Handel

by Handel- The Man

  As in Siroe, the orchestra for Berenice is simply the basic band of strings, oboes, bassoons and continuo, with the oboes only heard in three numbers and a solo for Sammartini. Handel is so obviously one of the great masters of orchestral sound, gifted with a rarefied sense of timbre, balance and colour, that it would be absurd to suggest that this limited palette was among the work’s shortcomings, yet, given the financial state of the Covent Garden enterprise, we might suppose that the composer was making a desperate retrenchment. If so, it was useless. Berenice enjoyed a miserable four performances and the season concluded with revivals of Alcina, Giustino and the pasticcio Didone abbandonata, which had first been brought on in April.

  Handel might have been consoled by witnessing the almost simultaneous collapse of his Nobility rivals at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, as audiences, by now bored and satiated with novelty fare and the erstwhile amusement of pitting one company against another, fell rapidly away. Porpora had left London the previous year after the failure of his royal wedding offering La Festa d’lmeneo, and Farinelli now slipped out of England as well, soon to begin the most bizarre adventure in his extraordinary career, as a sort of music therapist to the psychologically disturbed King Philip V of Spain, whom he soothed with the same four songs nightly for nine years. Several of Handel’s own singers returned to Italy, including Conti and Annibali, while Strada, though remaining in London until the summer of 1738, never sang again for the composer who had done so much towards making a distinguished career for her.

  ‘Great fatigue and disappointment’, says Lord Shaftesbury, ‘affected him so much, that he was this Spring 1737 struck with the Palsy, which took entirely away the use of 4 fingers of his right hand; and totally disabled him from Playing: And when the heats of the Summer . . . came on, the Disorder seemed at times to affect his Understanding . . .’ He had witnessed the onset of Handel’s illness early in May and written apprehensively to James Harris, the tone of whose reply indicates the intense respect in which the composer was now held by discerning English music lovers. ‘. . . When ye Fate of Harmony depends upon a Single Life, the Lovers of Harmony maybe well allowed to be Sollicitous. I heartily regrett ye thought of losing any of ye executive part of his meritt, but this I can gladly compound for, when we are assured of the Inventive, for tis this which properly constitutes ye Artist, & Separates Him from ye Multitude.’ Shaftesbury must have thought that Handel was on the way to recovery, for Harris adds, ‘It is certainly an Evidence of great Strength of Constitution to be so soon getting rid of So great a Shock. A weaker Body would perhaps have hardly born ye Violence of Medicines, wch operate So quickly.’

  Experts are still undecided as to what actually caused Handel’s palsy. It may have been recurrent muscular rheumatism exacerbated by nervous exhaustion. Colic, headaches, irritability and cognitive dysfunction have all been diagnosed as symptoms of lead poisoning brought on by excessive port drinking, and his gluttony, which may have been comfort eating to relieve stress, undoubtedly contributed its share. Elsewhere a cause has been located in ‘psychological distress at being unable to satisfy his patrons with the entertainment that he thought they desired’. A measure of Handel’s significance in Augustan cultural life is offered by the fact that his paralysis made news in the papers. The London Daily Post reported a likely recovery on 30 April, but a fortnight later the London Evening Post noted that ‘the ingenious Mr Handell is very much indispos’d, and it’s thought with a Paraletick Disorder, he having at present no Use of his Right Hand, which, if he don’t regain, the Publick will be depriv’d of his fine Compositions’. Whatever the origins of his complaint, treatment at a spa was the most obviously available therapy. ‘But tho’ he had the best advice, and tho’ the necessity of following it was urged to him in the most friendly manner,’ Mainwaring tells us, ‘it was with the utmost difficulty that he was prevailed on to do what was proper, when it was in any way disagreeable.’ Who suggested the baths of Aachen to Handel we do not know – possibly his former pupil the Princess of Orange, whose husband had taken a successful cure there in 1730 – but the prescription was perfect almost to a miracle.

