The initial idea for a statue of Handel among the Vauxhall groves was perhaps Tyers’s own, and it seems reasonable to assume that either he or Gravelot, whose engraved decorations for the Alexander’s Feast portrait had recently appeared, or maybe even the Prince himself, brought Handel and Roubiliac together. The result, in any case, was spectacular, not merely because this was the first such tribute to a living man in the annals of contemporary sculpture but because Roubiliac, whose three other Handel portraits include the superb Windsor bust of 1739 and the Westminster Abbey monument so admired for its fidelity by Hawkins, is arguably the only artist to have caught something of that mixture of ease and alertness so essentially the composer’s. Of the paintings, only Philippe Mercier’s vision of him, shiny-nosed, unshaven, turban rakishly pushed back over his cropped head as he sits with his oblong manuscript sheets before him, gives us a human glimpse. Otherwise he is the bob-wigged porker of Balthasar Denner, the obese pudding face of Bartholomew Dandridge, or the elegant bourgeois of the likeness commissioned by Charles Jennens from Thomas Hudson in 1756.
Besides its extraordinary precision of detail, in the wide-nostrilled retroussé nose, the slightly protruding underlip, the baggy eyes and that most emphatic Handelian facial feature, the bushy black eyebrows, Roubiliac’s portrait, in its sinuous rococo compositional lines, captures with an engaging sense of humour those qualities of mingled grandeur and intimacy reflected in the music. The composer is presented as Apollo plucking a lyre, while a putto, leaning on a viola da gamba at his feet, notes down what he plays. Yet this is an Apollo in the crumpled informality of Georgian undress, with a floppy turban, loose dressing gown, breeches unbuttoned at the knee and one slipper off. The statue is an ideal image of nonchalant genius and a perfect expression of what Handel’s presence in England really meant to contemporaries who liked music enough to understand him.
Carved in Roubiliac’s workshop in St Martin’s Lane ‘out of one entire Block of white Marble’, it received a place of honour ‘in a grand Nich erected on Purpose’, where it was ‘set finely off by various Greens, which form, in Miniature, a sort of woody theatre’. Ferried over the river on 27 April, it encouraged the inevitable crop of magazine verse, such as that of ‘a Gentleman of Oxford’ who wrote:
See Handel, careless of a foreign fame,
Fix on our shore, and boast a Briton’s name:
While, plac’d marmoric in the vocal grove,
He guides the measures listening throngs approve.
Listening throngs in the capricious Vauxhall weather were always able to hear his concertos, which formed a staple of the band’s repertoire, though he never wrote any of them specifically for the gardens themselves. As we have already noted, the recent oratorio performances often featured organ concertos in which Handel himself was the soloist, and Walsh now published, in October 1738, the set of six works for harpsichord or organ subsequently labelled the Opus 4 Organ Concertos. The second of these had already appeared the previous month in Walsh’s anthology The Lady’s Entertainment, and he warned the public that ‘a mangled Edition’ of the concertos was in the press. All six had, of course, already been heard before, but the issue of Opus 4 is something of a landmark in English musical history, introducing to a wider public a form Handel had more or less invented.
His keyboard virtuosity had been celebrated since his Roman contests with Domenico Scarlatti, but we must not imagine him playing in London the sort of massive German instruments for which Bach was currently writing. Pedal boards on English organs were comparatively rare, and the many sets of lessons and voluntaries published by eighteenth-century organists in London and the provinces assume the use of the manuals alone. The instrument Handel used at Covent Garden had one manual and seven stops, and he was to recommend an almost exactly similar instrument to Charles Jennens in 1749 as ‘every thing that is necessary for a good and grand Organ’. The two-manual instrument he presented to the Foundling Hospital chapel had, of course, more stops but still no pedals.
Hawkins, who had heard him play at oratorio performances, praises his ‘amazing command of the instrument, the fullness of his harmony, the grandeur and dignity of his style, the copiousness of his imagination, and the fertility of his invention’. His custom was apparently to introduce each concerto with a voluntary, ‘the harmony close wrought, and as full as could possibly be expressed; the passages concatenated with stupendous art’, and this improvisatory element was carried over into the concerto itself. The result is inevitably that what has come down to us is, in several cases, not the entire work as originally given, and one of the features of Handel’s art most admired by his contemporaries is now lost to us more or less irrevocably. Burney tells us that, after his blindness came on, he played several of his old concertos from memory, giving the ritornellos to the band, who waited for the shake at the end of his improvisations ‘before they played such fragments of symphony as they found in their books’.
