First, Handel brought together in a wholly accessible way all the musical idioms of the previous fifty years, with dramatic and stirring choruses evoking the grand state occasions at Westminster Abbey, moving and tuneful solos borrowed from opera style, and an orchestral bedrock based on the concerto style he and Bach had inherited from Vivaldi. Second, these were richly allegorical stories with plenty of incident and emotional impact but without extravagant, over-egged operatic acting to embarrass the English. And third, after the failure of the Jacobite Rebellions and the decisive victory for the Protestant-Hanover side in the Battle of Culloden in April 1746, stability began to transform the United Kingdom, and its growing wealth and military prowess found their celebration in Handel’s patriotic choruses, in which God and the King were more or less interchangeable objects of praise. When, in Messiah’s famous ‘Hallelujah’ chorus, the choir sing ‘…and He shall reign for ever and ever’, two kings are being celebrated: one in heaven, the other at St James’s Palace. The immigrant Handel, a naturalised British citizen from 1727, demonstrated more successfully than any other composer before the nineteenth century how music could become the collective voice of nationhood. He may not have composed ‘Rule, Britannia!’ – the Catholic Freemason Thomas Arne did in 1740, as well as the adopted version of ‘God Save the King’ in 1745 – but Handel’s was the template Arne followed, having been among the rhapsodic throng at the Oxford oratorios in 1733.
As Great Britain’s self-confidence grew, its people began more and more to identify with God’s chosen people, the Israelites of the Old Testament, whose destiny the British were more than happy to appropriate. Handel’s oratorios, like Israel in Egypt, Saul, Samson and Solomon, extolled the virtues of wisdom, strength and patrician fairness – the hallmarks felt to lie at the heart of British self-esteem as it began to build its huge empire. As if to underline the association, the British Parliament passed a Jewish Naturalisation Act in 1753, which was not to be emulated in any other European country for half a century.
Handel’s adopted countrymen and women knew a compliment when they saw it and returned it handsomely. He died rich and famous, and was the subject, a few years after his death, of the first ever book-length biography of a musician. Until Elgar, Vaughan Williams and perhaps Parry in the twentieth century, no composer commanded as much respect, pride or admiration among Britons. Indeed, when Josef Haydn arrived in London for a series of concerts in January 1791, he was struck by the continued reverence accorded Handel, a reverence with which he wisely chose, in PR terms, to associate himself. The international prestige of Handel was unmatched among British composers until Lennon and McCartney in the 1960s. (It is possible that Handel’s legacy was ever so slightly double-edged, though, in that he unwittingly prompted a tendency for Britain’s musical elite to believe that his native Germany was an inherently more musical country, a tendency that persists to this day. In 1905, Edward Elgar, a fervent admirer of German music, described the British music scene as ‘vulgar, mediocre, chaotic and insipid’. Over a century later, in January 2012, the Liverpool-born conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle, remarked at the launch of the 2013 Baden-Baden Easter Festival, ‘We British have every reason to be modest about our music.’ It was best heard, he quipped, ‘in homeopathic doses’.)
The hundred years of music from 1650 to 1750, a period of feverish invention and technical ingenuity, began in Italy, found momentum in France and Germany, and reached some kind of apotheosis in Britain with Handel’s sublime English oratorios, which, with Bach’s cantatas and Passions, embedded in music a profoundly moral dimension. Indeed, against the backdrop of scientific endeavour and machine-like precision there was a very human emotion that enriched every note of Handel’s solo arias in opera and oratorio: compassion.
