Handel

by Handel- The Man

  The first-night audience for Israel in Egypt, on 4 April 1739, must indeed have been baffled by the overall character of the work presented to them. In its original form the oratorio consisted of three sections, beginning with the Funeral Anthem, adapted by the thrifty Handel as ‘Lamentations of the Israelites for the death of Joseph’, continuing with the sequence of plague choruses and ending with the Song of Moses from Exodus 15. The words of the second and third parts, making up the piece as we know it today, may have been selected by Jennens, but it is as likely that Handel, who piqued himself on his knowledge of scripture, prepared his own text and that the genesis of the work, as Dean and Streatfeild suggest, was probably an anthem, from which the composer developed the notion of a full-scale oratorio.

  In any event the piece was choral to the almost total exclusion of solo numbers. There are four airs, two duets and some patches of recitative for tenor, whose relationship to the work was obviously based on that of a narrating Evangelist in a German passion. This last point is as significant as the inclusion of the Funeral Anthem, for what ‘the Town’ was actually hearing and noticeably failing to relish was a consolidation upon the achievement of the earlier work in exploiting the dramatic and evocative potential of the chorus, and a strengthening of those links with European sacred music renewed in The Ways of Zion Do Mourn.

  However much he may have misread the audience’s interest in the piece, ‘R.W.’ was intelligent enough to appreciate its singular nature, encapsulated in ‘the Sublimity of the great Musical Poet’s Imagination’, and sensitive also to the special problems presented by Israel in Egypt to Georgian Protestant theatregoers. Admittedly, success was hardly guaranteed by the apparent inadequacy of the choir, ‘the many of his Vocal Instruments, which fall so vastly short in being able to do due Justice to what they are to perform’, and the enormous length of the original work (Handel tried it with a couple of new organ concertos on 7 April and in a cut-down version on the 10th with Italian airs for Francesina) probably discouraged several listeners. But the main difficulty was one which, in various forms, has bedevilled Handel oratorio ever since, namely that singularly deep-rooted reaction against the use of the Bible for entertainment purposes.

  He had come across it first in Italy, when Pope Clement had censured Prince Ruspoli for allowing Durastanti to take part in the première of La Resurrezione, and later in London, when Bishop Gibson had discouraged staged oratorio, and though he was never confronted with an absolute hostility from the public en masse there was a continuing barrage of criticism, often from the most unexpected sources, some of which must have reached his ears. We shall take note of these audience reactions in their proper place, but it is worth noting here that disapproval had already started building up during the Esther and Athalia performances in 1733. James Bramston’s satire The Man of Taste cynically decreed that:

  The Stage should yield the Solemn Organ’s note,

  And Scripture tremble in the Eunuch’s throat.

  Let Senesino sing, what David writ,

  And Hallelujahs charm the pious pit

  while Thomas Newcomb’s Juvenalian The Manners of the Age asked:

  If sacred operas shall instruct us still,

  And churches empty, as ridotto’s fill;

  The Hebrew, or the German leave the field,

  And David’s lyre to Handel’s spinnet yield.

  Thus we can detect a defensive note in ‘R.W.’s’ claim that ‘the Theatre on this occasion, ought to be enter’d with more Solemnity than a Church; inasmuch as the Entertainment you go to is really in itself the noblest Adoration and Homage paid to the Deity that ever was in one. So sublime an Act of Devotion as this Representation carries in it . . . would consecrate even Hell itself.’ An anonymous correspondent in the London Evening Post suggested that the fate of Israel in Egypt was in question from the start, owing merely to its title, let alone to the text itself.

  The oratorio, by its very nature, seems to sit awkwardly among Handel’s other works in the same genre. There are political resonances here, in the implicit allusion to eighteenth-century Britain’s concept of itself as a modern Israel shaking off the chains of despotism and slavery, but these are kept at arm’s length by the non-dramatic nature of the text. The arias are either unremarkable or in one case, through no fault of Handel’s, purely inept. Even the duet for basses, ‘The Lord is a man of war’, descends into prolixity. Unbalanced and more than slightly obsessive in the nature of its artistic achievement, the work pushes to unimagined limits that epic experimentation with the oratorio medium that began in its immediate forerunner Saul. Nobody had written anything quite like Israel in Egypt before and its singularity, both in form and expression, placed it beyond the intellectual grasp of Handel’s contemporaries, for whom he was seldom inclined to revive it.