As we have already noted in the case of Opus 3, Handel never regarded the concerto form as rigidly sacrosanct. Where he was concerned, it was an opportunity for the band to show its qualities of well-drilled virtuosity and in his organ concertos this extreme freedom in the disposition of movements, which makes many of his instrumental works closer to dance suites than to the orthodox models of Vivaldi, Telemann and Bach, relates perfectly to the ‘ad libitum’ spontaneity of the solo line. Each concerto, each movement indeed, holds its surprises, reworking material from earlier pieces and moulding conventional forms to offer new solutions. No. I in G minor, for instance, begins in traditional larghetto e staccato overture style, but soon breaks up into a species of commentary by the soloist against a background of orchestral interjections recalling the original opening, to be followed by the dazzling brilliance of Handel’s longest concerto movement, a 158-bar allegro. No. 4 in F cradles, between its extrovert outer movements, the delightfully suave andante (the composer specifies ‘Open Diapason, stopt Diapason & Flute’ with strings alone) in which the organ and the band sport with each other, though seldom actually interchanging material.
Another instrumental collection, seven sonatas registered in Walsh’s cash book on 7 October 1738 and published the following year, was partly based on Handel’s felicitous arrangements of music from the Chandos Anthems, whose autographs show absorbing evidence of the work thus carried out. These Opus 5 trios, incorporating a certain amount of new music and making use of some of the dance movements composed for Sallé and her company in 1734–5, are lighter in mood than their Opus 2 forerunners, perhaps reflecting a specific request from Walsh himself.
During the summer Handel had been at work on a new oratorio, to a text by Charles Jennens, probably the work referred to in a letter sent three years previously from composer to librettist, thanking him for ‘the inclosed Oratorio’, and continuing, ‘I am just going to Tunbridge, yet what I could read of it in haste, gave me a great deal of Satisfaction. I shall have more leisure time there to read it with all the Attention it deserves.’ The subject chosen was the story of David, Saul and Jonathan, beginning with an ‘Epinicion, or Song of Triumph for the Victory over Goliath and the Philistines’ and ending with a paraphrase of David’s lament over the dead king and his son, which opens the second book of Samuel. It had provided themes for several seventeenth-century Italian oratorios, for one of Johann Kuhnau’s biblical keyboard sonatas, for Purcell’s dramatic scena, ln Guilty Night, focusing upon Saul’s visit to the Witch of Endor, and for Charpentier’s magnificent sacred opera David et Jonathas, written in 1688 for the students of the College Louis le Grand and featuring several fascinating though entirely coincidental parallels with Handel’s treatment of the same material. Interestingly, Porpora had created a work using a related biblical story in his Davide e Bersabea, produced by the Opera of the Nobility in 1734, and it was perhaps this which prompted Jennens to turn to a similar subject for Handel.
Often represented by writers on the composer as a crabby, snobbish fusspot, Jenne
ns was in fact one of his most sympathetic and discerning admirers. A wealthy bachelor deriving his income from the Birmingham iron foundries established by his grandfather, he lived partly at Gopsal, near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire, and in London, where his princely lifestyle was the theme of malicious and exaggerated gossip. Was it really the case, as his enemy the Shakespeare scholar George Steevens, would have us believe, that ‘in his youth he was so remarkable for the number of his servants, the splendour of his equipages, and the profusion of his table, that from this excess of pomp he acquired the title of Solyman the Magnificent’? According to the same scarcely reliable source, ‘so enamoured . . . was our Magnifico of pomp, that if his transit were only from Great Ormond-street, Bloomsbury, where he resided, to Mr Bowyer’s, in Red Lion-passage, Fleet-street, he always travelled with four horses, and sometimes with as many servants behind his carriage. In his progress up the paved court, a footman usually preceded him, to kick oyster shells and other impediments out of his way.’
