Donna Leon - Handels Bestiary: In Search of Animals in Handels Operas

Handels Bestiary

ALSO BY DONNA LEON

Death at La Fenice

Death in a Strange Country

Dressed for Death

Death and Judgment

Acqua Alta

Quietly in Their Sleep

A Noble Radiance

Fatal Remedies

Friends in High Places

A Sea of Troubles

Willful Behaviour

Uniform Justice

Doctored Evidence

Blood from a Stone

Through a Glass, Darkly

Suffer the Little Children

The Girl of His Dreams

About Face

A Question of Belief

Brunettis Cookbook

Drawing Conclusions

In Search of Animals
in Handels Operas

Illustrated by

Music by George Frideric Handel with

conducting Il Complesso Barocco

Copyright 2010 by Diogenes Verlag AG Zrich
CD Copyright + 2010 by Il Complesso Barocco

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S ubtract the motor. Cancel it from your consciousness: switch it off, as it were. Then take a new look at the world, or better said take a look at the way the world was before so much of it was changed by the arrival of the motor and all it brought along with it. Suddenly the order of importance given to certain things will change. Who needs oil? Where can I find a good riding horse?

One of the first recalibrations that the absence of the motor demands is a re-shifting of the order of creation that will allow animals to return to their former importance. The muscle power of man, made pretty much redundant by the arrival of the machine, will still be inferior to that of an ox, and his ability to move quickly from place to place will again depend upon the speed of the horse. Not only did animals supply muscle power, but their ownership and husbandry was one of the principal bases of wealth, and thus power, in the pre-industrial world.

Returning to former times will also cause us to lose access to those sources that today provide us with information about the world we live in the printed book, films, television, the internet and leave us once again dependent upon the means which informed past ages of the world around them: oral tradition, legend, and manuscript. The importance of the role played by animals in these sources cannot be overstated.

Man lived with animals and around animals, and thus their abilities and habits were the stuff of common knowledge and of common reference. Folk tales were filled with their antics, their cunning, and their sense of independence, and much moral instruction was based upon their observed or imputed - behavior. Leftovers of this come down in the English-speaking world in expressions like Cunning as a fox, Brave as a lion, Dirty as a pig, Wily as a serpent.

The attributes which common wisdom linked to various animals were often based upon direct observation: foxes are cunning, and lions are brave, and a mother tiger will defend her young at any cost. But much was based on other sources, among which at least in Europe was the Bible, which probably explains the bad reputation of the snake, who is really quite a helpful chap, gobbling up insects and vermin. Much received wisdom about animals also filtered down from the Natural History of Pliny the Elder and the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, as well as from that great historian, Herodotus.

Information well, what passed for information about animals also had a way of slipping in from other cultures and from sketches and verbal accounts brought back from travelers in foreign lands. Thus the pictorial representation of animals which had been described but never seen displayed a certain inventiveness. A manuscript from Northern France (ca. 1300) pictures what is meant to be an elephant but which actually looks like a friendly dog with pig tusks, from between which emerges something that looks like a cross between a walrus horn and a vacuum cleaner. In one later bestiary, a painting of what is often said to be a sloth, might just as easily be a curly-haired mouse with inordinately large feet. These early manuscripts also contain an inventive menagerie of dragons and demons, sirens and centaurs, as well as griffons and unicorns. There are also ox-headed Saint Lukes and sheep-headed pastors.

Strangely enough, only a century later artists other than the ones who illustrated the Bestiaries were even then painting, sketching, and drawing perfect pictures of animals and birds, accurate to the most minute detail. The Biblioteca Civica of Bergamo possesses the notebook of Giovannino de Grassi with drawings of birds and animals so real that they seem only perched on the page, ready to fly off into reality. Or consider for a moment all of those perfectly rendered dogs sitting under the tables where Christ is eating the last supper or noblemen are feasting. But the business of the Bestiary was to teach, not to render an accurate pictorial record, and the craftsmen who illustrated them were a world away in talent from the artists who were in the process of opening Europes eyes.

Man is an imaginative creature who delights in making connections between the real world and a higher world. Thus the perceived virtues and vices of animals are often made to resonate in the human sphere to serve as examples from which moral lessons can be drawn to the edification and improvement of fallen mankind. Mickey Mouse did not conquer the world because he is a fool; Goofys name is not an accident.

Though this tradition is Medieval and pre-Medieval, certainly these habits of thought and association filtered down into the Eighteenth Century to become part and parcel of the mental baggage of writers, poets, and of concern here opera librettists. The qualities attributed to animals served, and still serve, as a sort of moral shorthand, and so reference to a lion in an aria would summon with it the courage that is traditionally attributed to that animal, the noblest of them all. To fill an aria about a snake with sibilant words and then to set it to a sinuous rhythm would enforce the association with the chief enemy of mankind.

Handels operas and oratorios are filled with arias that make reference to animals: sometimes they are invoked as templates of virtuous behavior, while occasionally they serve a more malign purpose, like the frogs who invade the land of the Egyptians, even in the kings chambers. Occasionally as with the mother tiger who pops into the third act of