  Choral writing in any age has rarely achieved such a pitch of dramatic intensity. So dedicated was Handel to the fullest possible exploitation of his medium that he cast the majority of choruses in eight parts, thereby heightening effects of mass and contrast. The ten plagues of Egypt were scarcely promising material for him (potentially the most bathetic moment in his entire oeuvre is afforded by an alto aria complete with hopping violins, which deals with the frogs and the cattle murrain, and requires the soloist to repeat the words ‘blotches and blains’) yet out of these he fashioned an audacious sequence of descriptive choruses, imposing a tonal unity by a predominance of flat keys (G minor, B flat, E flat) and a return at the close of Part I to the C minor of the opening. A gawky, stooping chromatic fugue subject, rather like the ‘royal theme’ of Bach’s Musical Offering, conveys the Egyptians’ disgust at drinking the blood-laced Nile water, shimmering demisemiquavers portray the buzzing flies, the storms of hail and fire begin with the first pattering drops as the downpour gets under way, the darkness fragments the vocal lines in spectral semi-breves before they bind once again in the slashing, percussive ‘He smote all the first-born of Egypt’ and the Israelites are ‘led forth like sheep’ in a radiant pastoral complete with drones and pipes.

  A comparable firmness of design controls Part II, framing its paeans of triumph between the two colossal C major outbursts of Moses and Miriam, scored for double choir, three trombones, two trumpets, wind, strings and timpani. Monotony in the praise of God, of a sort which all too easily clouds works like Joshua and The Occasional Oratorio, is avoided here by the continuing flexibility with which Handel manipulates his forces. Nowhere is this better shown than in the sequence dovetailing the serene ‘The depths have covered them’ with ‘Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious’, a farouche war dance, blending in its turn with the ascetic fugato of ‘Thou sentest forth thy wrath’ and the whirling rhythms of ‘And with the blast of thy nostrils’. The key, however, to the significance of the whole work, as an essay in interpreting the relationship between man and God, comes not at moments like these, but in ‘The people shall hear’. This is arguably the finest chorus he ever wrote, its sombre evocations of fear ushered in by those dotted quaver patterns forming one of his favourite rhythmic foundations, and sweeping us into a series of amply developed episodes, as the dark mass of jagged chords dissolves on the words ‘all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away’ and the three a capella bars ‘they shall be as still as a stone’ introduce the sinewy harmonies illustrating the Israelites’ wanderings through their regained land.

  Israel in Egypt is in every sense Handel’s most allusive work, a piece in which he takes stock of an entire musical heritage and at several points consciously recalls the voices and idioms of the past. As in Saul, the feeling of archaic grandeur is emphasized by the use, in various numbers, of three trombones, whose timbre immediately recalls the musical world of Schütz and Monteverdi, and fugues like ‘And I will exalt him’ and ‘And the earth swallowed them’, each with a heavy chordal introduction, carry us back even further, towards Hassler and the Gabrielis. The thematically independent orchestral ritornellos ending ‘And with the blast’ and the
Plague of Flies are a device more familiar in the context of early Venetian opera. Such recollections are hardly accidental, since the oratorio draws heavily for its melodic and structural material on the work of various seventeenth-century composers, including Alessandro Stradella, Johann Kaspar Kerll and the Milanese choirmaster Dionigi Erba, but Handel’s transmutations of the borrowed material have their own interest and contribute towards the unique discourse of the piece as a whole.