He was certainly a man of deep culture, issuing the earliest variorum editions of Shakespearean texts (for which Steevens attacked him) transforming his Leicestershire mansion into a fine Palladian house and assembling a library of Italian opera scores, which Handel would find useful in his continuing trawl for musical ideas. Jennens was a dedicated enthusiast for the composer’s work. ‘Everything that has been united with Handel’s music’, he once wrote, ‘becomes sacred by such a union in my eyes.’ Sensitive, shy and given to melancholy, he shared this particular passion with his great friend Edward Holdsworth, whose travels in Italy as a tutor to the sons of the nobility on the Grand Tour made him an ideal agent for obtaining copies of the latest operatic successes. When Holdsworth died unexpectedly, Jennens erected a memorial tempietto to him in the Gopsal grounds, topped by a statue of Religion. Both men were nonjurors, members of that body of disaffected Anglicans for whom conscience made it impossible to support the Hanoverian succession to the British crown. Holdsworth himself had been fingered by government agents as a suspected Jacobite.
Political and religious agenda find their way into Jennens’s libretto for Handel, whether in the subtexts of Saul and Belshazzar or via the emphasis placed in Messiah on the mystery of the Eucharist, central as this was to nonjuring theology. Though in Saul David’s outrage at the killing of ‘the anointed of the Lord’ echoes condemnation of the death of King Charles I in 1649 at the behest of his parliamentarian captors, the Jewish monarch himself is perhaps also an avatar, however unlikely, of Sir Robert Walpole, whom opposition propaganda sought to portray as a tyrant defying the rule of law. Belshazzar, meanwhile, enshrines in the figure of Cyrus the concept, promoted by opposition politicians and pamphleteers, of ‘the Patriot King’ ruling in the name of popular liberties and his country’s good. The literary and dramatic qualities of both oratorios reveal a superior gift on Jennens’s part for thinking scenically and creating, throughout successive episodes, the kind of theatrical impetus likely to kindle the imagination of his favourite composer.
Saul remains without equal among the oratorios for the colour and variety of its incidents. As well as the King’s jealous harrying of David, the narrative encompasses the romantic interest of the hero’s relationships with Saul’s daughters Merab and Michal, his friendship with Jonathan, the Macbeth-like consultation with the Witch of Endor, and the warfare between Israelites and Philistines. Yet Jennens prevents the drama from degenerating into a mere succession of crowded tableaux by using the dispassionate reflections of the chorus to offset the key moments of the story and by throwing the character of Saul himself into appropriate relief. It is emphatically his story rather than David’s, even if his share in it is couched predominantly in recitative and arioso forms, as opposed to full-scale aria. This last feature relates directly to an understanding of the essentially incomplete nature of Saul’s personal achievement, originally determined at the moment when he faltered at killing King Agag of the Amalekites and Samuel declared that ‘the Lord hath rent the kingdom of Israel from thee this day, and hath given it to a neighbour of thine that is better than thou’.
Jennens and Handel seem to have appreciated the tragic flaws of envy and self-loathing intrinsic to such a character, though, as with all early eighteenth-century forays into the territory of classical drama, the atmosphere of Saul as a whole owes less to Euripides than to Racine. The King’s hamartia is pointedly contrasted throughout with the unsullied excellence of David who, though his relationship with Michal purges him of absolute priggishness, cannot be allowed to usurp Saul’s dramatic prominence by being made the centre of too much sympathetic interest. This is further underlined by the vocal allocations: Saul is a darkly brooding bass of Verdian intensity, while David’s countertenor reflects Handel’s enduring associations of the timbre with youthful dignity, grace and kingly virtues.
It was a more stirring and colourful libretto than any he had ever set before or was to set again, and he matched it with music of extraordinary conviction and authority, whose abundance is overwhelming in a way unmatched by any other dramatic work in the European music of the period, with the same inclusive grandeur and assurance of gesture as are found in Die Zauberflöte, Aida and Die Meistersinger. It is almost impossible to write calmly of so monumental an achievement. The scale of the overture alone, an expansive four-movement symphony based on a trio sonata, is enough to indicate the overall generosity of concept in the oratorio, and the choruses, whether in the glitter and revelry of the opening Epinicion, the relentlessly probing ‘Envy, eldest born of Hell’, ruminating fretfully above its ground bass, or the extended elegy over the dead of Mount Gilboa which crowns the work, consolidate upon what had been brought about in Athalia and prefigure the expressive sublimities of Israel in Egypt. Hardly a single one of the airs is without some individuality of design or instrumentation; they veer from the simple purity of David’s ‘Oh Lord, whose mercies numberless’ or Jonathan’s ‘Sin not, oh King’ to Merab’s Pergolesian ‘My soul rejects the thought’ and the spectacularly mangled middle section of Saul’s ‘A Serpent in my bosom warm’d’, where, after a mere three bars, the aria suddenly breaks off in a descending double octave as the King hurls his spear at his erstwhile protégé.
