About this Piece

We probably don’t expect nail-biting suspense from an allegorical morality play, but still, with a title like The Triumph of Time and Disillusion? Talk about spoilers… 

Time and Disillusion are two of the four characters here, older, wiser mentors vying with youthful Pleasure for the soul of Beauty. And a “triumph” is not just an abstract success but also a type of celebratory procession modeled on the victory parades awarded to conquering generals in the ancient Roman Empire. So we know going in that maturity and spiritual values will defeat transient illusions and physical temptations. 

Happily, the Petrarch-inspired libretto that Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili crafted in 1707 is a surprisingly nuanced and relatable human psychological voyage of self-discovery, even if the end point is given away. Better yet, Pamphili entrusted it to a young Georg Friederich Händel (not yet the George Frideric Handel of London), who would become one of his era’s most gifted masters of depicting and dissecting emotional and mental states musically. 

Handel had become an accomplished and versatile instrumentalist as a student in his native Halle. In 1703 he left Halle for Hamburg, then the major center for opera in Germany. There he gave himself a sort of self-guided apprenticeship, playing violin and keyboards with the city’s opera company and attracting the attention of valuable benefactors. These included Ferdinando de’ Medici, who encouraged him to go to Florence, capital of the Medici family’s Grand Duchy of Tuscany. That Handel did in 1706, making a base for himself in Florence, but also spending much time in Rome and Venice over the next three-and-a-half years. 

After a few months in Florence, Handel was in Rome by the beginning of 1707. He announced himself with an attention-getting performance on the organ at the church of St. John Lateran. Soon he was a welcome part of Rome’s highest musical circles, which included Cardinal Pamphili (whose family had recently paid for the interior renovation of St. John Lateran). Music was Pamphili’s passion, and he was an accomplished and prolific writer whose librettos had been set by the cream of Italian composers. Opera had been banned in Rome since 1676, but music lovers and composers got around the laws with oratorios and cantatas that were formally and stylistically operas in all but name. 

Such was The Triumph of Time and Disillusion. This was Handel’s first oratorio and also his last, 50 years later, in a manner. In 1707, it received, at most, a few performances in Pamphili’s palace theater or that of another noble patron. Handel revised it extensively as Il trionfo del Tempo e della Verità for his London season at Covent Garden in 1737, and then again in English, in 1757, as The Triumph of Time and Truth, though much of the last version was probably the work of his friend and multifaceted assistant John Christopher Smith; Handel did conduct some of its performances, however. 

Pamphili and Handel begin the oratorio by introducing the characters. Beauty is presented as a lively but superficial young woman gazing into her mirror, taking her reflection as the whole of herself, though she realizes that she is bound to lose her good looks with time. Pleasure sounds like the devious and self-absorbed trickster he is to us, but Beauty eagerly accepts his guidance. Basically a team, Time and Disillusion first sing together. In stark contrast to Pleasure’s edgy blandishments, Disillusion—alternative translations call the character “Enlightenment,” and Handel scholar Ruth Smith suggests “Insight” as the most accurate name—sings with noble simplicity. Beauty digs in her emotional heels, deliberately using pleasures as a shield against thinking. Time tries to scare Beauty, showing her that a dusty skeleton is the inevitable end of all physical beauty. 

The psychological battle lines have been drawn. Pleasure tries to keep Beauty from thinking for herself, insisting that it is useless to worry about the future. Time and Disillusion try to get her to consider probing questions. All three use Beauty’s insecurities to leverage her thoughts and feelings. There is more than a whiff of patriarchal privilege in this, but Beauty is all of us, the Everyone of this morality play, and her life lessons are meant to be ours as well. 

Gradually, Beauty matures before our ears, passing from denial to acceptance. At first, this brings her no comfort at all, only a despairing sense of loss. Time tells her that chronological decline and loss are not inevitable and can be evaded in the eternity of heaven. Beauty continues to be torn, however, as Pleasure manipulates her anxiety and tells her that the ideas of Time and Disillusion are the illusions. But Disillusion gets her thinking about different kinds of pleasures. Time has revealed Truth, who is eternally beautiful. Increasingly thinking for herself, Beauty begins to ask her own questions. She calls on Disillusion to show her the mirror of Truth, which leads to a breakdown and then repentance. From self-loathing she finds her way to self-acceptance; she is now sufficiently free and altruistic that she can offer to share Truth with Pleasure, who vanishes like the weak and petulant lover he always was. 

How much sympathy Handel had for the more didactic religious elements is open to debate; nominally Lutheran, he worked for Calvinists, Catholics, and Anglicans with ecumenical skill. He certainly found the libretto’s intensely human aspects inspiring, illustrating and illuminating the mercurial shifts with unflagging invention.  

Not all of it was completely original, as he repurposed material in what would become a distinctive characteristic of his working method. For Pleasure’s final temptation, the gorgeously seductive, dangerously simple aria “Leave the thorn” (Lascia la spina), he took an instrumental sarabande from his Hamburg opera Almira. He also used melodic ideas from seven different operas by Reinhard Keiser, the dean of the Hamburg opera composers. (In turn, Handel would take passages from this Triumph for use in several later oratorios and operas.) 

Handel also clearly relished the opportunities for instrumental display that Pamphili’s production resources provided. Near the end of the first part, he included a short, accompanied sonata for organ, which he would have played himself. No less than Arcangelo Corelli, the preeminent Italian violinist of the generation before Vivaldi, was the leader of Pamphili’s orchestra. When Corelli professed himself baffled by the overture originally composed in the French style, Handel quickly wrote another in Corelli’s own style, this one setting out the duality that drives the entire work, contrasting vivacious pleasures with deep doubts and grief. 

At the very end of the work, Handel gave Corelli another collegial nod. Beauty, newly secure in her own identity, prays to her guardian angel. From the accompanying orchestral strings, she is joined in a serene duet by a solo violin, which would have been played by Arcangelo (Archangel) Corelli. —John Henken