, HWV 328. It is not a merely ornamental introduction: it establishes the sound world within which the vocal journey will be placed.

Then comes Ahasuerus. How can I stay when Love invites, from the Esther of 1732, opens the sung side of the programme and places Vistoli at once within the continuity between the Italian stage and the English oratorio.

With Barak the character changes. All danger disdaining and In the battle, fame pursuing belong to that area of Handel’s writing in which energy, agility and dramatic authority must find a point of balance. Vistoli approaches these numbers without turning them into mere technical demonstration.

The bravura is evident, but it does not become an autonomous argument. It is an important difference.

There are performers who seem constantly engaged in demonstrating their mastery of the repertoire. Vistoli belongs rather to those in whom mastery becomes a premise and can therefore disappear behind the music.

For a virtuoso there is perhaps no greater praise.

Carestini, or amplitude

With Carestini the perspective shifts. Più bella spoglia sarà fral is of interest above all for its very presence in the programme, evidence of that linguistic and theatrical circulation which constitutes one of the disc’s most stimulating motifs.

The real space allotted to Carestini opens, however, with Athalia. Cor fedele spera sempre and Angelico splendor allow a passage into a different dimension of Handel’s writing, broader and more expansive, in which virtuosity does not disappear but changes function.

Here another general merit of Vistoli’s approach emerges: the ability not to treat every aria as an occasion for producing an effect.

It is a frequent danger in baroque recitals. When every da capo claims to be surprising, every variation significant, every ornament a small aesthetic manifesto, the music ends up suffocated by interpretative intention.

Vistoli, by contrast, seems to possess a very precise sense of hierarchy. Ornamentation remains subordinate to form; virtuosity does not obscure the continuity of the phrase; technique serves to make the discourse possible rather than to replace it.

Angelico splendor, among the most brilliant numbers of the programme, confirms how well the project combines documentary interest with musical pleasure. Apparent ease is always one of the most reliable signs of great technique.

When the listener stops perceiving the difficulty, virtuosity has achieved its purpose.

Andreoni, or silence

Then comes David. Di Jonathan lo stral portò is Andreoni’s only presence on the disc. In a programme of over an hour it amounts almost to a parenthesis. But it is precisely this disproportion that ends up acquiring meaning.

The four singers evoked by the project do not carry the same historiographical weight. Senesino and Carestini are figures for whom we possess a relatively wide body of testimony; Guadagni traverses a theatrical history leading as far as Gluck; Andreoni, by contrast, remains far more elusive.

His presence in the programme thus breaks the illusion that the past can be reconstructed uniformly.

It cannot.

Sometimes we have chronicles, letters, descriptions, caricatures and very extensive repertoires. Elsewhere almost nothing remains but a musical part. The recording has the merit of not artificially correcting this asymmetry.

Guadagni, or the word that becomes theatre

With Guadagni the journey makes a significant chronological and stylistic leap. Great God! Who yet but darkly known, The raptur’d soul defies the sword and But who may abide the day of His coming? belong to Handel’s late season and lead the programme towards a different relationship between word, affect and theatrical gesture.

It is also the area in which Vistoli finds some of the numbers that best correspond to his interpretative maturity. The raptur’d soul defies the sword, from Theodora, requires a broad conception of musical time: it is not enough to resolve the succession of phrases correctly; a sense of direction must be sustained across an extended arc.

It is the kind of number that distinguishes an interesting voice from an interpreter.

Vistoli belongs without doubt to the second category.

His familiarity with the Handelian repertoire allows him to avoid both monumentalisation and excessive smoothness. The intensity arises from the relationship between music and text, not from the external application of a spiritual rhetoric.

The word, above all in English, takes on an essential function here.

Handelian oratorio is not Italian opera simply translated. The language modifies the scansion, the weight of the consonants, the relationship between verbal accent and musical accent. Vistoli shows a stylistic awareness mature enough to confront this specificity without strain.

