Oscar and Caesar, Horner and Handel

Just three years shy of his 100^th birthday, Oscar will hoist himself off his slab to stand at attention one more time this coming Sunday evening at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. He’ll try his best to keep the chin up and the fascist countenance glowing. But the luster is gone. You can see the resignation in the furrowing brow, the evermore fascist curve of the frown, the sharp edges of the knee-replacement hardware poking through the skin halfway down his legs. This nonagenarian yearns for death with dignity.

A quarter-century ago the TV viewership of the Academy Awards broadcast was just shy of 60 million. That was 1998, the year that Titanic sailed to eleven wins, steaming off with Best Picture at the end of the four-hour broadcast. Sunrise after the all-night deck party would have been the right moment for a burial at sea.

Rigor mortis hadn’t set in. Oscar had been born with it. The last that would have been seen of him that spring morning in 1998 following the Titanic sweep would have been the glint of a tiny golden missile arcing above the Pacific off Malibu after the statuette had been fired from a cannon mounted on the bow of director James Cameron’s yacht. To the strains of a digital bagpipe dirge that gives way to an even more mournful sea shanty sung by an echo-chamber choir, the mercifully deceased Award would have been sent to his final resting place on the Continental Shelf off of Malibu—even if no underwater resting place is truly final as long as deep-sea Cameron lives and breathes. Oscar’s Lament was composed by James Horner, who also took home the prize for Best Original Score that Sunday night back in Clinton Time. The funeral music came from the cue in Titanic called “Never an Absolution,” a fitting title for Oscar’s last rites, since he had many crimes to answer for, from Mrs. Miniver to Braveheart and beyond.

But it was Horner, not Oscar, who was doomed. An amateur aviator, the composer’s turboprop plane crashed into a hillside in the Los Padres National Forest in June of 2015.

The sleek, bald Academy Award statuette cuts a very different figure from that of George Frideric Handel. He was corpulent and bewigged, but, like Oscar, an addict of theatrical thrills and celebrity. Ogled at by Cardinals and Princes for his comeliness, Handel got big in every way once success in the entertainment industry overtook him.

Surviving portraits of Handel show him to have had snazzy clothes such as a richly brocaded coat he could have donned to make a grand entrance to the Dolby Theatre before the ceremony, snatching Best Original Score honors from John Williams, nominated for an Oscar the 54^th time this year. His handsome buckled shoes, dark and shapely, would have looked great on the red carpet. Handel’s will made clear that he wanted his wardrobe to shine after his death, which came to him in the spring of 1759: “I give and bequeath unto my servant Peter the Blond, my clothes and linen, and three hundred pounds [sterling].”

Three centuries before the invention of motion pictures, Handel had set out as an eighteen-year-old on the path to make his name in the blockbuster entertainment of his time: opera. Against the wishes of his father, who had hoped his son would become a lawyer, Handel left his hometown of Halle to work at northern Europe’s only public opera house which was in Hamburg, then Germany’s biggest city. From there the young man went to Italy, the birthplace of opera, for four years before bringing his big, brash style of musical showmanship to London in 1711.

300 years ago this week, Handel was at the height of his operatic fame and in the midst of a fabulous run of what has become his most oft-performed opera, Giulio Cesare. Many modern productions around the globe will mark the tricentennial.

In the thrall of song and spectacle, the biggest bigshots of English society backed Handel’s operatic enterprise. Dukes and Princes, and even King George himself thronged to the show, the monarch himself doubtless seeing and hearing himself in the conquering title hero, who, in the opening scene, delivers his most famous lines, uttered in the second person used in his own accounts of his exploits: “Caesar came, he saw, he conquered.” In the King’s Theatre in 1724, these lines were delivered in the language of opera, Italian: “Cesare venne, e vide e vinse.”

As in the Hollywood of today, the production was big budget, most of the money going to the star singers, who made far more than Handel. The imperious Italian castrato, Francesco Bernardi (known, like the overpaid soccer stars of our own time, by a stage name: Senesino) sang the role of Caesar. After his retirement back to Italy, Senesino inscribed mocking words over the doorway of his villa, an equal to the palaces on Mulholland Drive in today’s Hollywood: “This house was built on the folly of the English.” The role of Cleopatra was taken by another richly paid, strong-willed member of the company, Francesca Cuzzoni.

