In Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, the dramatic interaction is not between two characters but between two humours: the cheerful and the melancholy. Basing his text on a pair of odes by Milton, Handel’s favoured librettist Charles Jennens fashioned a vehicle for the composer that’s rich in nature imagery (the hawthorn in the dale, the song of the lark, the strutting cock) and full of arresting if quaint phrases (“Jonson’s learned sock” being one of many). In the first two parts the two humours alternate, number by number, affording maximum contrast.
Part 3 has often been disparaged as being the work of Jennens alone. Certainly he was no Milton, yet he offered Handel a celebration of “the middle way”, Moderation, that chimed with the Georgian ideal of temperate living, more often aspired to than practised. And Handel responded by writing, in the duet As Steals the Morn, one of the loveliest things to come out of the 18th century.