Then comes But who may abide the day of His coming? It is one of the disc’s testing points, both for the fame of the number and for the quantity of interpretations accumulated in listeners’ memories.

Vistoli does not seem interested in declaring his own difference through eccentricity. It is a quality that recurs throughout the programme.

He does not try to make Handel modern, surprising or provocative. He does not attempt to impose an ideological reading of the piece. He relies instead on the solidity of the musical construction and on his own capacity to sustain it.

And it is precisely this sobriety that gives the reading its authority.

The singer before the countertenor

Perhaps the decisive point of the recording is just this: after a few tracks one gradually stops thinking about the vocal category. Vistoli asks no indulgence for being a countertenor and asks for no wonder because he sings in a register that, until a few decades ago, still retained an aura of exceptionality.

His singing can be judged by the same criteria we would apply to any performer of the first rank: musicality, phrasing, handling of the word, the ability to differentiate affects, technical control, intelligence of form.

This is an important step not only for him but for the recent history of this register.

The great season of the countertenor’s rediscovery necessarily produced a rhetoric of the countertenor as well. First wonder at the timbre, then the expansion of the repertoire, finally a new generation of singers for whom that repertoire is no longer reconquered territory but a mother tongue.

Vistoli belongs fully to this last phase. He does not have to prove that a countertenor can sing Handel. He simply has to sing Handel well. And he does.

Haïm, or breathing together

A result of this quality would not be possible without Emmanuelle Haïm and Le Concert d’Astrée. The conductor knows Handel far too well to turn the orchestra into a neutral accompaniment. The theatrical element remains present throughout, even when the programme proceeds by extracts.

The overall impression is of a mobile reading, attentive to rhetoric without making it mechanical, capable of sustaining the soloist without stifling him. It is a particularly important balance in a recital built around the voice.

An accompaniment that was too deferential would have turned the disc into a showcase for Vistoli; a direction that was too aggressive would instead have deprived the voice of the space it needs to articulate the word.

Haïm avoids both extremes. Le Concert d’Astrée participates in the dramatic construction of the programme and prevents the succession of arias from taking on the character of a mere vocal gallery.

In the few numbers in which she appears, Giulia Semenzato completes the vocal picture with discretion and elegance, without altering its centre of gravity, which remains firmly with Vistoli.

Three reservations

A project conceived in this way naturally lays itself open to certain objections.

The first concerns balance.

Four singers are announced, but the proportions are strongly asymmetrical: Guadagni and Carestini occupy a substantial part of the programme, Senesino has a recognisable block, while Andreoni remains confined to an almost episodic presence.

The title in some sense promises four portraits; the disc delivers rather three figures and a shadow.

This is not necessarily a defect. On the contrary, as has been said, the asymmetry also reflects the differing substance of the documentation and of the available repertoire. But it remains a structural feature of the programme.

The second reservation concerns the order.

With Messiah and Theodora the disc reaches a strong dramatic concentration, only to return afterwards towards chronologically earlier material. The choice can be understood in terms of editorial construction, but it produces a less linear trajectory than a chronological sequence would have offered.

The third concerns the title itself. Handel’s Italians inevitably places Italianness in the foreground; yet much of the material naturally remains tied to the English oratorio. The Italian numbers are precious and conceptually central, but quantitatively in the minority.

More than an “Italian” disc, then, it is a disc about the persistence of Italy within Handel. And that is perhaps a more interesting definition. None of these reservations diminishes the quality of the performance. They concern rather the way the project organises and narrates itself.

No time machine

The initial question remains. What relationship exists between what we hear and the voices of Senesino, Carestini, Andreoni and Guadagni? We know some things, and many others we cannot know.

We can reconstruct the ranges required, study the tessituras, compare parts written for different performers, read contemporary testimony, observe the modifications made by the composer, consult treatises on singing and ornamentation.

We can go a very long way.

But we cannot reconstruct a body.