Composer and singers repeatedly clashed, Handel even threatening, during rehearsals for an opera the previous season, to throw Cuzzoni out of a nearby second-story window if she did not sing one of his arias which she had dismissed as inadequate.

The talk of the town, Handel packed his Giulio Cesare with unforgettable songs of love and lust, deception and diplomacy, rage and revenge, hunting and war, heartbreak and heroism.

One of the most famous of these is Cleopatra’s aria, “V’adoro pupille,” which comes near the start of the second of the opera’s three acts. Earlier, Cleopatra had introduced herself to Caesar not as the Queen of Egypt but as her sexy servant, Lydia. Already intoxicated by his military successes, Caesar is smitten and soon lured into her rooms for one of opera’s greatest set-pieces of seduction.

Working with his clever librettist, previously the orchestra’s cellist, Nicola Haym, Handel places a band of nine musicians, including an alluring harpist, on stage. They are costumed as the nine Muses and start the spectacle with a sumptuous sinfonia that makes the overeager Caesar wait for the appearance of his beloved. He must also listen to the band before Cleopatra sings and, crucially, before he sees her. Caesar can’t help but describe his amorous intoxication, as ever in the second person: an out-of-body commentary on his own aroused body. Yet at first, it is the vision, not the sound that he extols: the Muses arrayed before him have transported him to another realm. Three hundred years before Hollywood got going, it is as if Caesar is watching a movie.

Julius, what do you see?
And when did the gods come down to earth,
so bathed in light?

At last Cleopatra (as Lydia, dressed as “Virtue”) appears. She sings an ardent, yet restrained melody that seems almost to hold its amorous excitement in check, thus stoking Caesar’s desire all the more feverishly:

I adore you, dear eyes,
Lightning bolts of Love,
Your sparks,
Are welcome in my bosom.

All the images in the text are visual, but it is the sound that enters his body through his ears.

As sung here by Danielle de Niese, who as a teenager in Hollywood won a Daytime Emmy before she got her big break as Cleopatra in 2005 at the Glyndebourne Opera in England, the aria enchanted not only audiences but the owner of the adjacent country house and chairman of the famed opera company, Guy Christie. The two were married a few years later and now have two children.

Long before Hollywood captured and capitalized on the world’s visual desires, Handel showed that sight burns so much more intensely when fueled by artful music.

After Cleopatra/Lydia praises Caesar’s eyes, a second section turns to the minor and her “sad heart” that begs for his affection. Caesar can no longer stop himself from declaring his rapture and breaks into the aria prematurely, in almost startingly violation of the norms of prevailing operatic practice: “Jupiter in heaven has no melody to rival so sweet a song!”

(Sadly only the first section is available for free on YouTube; for the sensuous whole you’ve got to subscribe to their streaming service Glyndebourne Encore.

After this, as (almost) always in Handel’s opera arias, the opening section is repeated, delaying Caesar’s gratification still further while offering the singer the chance to embellish the melody with ornamental caresses and quivering trills.

Like Handel, Horner also tried to capture the pulse and persistence of desire. On Oscar night in 1998, Horner won a second award, this one for Best Original Song, “My Heart Will Go On.”

On the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, where the Academy Awards were then still held, a moon—this one much bigger than the one behind Cleopatra in Glyndebourne—illuminated the stage. An onstage violinist, then a penny whistle player spun out Horner’s plaintive pseudo-Scottish melody in a long introduction, sparser than Handel’s sinfonia for Cleopatra. At last, a latter-day Cuzzoni appeared on the vast Chandler Pavilion stage: Celine Dion singing Will Jennings’s lyrics that, like V’adoro pupille, concentrate on vision, though the sense of touch is also voiced:

Every night
in my dreams
I see you, I feel you.

If the laurels were passed out not at the foot of the Hollywood Hills but on the slopes of Parnassus, this category would yield the same result: “And the Oscar goes to … George Frideric Handel!”

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