Conference Agenda

George Frideric Handel’s Second Academy Period saw some of his most enduring works, including three operas based on Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516; rev. 1532): Orlando (1733), Ariodante (1735), and Alcina (1735). Recent scholarship has explored the politics of Handel’s operas, particularly during the First Academy Period of the 1720s. The production of Ariodante would be especially problematic in the early 1730s, though, due to simmering tensions with Scotland and the lingering movement to replace the Hanoverians with a new Stuart dynasty. This paper explores a potential reason for Handel’s return to magical themes and an opera with a Scottish setting by examining the relationship between these operas and a garden installation commissioned by Queen Caroline called Merlin’s Cave.

The cave consisted of a cottage structure on the grounds of Richmond Palace in that served an important political function. It included waxwork figures used to tie the Hanoverians through the line of kings to King Arthur, a work of propaganda meant to promote the legitimacy of the German royals and help solidify public support against the return of the Stuarts. Given their friendship, the question remains as to whether Handel supported Queen Caroline’s project of Merlin’s Cave through his operas. This seems likely as the cave’s planning and installation occurred between 1732 and 1735, with a key feature of the cave being a statue of Bradamante that had links to the Hanoverians and was a character who appeared in Alcina, which premiered in April 1735. While much can be said of these three operas, the context of their composition and premiere during the planning and building of Merlin’s Cave serves as another example of Handel’s political acumen and dramatic skills in navigating the fraught politics of his time while managing to survive the fickle world of opera in eighteenth-century London. It also demonstrates Queen Caroline's keen political mind as she sought to ensure her family's rule through public works and patronage.

On August 30, 1783, Margaret Fowke, an English woman in Calcutta, anxiously scribbled a letter to her brother Francis. “What a father the lord has bestowed upon me,” she bemoaned. She had just fought with her father, Joseph, about the propriety of traveling to visit Francis in Benares and saw her chances to go slipping away. Less than two weeks earlier, she similarly complained to Francis about withstanding “a great deal of old music” before her preferred vocal works at a musical soirée she hosted with Joseph. Her father was a devotee of George Frideric Handel’s “ancient” instrumental music. In both contexts, father and daughter found their values diametrically opposed.

In this paper, I argue that Margaret and Joseph’s musical disagreements emblematized competing ways of experiencing the British Empire in colonial Calcutta. Adopting a biographical approach to empire (Finn 2010; Fullagar 2020), I use Margaret’s correspondence to reconstruct the intimate details of her life and relationship with Joseph. These details illustrate how life under empire informed gendered expectations. Margaret, concerned with fashion, travel, and socializing in polite company, rejected Handel’s instrumental music because it indexed Joseph’s views of social decorum in India. He, conversely, shared metropolitan fears about India’s corrupting or effeminizing influence and, accordingly, restricted Margaret’s social movements violently. Handel thus became a sonic emblem of imperial experiences misaligned with Margaret’s expectations of freedom and expression in India.

Scholars of history, literature, and performance have long documented theater’s participation in Britain’s imperial project (Wilson 2022; Dillon 2014; Roach 1996). With notable exceptions (Woodfield 2001), music has been absent from these histories. My work contributes to a burgeoning historiography of music in the British Empire (Borowski 2023; Lingold 2023; Weaver 2023; Ryan 2021) by demonstrating, through Handel’s music, how empire’s ideological currents manifested in individual imperial lives. More significantly, I respond to recent debates about Handel’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade (Hunter and Harris 2022). Margaret’s subversive reading of Handel’s music offers an opportunity for musicologists to re-evaluate, re-imagine, and resist hegemonic narratives by decentering the composer through his works’ global resonance.

“… the opera form itself… belongs equally to the history of culture and the historical experience of overseas domination.”
– Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

The eighteenth century was a pivotal time in the history of British-Indian encounter. Alongside the social and political instability of the Mughal Empire, the East India Company – an English joint-stock company founded to facilitate Indian Ocean trade – solidified its economic monopoly and established itself as the chief colonial power on the South Asian subcontinent. As the Company’s mercantile relationship with Indian sovereigns transitioned into that of a colonial company-state and as the British crown and economy became increasingly reliant on overseas enterprise, discourses on governance, expansion, and racial difference developed to sustain the ideological foundations of imperialism.

It is at this juncture in the early history of the British empire that Handel was producing opera seria that both reflected and facilitated the sociopolitical and intellectual tensions of an expanding Britain. Although scholars such as Martha Feldman, Suzanne Aspden, Michael Burden, Thomas McGeary have addressed opera seria’s attunement to sociopolitical dynamics of the British empire, the time is ripe for a postcolonial critical approach to this repertoire that both critiques its entanglement in projects of imperialism and interrogates its role in forming western modes of knowledge production. Ellen Harris and Davis Hunter respectively link Handel to the enterprises of the East India and Royal African Companies. Their important contributions, however, primarily document the economic link between overseas enterprise, operatic institutions, and musical publication, and not the ideological and epistemological constructs that enabled imperial conquest. My work builds on this scholarship and further interrogates how Handel opera seria narrativizes and represents the politics of eighteenth-century imperial expansion.

This paper focuses on Handel’s 1731 opera Poro, re dell’Indie which dramatizes the clash between Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great and King Porus, who ruled portions of Punjab, during the former’s fourth-century BCE Indian Campaign. Analyzing the musical-dramatic representation of the opera’s two male monarchs, I examine how Handel adapts classical historical accounts to allegorize contemporary issues of British imperialism and colonization in India. To this end, I use musical and textual analysis, as well as eighteenth-century political literature as well as English translations of classical sources in order to understand how writers constructed popular mythologies of Alexander alongside accounts of British-Indian encounter. Ultimately, I consider Poro, re dell’Indie’s participation in this discursive exchange and its role in fashioning the developing concepts of British selfhood, Otherness, and empire.