The modern high male voice is therefore not the answer to the disappearance of the castrato. It is one of the contemporary solutions to the problem posed by the survival of his repertoire. Part of the merit of Handel’s Italians lies in not turning this solution into a claim to authenticity.

Vistoli is not Senesino. He does not reconstruct Carestini. He does not show us how Guadagni sang. He does something artistically more serious: he takes seriously the music Handel wrote for them.

The difference is substantial.

If we were to judge the recording by its capacity to restore the sound of the castrati, we should have to declare the project impossible before even listening to it. If instead we judge it by its capacity to interrogate the different vocal demands deposited in the scores, the result is of great interest.

And it is here that Vistoli confirms himself not simply as an excellent countertenor but as a Handelian interpreter of the first rank.

From Jaroussky to Vistoli

The most interesting comparison, moreover, lies within Emmanuelle Haïm’s own discography.

In 2007 Haïm and Le Concert d’Astrée had recorded with Philippe Jaroussky Carestini: The Story of a Castrato: a project built on a kindred principle, that of reconstructing a singer through the repertoire written for him.

Nineteen years later the perspective widens.

There, there was a portrait.

Here, there is a gallery.

And the performer changes too.

Jaroussky and Vistoli belong to two immediately distinguishable vocal conceptions, and it is precisely this that makes the continuity of the project interesting. Haïm does not seem to be pursuing a single model of the high male voice; she returns instead to the problem through different instruments.

It is a significant choice. If the historical castrato is irreproducible, there is likewise no reason to suppose that a single type of countertenor should represent his ideal heir. The plurality of modern instruments can indeed become a critical resource.

It does not reconstruct the past, but it prevents it from being fixed in a single image.

The traces of the voice

At the end of the journey a singular sensation remains. We have listened for more than an hour to music bound to singers of whom we shall never hear a single note. And yet Senesino, Carestini, Andreoni and Guadagni are not entirely absent.

They are in the difficulties Handel imagines. In the tessituras he chooses. In the coloratura he lays out. In the changes he introduces, in the arias he substitutes, in the language he alters, in the occasions on which he retrieves earlier material because he judges it suited to a new performer.

They are, in short, in the very form of the music.

This makes Handel’s Italians something more than a well-constructed recital magnificently entrusted to its performers: a small archaeology of the voice, conducted not through the claim to reconstruct what has vanished but through the observation of what that disappearance has left behind.

Vistoli is particularly suited to an operation of this kind precisely because he does not try to occupy the place of the ghosts.

He lets them exist.

And meanwhile he confirms a maturity that now makes it reductive to consider him merely one of the finest countertenors on the current scene.

The question is a different one.

Vistoli is a musician who sings.

The distinction may seem obvious; it is not at all. It means that technique, timbre and register do not continually impose themselves as the object of listening but are absorbed into a broader musical thought.

And this is perhaps the reason why the disc does him a better service than an anthology built exclusively on the most spectacular numbers would have done. The true measure of a singer does not emerge from acrobatics alone.

It emerges from the ability to traverse repertoires born for different personalities while preserving one’s own identity without making them all alike. This is the difficult balance that Handel’s Italians asks of its protagonist.

And Vistoli sustains it with authority.

One may listen to the disc for the rarity of certain versions, for the curiosity of following the presence of the Italian castrati in the London oratorio, for Haïm’s direction or simply for the pleasure of a Handelian programme constructed with intelligence.

But in the end one inevitably returns to him. Not because he imposes his own presence on the music.

For the opposite reason.

The technique is secure enough not to have to be continually displayed; the stylistic knowledge deep enough not to turn into pedantry; the personality defined enough not to require eccentricity in order to assert itself.

And this allows Handel to remain at the centre. Perhaps this is precisely where the difference lies between the virtuoso and the great interpreter. The virtuoso makes us admire what he can do. The great interpreter, having made us forget how difficult it is to do, leads us back to the music.

The voices for which Handel wrote are lost. Carlo Vistoli does not claim to restore them to us. He restores something that matters more: the musical reasons why we go on looking for them.