  Handel was the latest in the long series of illustrious patients at Aachen, which had included Charlemagne (who fixed his imperial court there), Petrarch, Dürer, Peter the Great, four popes and, more recently, several leading Jacobites. Scattered about the city were the twenty or so thermal springs, the hottest in Europe and giving off an overpowering sulphurous stench. Their specific application had long been celebrated in cases of rheumatic paralysis and, used as sweat baths, in the treatment of venereal disease. The company was thus, as in so many other spas, distinctly mixed, and part of the pleasure (and sometimes the risk) of visiting Aachen lay in the astonishingly diverse clientele.

  Thanks to Count Carl Ludwig von Poellnitz, who visited the city two years before Handel himself, we know a great deal about both the atmosphere of the place and the nature of the cure. As at Bath and Tunbridge, there was a prevailing air of pleasant holiday trifling, enhanced by gambling and gallantry, whether at the four o’clock balls at Baugy’s rooms or at the Café du Gascon near the principal springs. Those who drank the waters were recommended to alternate each draught with mouthfuls of orange or lemon peel, caraway comfits or ginger roots to take away the taste or to eat a special pap known as manillette, made of thin, dry aniseed biscuits soaked in white wine and water. The recommended diet (of which Handel would certainly have taken note) permitted roast meats, game and fish, but no garlic, lard or salt, carp, tench, eels or lampreys. Rhenish, Moselle, watered Burgundy and light beers were the only alcoholic drinks allowed. The waters themselves, though ‘mortal to infancy or old age’, if taken internally, were good for practically everything else, including barrenness, nosebleeds, piles, scurvy, colic and ‘for moderating a canine appetite’.

  It was typical of Handel, strong-willed, impatient and, as Harris had noted, physically very resilient, that he should have chosen bathing rather than drinking and have submitted himself to the kind of regime known in German spas as a ‘horse cure’. The baths themselves were undoubtedly pleasurable and the bathers, dressed in ‘a grotesque bonnet in the shape of a woman’s cap’ and loose linen drawers, were regaled with titbits from little floating trays. ‘The water,’ says Poellnitz, ‘which is fat and unctuous to the touch, gently softens the skin, and by the help of the salts with which it is impregnated, opens the pores, restores the nerves to their natural tone, and enlivens the body in so sensible a manner that, however well a man be at entering the bath, he always comes out of it more healthy and cheerful.’ Handel certainly did so, as Mainwaring tells us: ‘Whoever knows any thing of the nature of those baths, will, from this instance, form some idea of his surprising constitution. His sweats were profuse beyond what can well be imagined. His cure, from the manner, as well as from the quickness with which it was wrought, passed with the Nuns for a miracle. When, but a few hours from the time of his quitting the bath, they heard him at the organ in the principal church . . . playing in a manner so much beyond any they had ever been used to, such a conclusion in such persons was natural enough.’

  All seemed set for a triumphal return to the operatic stage, though the omens for recovering a sufficient audience were not promising. ‘There were few persons of any other class beside that of Nobility who had much knowledge of the Italian, any notion of such compositions or any real pleasure in hearing them,’ Mainwaring bleakly observes. ‘Those among the middling and lower orders, whom affection or curiosity had drawn to [Covent Garden] at his first setting out in conjunction with Rich, fell off by degrees.’ A fresh agreement had been reached whereby Handel would join forces once more with Heidegger at the Haymarket and take on several members of the Nobility company, including the renegades Montagnana and Merighi and the new castrato hired to replace Farinelli. Soon after his return he began a fresh opera for the forthcoming season, but only four days later, on 20 November 1737, London received the news that Queen Caroline was d
ead.

  It had been a slow and agonizing decline, the result of an untreated rupture, which the Queen had borne with stubborn fortitude. The shock caused not only to her family but to the court and city as a whole was immense. From contemporary accounts it is immediately obvious that she was the kind of woman who was either fervently admired or else deeply loathed, and her influence on the King and his ministers was never taken lightly. The range of her interests and sympathies was enormous, and to this day she has never really been given the appreciation due to her vibrant, forceful personality by a nation which, even in her own epoch, mistrusted her foreign sophistications.