In his maturity, Handel converted this artistic response into action, becoming one of the founding sponsors, alongside artists Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough, of Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital in London. Not strictly speaking an orphanage, the Foundling Hospital was a place of refuge to which poor or destitute mothers could bring their children to be sheltered and educated. Thought to be the world’s first incorporated charity, it continues as a foundation, museum, garden sanctuary and philanthropic cause to this day. Handel’s Messiah was as linked with Thomas Coram’s enterprise as J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan was with Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, which stands virtually adjacent to the site of the Foundling Hospital. Even for its first performance in the unfamiliar setting of the ‘New Musick Hall in Fishamble Street’ in Dublin, Handel made arrangements for a portion of his earnings to be diverted to three Irish charities, including the Charitable Musical Society for the Relief of Imprisoned Debtors, which had built the six-hundred-seat hall for its meetings. Though Messiah was a sacred work, its frequent performances given in secular settings, and its relationship to the very real social issues of the time, place it firmly in a Lutheran-Anglican ethos of community and pragmatism, and reveal a changing attitude to the function and reception of music. It would not exist as a work in the form that we know today were it not for the engagement and approval of a broader public in Handel’s lifetime. Like the scientific inventions that were sparking into life all around him, heralding the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, this music was intended, primarily, to benefit and enlighten all.
One of his final oratorios, Solomon, contains towards its end an aria for the Queen of Sheba, who is bidding a longing farewell to King Solomon, whom she will never see again, as he returns to Jerusalem. ‘Will the sun forget to streak?’ is no hysterical outburst of operatic tragedy, nor is it a plaint of sentimental, self-indulgent misery. It is the mature voice of rueful acceptance. As we listen to it, it is as if the centuries have melted away and we are left with Handel’s simple, humane message: time does not stand still, so cherish every moment of joy with gratitude.
Will the sun forget to streak
Eastern skies with amber ray,
When the dusky shades to break
He unbars the gates of day?
Then demand if Sheba’s queen
E’er can banish from her thought
All the splendour she has seen,
All the knowledge thou hast taught?
4
The Age of Elegance and Sentiment
1750–1850
As with rosy steps the morn,
Advancing, drives the shades of night,
So from virtuous toil well-borne,
Raise Thou our hopes of endless light.
(from Handel’s and Morell’s oratorio Theodora)
HANDEL’S FIRST EIGHTEEN ORATORIOS in London theatres were packed-house affairs. Then, in 1750, he premièred a controversial new work that was a box-office flop. The offending piece was Theodora, a setting of a libretto by his friend Thomas Morell, which itself was based on an account of the early Christian martyr by Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry.
Even before the première Handel had a premonition that Theodora, with its uncompromisingly tragic ending involving the eponymous princess choosing virtue over life, might unsettle his regular audience, telling Morell, ‘The Jews will not come to it because it is a Christian story; and the ladies will not come because it is a virtuous one.’ But the real reason why Theodora, with its ravishing music and Handel’s name above the title, opened to a near empty theatre in March 1750 was altogether more unexpected. Two earthquakes had hit London that month and the well-to-do had heeded fire-and-brimstone sermons, Charles Wesley’s among them, about the quakes being God’s punishment for wickedness, and had fled to their estates in the more godly countryside. (An ill-conceived escape plan, as it turned out: the subsequent tremors shook rural Lincolnshire.)
Though the tremors injured some Londoners and caused stones to tumble off the top of Westminster Abbey’s new spire, they were as nothing to a quake, five years later, along Europe’s Atlantic seaboard that really did seem, to some, to signal the end of civilisation
. Indeed, the coming age of cultural change – including new trends in music – was ushered in by a widely held belief that the world was on the brink of catastrophe.
As if to confirm people’s biblical fears, the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Lisbon in 1755 struck on 1 November: All Saints’ Day. What was left standing of the Imperial city after the initial shocks was then razed to the ground by uncontrollable fires. It is thought as many as sixty thousand people perished. Similar scenes were played out along the coasts of western Europe and northern Africa, with Galway City’s walls partially swept away and a tidal wave reaching as far west as Barbados. Across Europe, prophets and priests portrayed it as the wrath of God and a foretaste of an imminent Armageddon. Voltaire composed a poem on the disaster that had considerable cultural impact, opening a floodgate of intellectual challenge and debate. What is perhaps most striking about ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne’ is its astonishing challenge to the prevailing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century concept of, and faith in, God. Nothing could be further from the omnipotent, benevolent creative force of Handel’s oratorios or Bach’s cantatas and Passions – yet Handel was still alive, just, and Bach had only died five years earlier. In a direct riposte to post-tsunami Portuguese Jesuits, like the immensely powerful Gabriel Malagrida, who declared unequivocally that the catastrophe was God’s anger at the population’s immoral behaviour, Voltaire rejected a compassionate deity and the notion of providence, divine or otherwise, asking what sin babies had committed to deserve such a punishment.