The work’s most memorable moment constitutes a sequence that ought to be basic material in any study of dramatic music and which (though its subject had drawn thrilling responses from both Charpentier and Purcell) is without rivals or precedents in Baroque lyric drama. Saul’s desperate recourse to the Witch of Endor and the ghost of Samuel caught at Handel’s compassionate imagination to produce a scene which, as well as being eerie and baleful, reaches out to invoke our pity for the King in the agonized accompagnato recitative ‘Wretch that I am’, his aching loneliness best summarized in the heart-stabbing trill on the dotted quaver F for the violins in Saul’s first address to Samuel. The Witch summons the dead prophet in a weird invocation whose grotesquerie is effected by laying a four-beat string figure across an irregular bass, interleaved with sustained oboe and bassoon chords, the whole piece measured in 3/4. These grisly bassoons, the Grecian ghosts from Alexander’s Feast, introduce Samuel himself, a basso profondo inexorable and remote, with whom Saul is destined to plead in vain and whose final pronouncement, closing all with shattering abruptness, is:
Thou and thy sons shall be with me tomorrow,
And Israel by Philistine arms shall fall.
The Lord hath spoken; he will make it good.
Jennens, whose admiration for Handel’s genius was tempered with a nagging desire to offer his own suggestions for its artistic refinement, criticized his use of a carillon for the Israelite rejoicings over Saul’s thousands and David’s ten thousands and his purchase of ‘an organ of £500 price . . . he has bespoke of one Moss of Barnet. This organ, he says, is so constructed that as he sits at it he has a better command of his performers than he used to have, and he is highly delighted to think with what exactness his Oratorio will be performed by the h
elp of this organ; so that for the future instead of beating time at his oratorios, he is to sit at the organ all the time with his back to the Audience.’ Jennens dismissed both instruments as Handel’s ‘maggots’ but each contributed to that opulence of orchestration which the composer lavished upon the work. To show off the organ he threw in a concertante movement in the middle of Act II: the carillon, flourishing a little tune of marvellous banality for the Israelite women, enhances our sense of embarrassment as the enraged Saul writhes at the gleeful plaudits for David. Elsewhere in the score there are parts for two flutes, a harp, two trumpets, three trombones in both choral and instrumental numbers, besides the basic orchestra of oboes, bassoons and strings. At certain points, notably during the final chorus, the noise must have been even louder than that produced in the Deborah performances.
Saul, aided by ‘general Applause by a numerous and splendid Audience’ when the royal family attended the second night, met with a modest success before going on to become an established favourite among the dramatic oratorios, given six subsequent revivals by Handel himself. Lord Wentworth, pondering the composer’s bold instrumental effects and the indifferent quality of the cast, was sceptical of its fate: ‘I hear Mr Handell has borrow’d of the Duke of Argylle a pair of the largest kettledrums in the Tower, so to be sure it will be most excessive noisy with a bad set of singers; I doubt it will not retrieve his former losses.’
It did not, neither did a solitary revival of Il Trionfo del Tempo nor a proposal by Walsh to publish the Opus 5 trios by subscription, which met with no takers. ‘Nothing shews the Worth of a People more, than their Taste for Publick Diversions,’ observed one member of ‘a crowded Audience of the first Quality of a Nation’, signing himself ‘R.W.’, at the third performance of the new oratorio Israel in Egypt. But he grossly overestimated the enthusiasm: more to the point was Lord Shaftesbury’s comment, made many years later, that Handel’s season failed owing to ‘his Singers in general not being Capital, nor the Town come into a relish of this Species of Musick’.
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