  Reaction to her death varied between nostalgic regret and opprobrious scorn. To the anonymous hack who bewailed ‘Carolina waiting for the tomb’ as ‘An Hypocrite in nought but hiding Pain’, an unsigned lampoon (perhaps by Swift, who had never forgiven her for neglecting him) angrily rejoined:

  An Hypocrite in all but disbelief in God.

  Promoted Luxury, encourag’d Vice,

  Her self a sordid slave to Avarice . . .

  To her own offspring mercy she deny’d, –

  And unforgiving, unforgiven dy’d.

  Attributed to Pope was the memorably unpardonable:

  Here lies, wrapp’d up in forty thousand towels,

  The only proof that Caroline had bowels.

  Others, recipients of her kindness and appreciation, offered significant tributes. Down at Kew the curate of the parish, preaching to her servants, including ‘the Thresher Poet’ Stephen Duck, praised the discrimination, constancy and charity of a woman who was ‘discreetly generous and elegantly frugal’; he himself was the twenty-eight-year-old Thomas Morell, who was to be one of Handel’s principal librettists during the 1740s. Perhaps the most touching tribute came from Paolo Antonio Rolli, who rightly saw Caroline’s death as marking the end of an epoch. Soon after his return to Italy, addressing the Marchese Teodoli in a rhythmically spirited ode, he wrote: ‘From the warlike Thames, never before noted for sweetness, a gentle harmony arose while the Royal Lady lived to delight in it . . . but then she paid to nature the due of all living things: an immense horror filled those shores and the Muse dwelt there no longer. Civil war threatened, the Spaniards infested the seas, defiant trumpets echoed from the distant frontiers. My sweet lyre, said I, it is time to retire to the forsaken haunts of Peace: come back to Umbria’s fruitful hills, where Ceres and Bacchus reside.’*(p)

  Handel’s veneration of the woman for whom he had written duets when she was a princess in Hanover, who sang snatches of his opera airs to tease her husband, and who had never wavered in her advocacy of his music, found utterance in one of the most deeply layered of all his works, a piece that openly displays his own sense of personal loss, and stands beside Alexander’s Feast and Israel in Egypt as a product of that single-minded originality of concept and design, which sets these compositions of the 1730s apart from the orthodox modes of opera and dramatic oratorio, and lays the ground for Messiah.

  The Ways of Zion Do Mourn, the great elegy for Queen Caroline, formed part of the long funeral service taking place in King Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey on the evening of 17 December. The procession of mourners and attendants, a tremendous affair involving the entire royal household, the Earl Marshal, the Archbishop of Canterbury, heralds and pursuivants and ‘the Royal Body’ carried by yeomen of the guard and followed by sixteen duchesses, went from the Prince of Wales’s lodgings to the Abbey along a route spread with black baize. Among those present was the Earl of Carnarvon, now Duke of Chandos, who wrote to his nephew, Dr Theophilus Leigh, ‘The Solemnity of the Queen’s Funeral was very decent, and performed in more order than any thing I have seen of the like kind . . . It began about a quarter before 7, & was over a little after ten; the Anthem took up three quarters of an hour of the time, of which the composition was exceeding fine, and adapted very properly to the melancholly occasion of it; but I can’t say so much of the performance.’

  With ‘near 80 vocal performers, and 100 instruments from his Majesty’s band, and from the Opera, &c’, as well as ‘several musical Gentlemen of distinction’ who ‘attended in surplices, and sang in the burial service’, the anthem must have needed more rehearsal than was possible in the five days between its completion and the actual ceremony. It made, nevertheless, a telling impression on those present at the occasion and was performed in various guises until well into the nineteenth century, after which (despite the Novello score remaining in print) it promptly disappeared from public notice. Nor is there much likelihood that it will ever regain any sort of popularity; an extended meditation, uncompromisingly austere even in its gentler moments, it reveals Handel thoroughly at home with the styles and forms of German and Italian church music of the Renaissance and Baroque, as ‘profound’ or ‘scientific’ as the demurest, most pious music lover could require.