Quel crime, quelle faute ont commis ces enfants
Sur le sein maternel écrasés et sanglants?
The great change in attitude of which Voltaire was a supreme philosophical weathervane coincided with a rapid reshaping of music after the deaths of Bach and Handel. Two of Bach’s sons, Johann Christian in London and Carl Philipp Emanuel in Berlin, were pioneers of the new sound. This sound was stripped of the multiple layers and intricacies of counterpoint, and designed for clarity and instant sensual impact. It wasn’t just a new sound, though, that could be heard in the 1760s and ’70s, but a new approach to music altogether. Faith and morality, the watchwords of the previous generation, gave way to the Pleasure Principle. Instead of trying to improve their listeners, musicians started pampering them. In politics, science, philosophy and literature this was the period of the Enlightenment. For composers and musicians, it might just as well have been called the Enjoyment.
Throughout the history of music, periods of complication and innovation are followed by periods of simplicity and consolidation, which are then in time followed by more complication again. It is something to do with the younger generation contradicting the efforts of their elders, the perennial parent-child dynamic of human civilisation: ‘whatever they did, we will do the opposite.’ As far as Bach père, Johann Sebastian, was concerned, the point of music was to glorify God and reflect upon the great mysteries of creation through music of unabashed seriousness. What his sons and their contemporaries undertook, instead, was a massive spring clean of musical style and a project to celebrate not earnestness but wit, not inventiveness but elegance, not piety but beauty. The young brothers Bach, though, did not have the kind of natural genius required to lead a new movement out of its initial rebellious stage into the mainstream. They were musicians’ musicians. This task would belong to a group of composers whose lives overlapped and found focus within the walls of one great city: Vienna. They were Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
Just eight weeks after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, as if to provide Voltaire with a new god to replace the discredited old one, a boy was born in Salzburg who would provide an exhilarating focus for the new musical generation: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The new musical style was already well under way by the time Mozart was a young composer, and he grew up in a Europe experiencing a sea change in cultural attitudes. But what had prompted this new wave was far more extraordinary than a straightforward backlash to what had gone before.
In the 1730s and ’40s, building work near Naples had accidentally discovered the buried ruins of the first-century Roman towns Herculaneum and Pompeii, in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. In the decades that followed, extensive excavations revealed to increasingly intrigued eighteenth-century Europeans how sophisticated and, to their consternation, how saucy – their ancient ancestors had been. The excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum sparked a major re-evaluation of the Ancient World and a near mania – among the wealthy and educated of the later eighteenth century – for all things connected with it. Ancient Greek and Roman civilisations became something of an ideal to which people might aspire. In contrast to the strict work ethic and emphasis on service to the public good that had governed thought in the previous hundred years, the privileged now took their cue from the perceived sensuality and hedonism of the Ancient World, and sought pleasure without guilt or responsibility.
