Handel – Acis & Galatea

Acis & Galatea, HWV 49a
G.F. Handel – Original Cannons Performing Version (1718) 

Handel’s brief period (1717-1718) at Cannons (near Edgware) as composer to James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon, was to prove an excellent catalyst for his future success in England. Here, with the handful of professional musicians who constituted the ‘Cannons Concert’, he could experiment with instrumental genres and dramas involving English texts without the habitual financial pressures of public performance. His eleven Cannons Anthems constituted his most extensive single collection of English church music and Esther (HWV 50a, then called The Oratorium) became the prototype for the English oratorio, which was to sustain the latter part of his career. Equally important was the pastoral ‘entertainment’, Acis and Galatea, which was his first setting of a substantial dramatic English text. He had already set this story – derived from the version in Ovid’s Metamorphoses – in an Italian Serenata of 1708 (Acis, Galatea e Polifemo, HWV 72), and poetry in the pastoral genre was well suited to the da capo aria form that Handel had long cultivated in his Italian dramatic works. He was clearly on excellent terms with the major figures in the literary movement concerned with defining and developing English pastoral poetry, a circle centred around another of Handel’s patrons. The leading theorist and practitioner was Alexander Pope, whose models lie behind several numbers in Handel’s libretto (e.g. ‘Wretched lovers!’ and ‘The flocks shall leave the mountains’), closely followed by John Gay, who probably wrote much of the text. Brian Trowell has suggested convincingly that, at some stage in the process of creating Acis and Galatea, it was decided to expand it from a three-character piece (involving Acis, Galatea and Polyphemus alone, as in Handel’s Italian setting) to one with an advisor each for Acis and Polyphemus – Damon and Coridon respectively. According to Trowell, much of the newer poetry was added by John Hughes, but other poets might have been involved too, such as one of the Cannons tenors, John Blackley. As Graydon Beeks notes, Blackley wrote the libretto for at least one cantata by Johann Christoph Pepusch, director of the Cannons Concert.