  The words were compiled from Scripture with great skill by Edward Willes, sub-dean of Westminster, dovetailing passages from the Psalms, Lamentations, Job, the Apocrypha and St Paul into a coherent sequence, and moving, in a way typical of the age, from misery to confidence, from a particularized vision of the Queen herself to a general prospect of reward for virtue. Handel unites the whole through emphasis on the home key, G minor, and by recalling the words ‘How are the mighty fall’n! She that was great among the nations, and princess of the provinces!’ as agonized outbursts introducing two subsequent choruses (the phrase lengths and note values are identical, but the modulation is subtly altered).

  Though the anthem, at its rare modern performances, is sometimes given with solo episodes, its original disposition is exclusively choral, and one of its many claims to consideration is the sheer ingenuity and suppleness with which he handles his chosen medium. The solemnity here is neither pompous nor heavy-footed; in the tender E flat andante larghetto of ‘When the ear heard her’ and the energetic pulses of ‘She delivered the poor that cried’ there is reflective contrast with the long elegiac paragraphs of the surrounding movements. Yet here also the outlines enclose that intense intellectual sophistication which typifies Handel’s approach to the work in general. Far from forgetting the world of the opera house and the court to which Caroline belonged, he embraces it by constructing ‘When the ear heard her’ and ‘The righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance’ in the manner of those chamber duets he had composed for the Queen nearly thirty years before, with answering pairs of vocal lines clinched by the full chorus and by the use of recitative-type passages in ‘How are the mighty fall’n’ and ‘The people will tell’.

  One interesting aspect of the Funeral Anthem lies in an apparent return to Handel’s German roots. The royal family, while in England, worshipped as Anglicans, though a Lutheran chapel was set aside for their German servants. By using various chorale melodies in the score the composer may well have been celebrating Caroline’s memory in an idiom they both understood, but there is no real proof of this intention. The opening chorus features part of the Lutheran chorale ‘Herr Jesu Christ, du höchstes Gut’, and its final section reproduces (in a significantly improved form) an organ fugue by Johann Philipp Krieger. ‘She delivered the poor that cried’ is spanned by the cantus firmus of the chorale melody ‘Du Friedefurst Herr Jesus Christ’. ‘Their bodies are buried in peace’, on the other hand, quotes from a Catholic motet ‘Ecce quomodo moritur’ by the sixteenth-century Slovene composer Jacob Handl.

  It is an enduring reproach to our limited modern sensibilities that this magnificent piece should nowadays be almost totally ignored, even among those conversant with the operas and oratorios. Its significance in Handel’s development as a composer cannot be too highly emphasized, and the exercise of fashioning its unique discourse was surely decisive in edging Handel ever closer towards a type of musical work in which the chorus could occupy a major role. Amid the genuine grief of the Queen’s five daughters the impact of the Funeral Anthem made itself felt. One of them wrote to Princess Anne, mourning her mo
ther at The Hague, to tell her that ‘ye body is to be remov’d tonight to Westminster, and then everything is gone and we remain here in ye anguish of our hearts . . . We had Handel’s Anthem last Wednesday in ye French Chappel, that ye king might hear it . . . and it’s ye finest cruel touching thing that ever was heard.’

  10

  All for War and Admiral Haddock

  The reason most frequently given in the past for Handel’s renunciation of opera in favour of oratorio has always been based on the belief that he had somehow managed to grow out of writing operas and that the greater formal elasticity of oratorio allowed him a freedom he would not thereafter give up for the sake of a return to the stage. To this the Victorians added a cherished conception of their beloved choral composer as one who looked forward to Tennyson’s ‘We needs must love the highest when we see it’ and who, like Chaucer and Botticelli, exercised repentance for earlier profanities in the devotion of his art to God’s service. Writing in the Musical Times of March 1869, Sir George Macfarren, in an essay significantly entitled ‘The Italian Language: its evil influence upon music’, described the operas as ‘cast in a form that limited the workings of the mighty genius of the master, and allowed no play to its higher attributes’. They afforded ‘the rarest opportunity for characterization’ and were in any case ‘obsolete and lost to the world for ever’. ‘Based upon subjects that are entirely unsympathetic to our times, and constructed upon principles that are totally uncongenial to our stage, his operas will never, and can never, be performed again.’