The significance of the fashion for Ancient Greek and Roman culture is an awkward one for music, leading to possibly the least successful and most confusing of all its labels. In other fields, imitations of Roman and Greek architecture, art and scholarship acquired the name ‘classical’ or ‘neo-classical’, but the term is misleading in music, because composers of the eighteenth century had no Ancient World, or ‘classical’-era, music to imitate. If you had told Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach or Josef Haydn they were working in a consciously ‘classical’ style inspired by the period 800 BC–AD 100 they would have been baffled by the comparison. That is because they thought they were being ultra-modern, the cutting edge, the new blood. They thought they were sweeping away the fusty, clickety-clackety music of their elders, a style that has sometimes, equally unhelpfully, been called ‘Baroque’ –unhelpful in that the musical style of Corelli, Vivaldi, Bach and Handel had very little to do with Baroque architecture, or art, or literature. Their ambitions had no resonance with the streets of Pompeii or the poetry of Ovid; it was targeted on what they saw as an outdated, complicated, rather serious style that needed to be replaced with something simple, clear, emotionally unambiguous, easy on the ear, and ordered. They found the cleverness of their forebears’ music, with its fugues, its interweaving counterpoint, its layering upon layer of sounds, too academic and dry, rather like student exercises. We might even rename the new style typified by Bach junior ‘minimalist’, were it not for the fact that this term was coined by the English composer Michael Nyman to describe his music, and that of some of his peers, in the 1980s.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who was revered by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, invented his own label for his new approach, Empfindsamer (sensitive) style, while musicologists of the time came up with the description galante for the general shift towards musical simplicity. Unfortunately ‘classical’ is nonetheless how the music of the late-eighteenth and very-early-nineteenth centuries came to be categorised in musicological terminology from the early-twentieth century, a trend led by Germans who were keen to identify the Viennese trio of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as constituting a Golden Age, untouchably perfect and unique, a pantheon of Divine Masters worthy of the Greek and Roman Classical era. (To add to the confusion, ‘classical’ had come to mean all music, especially old music, that wasn’t ‘popular’ by the later twentieth century. The icing on the cake of this terminological mess is a sub-genre of ‘classical’ music known as ‘neo-classical’, which describes music by composers of the 1920s and ’30s who sought inspiration from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is why I prefer to call the period 1750-1850 ‘the age of elegance and sentiment’, because that at least is what it is.)
The new-wave composers of the mid-eighteenth century, call them what you like, were encouraged by a new generation of art-loving patrons, such as Frederick the Great of Prussia, and by a growing concert-going public. The concert hall as a dedicated venue was still a novelty outside England, but wealthier members of the bourgeoisie were often invited to hear musical events inside the grand palaces of aristocrats and princes. They cou
ld also buy their way into opera houses, most of which were nevertheless built, owned and controlled by rich patrons, chiefly for their own benefit and that of their friends and hangers-on. When, in the time of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, we refer to a ‘public’ concert, it is not in the modern sense of a gathering open to absolutely anyone, for the price of a ticket. It was a luxury for the relatively well-off, often arranged at short notice in an informal manner, as ‘public’ as a ball at Bath’s Assembly Rooms might have been. The nearest thing to the modern concept of a public concert were the outdoor entertainments laid on at London’s vast Pleasure Gardens, in particular Ranelagh and Vauxhall, which sprawled competitively across large sites on opposite sides of the Thames. Both Ranelagh and Vauxhall had large permanent performance structures, the Rotunda at Ranelagh being the subject of a particularly striking painting by Canaletto in 1754. Eleven years later, a nine-year-old Mozart played a recital in the packed Rotunda, which had a capacity of two thousand.
The Pleasure Gardens offered much else besides music to entice their huge crowds – food, wine, arrack punch, acrobats, rope-dancers, fire-eaters, mechanical fountains, equestrian displays, battle re-enactments, masked balls and leafy glades in which to make secret (or paid-for) assignations, and so, unlike Bath’s Assembly Rooms, they attracted all classes of society. A rehearsal of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks in 1749 drew an estimated twelve thousand spectators (paying 2s. 6d. each, £17.50 today) and created a gridlock of carriages across the newly built Westminster Bridge, paralysing central London for three hours. Johann Christian Bach composed songs for Vauxhall every season for fifteen years, though even he must have felt upstaged by an Italian gentleman called Rivolta whose novelty act at the Gardens involved his playing eight musical instruments simultaneously: pandean pipes, tabor, Spanish guitar, triangle, harmonica, Chinese crescent, cymbals and bass drum.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 13