  Indifferent to the ground-breaking Israel in Egypt, the London public was similarly unenthusiastic about Giove in Argo, a pasticcio knocked up, according to Handel himself, in four days, using material from several of his operas as well as numbers from Acis and Galatea and Parnasso in Festa. The composer added half a dozen new airs and a chorus, allowing a visiting soprano, Costanza Posterla, to include two arias by the Neapolitan composer Francesco Araja. The King’s Theatre season closed prematurely in the first week of May 1739. We know little or nothing of Handel’s activities during the summer, though no doubt he paid a visit or two to country friends like Sir Wyndham Knatchbull, James Harris or Lord Shaftesbury, and perhaps made a trip to Bath or Tunbridge for his health. By late September he was back at work, fortified the following month by canny John Walsh’s new royal copyright. ‘Whereas George Frederick Handel, of the Parish of St George the Martyr Hanover Square, in our County of Middlesex, Esq; hath humbly represented unto Us, that he hath with great Labour and Expence composed several Works consisting of Vocal and Instrumental Musick, and hath authorised and appointed John Walsh of the Parish of St Mary le Strand, in our said County of Middlesex, to print and publish the same; and hath therefore humbly besought us to grant Our Royal Privilege and Licence to the said John Walsh for the sole Engraving, Printing and Publishing the said Works for the Term of Fourteen Years; We being willing to give all due Encouragement to Works of this Nature, are graciously pleased to condescend to his Request . . .’

  November ushered in the hardest winter England had known for a decade, the worst, some claimed, in living memory. The Thames, above and below London Bridge, became choked with pack-ice and the river was full of stranded ships, wrecked lighters and wherries and the sinister flotsam of corpses of those who had drowned while trying to save cargoes or guide their vessels through the floes. The ducks left St James’s Park and people dropped dead of cold in the streets. In the new year the river froze over entirely and during the ensuing frost fair a Mr Cunningham of Fulham galloped a horse along the ice to Hammersmith and back again in three quarters of an hour for a twenty-guinea wager. But of course all this can have been nothing new for the Princess Sherbatoff, ‘Spouse to the Russian Minister Plenipotentiary’, who ‘appears at Court in a Russian Habit, viz. a Robe of Ermine and Furr, with a Sable Tippet, being the Winter Dress of that Country’.

  Advertisements for Handel’s new season included the assurance that ‘Particular Preparations are making to keep the House warm; and the Passage from the Fields to the House will be cover’d for better Conveniency’. He had left the Haymarket, or had not been asked to return owing to his recent box office failures, and now hired Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre from John Rich. Rich managed it in tandem with his newer enterprise at Covent Garden, and the actors and dancers in his company were sometimes expected to take part in performances at both theatres on the same night. Handsomely restored in 1714, its stage lighting enhanced by the use of looking glasses and with a trompe-l’oeil design over the pit showing ‘Shakespeare, Johnson, &c . . . in conference with Betterton’, its seating capacity of approximately 1,400 was more or less equivalent to Covent Garden’s.

  The opening concert, featuring Alexander’s Feast and two of Handel’s new string concertos, took place on 22 November, St Cecilia’s Day, and began appropriately with a freshly composed setting of Dryden’s A Song for St Cecilia’s Day, intended, no doubt, as a kind of illustrative pendant similar to those created for the longer work at its first performance by Cecilia, volgi uno sguardo and the Alexander’s Feast Concerto. In attempting Dryden’s poem Handel must have been aware, as with Alexander’s Feast, that he was tackling a modern classic, accorded the highest contemporary regard as a formative influence upon the writers of the age. The interest of each composition would have lain less obviously in his music alone than in the marriage of his talents to Dryden’s admired achievement. Not for nothing would Charles Avison, one of his sterner critics, later compare the two. ‘Mr Handel is in Music’, he wrote ‘what his own Dryden was in Poetry; nervous, exalted and harmonious; but voluminous, and, consequently, not always correct. Their Abilities equal to every Thing; their Execution frequently inferior. Born with Genius capable of soaring the boldest Flights; they have sometimes, to suit the vitiated Taste of the Age they lived in, descended to the lowest.’

  The poem is a gift to the imaginative composer and Handel ignores none of its hints or nuances. Apart from the more obvious illustrations, the soft complaining flute, the trumpet’s loud clangour, the sacred organ, solo cello divisions for Jubal striking the corded shell, and A major strings for ‘sharp violins’, he is at pains to bring out in subtler ways the all-pervading, god-given power of music which the ode asserts. The structure of the opening recitative and chorus imitates Dryden’s vision of harmony resolving chaos and finding its ultimate fulfilment in the image of man himself. In the closing ‘Grand Chorus’ Handel includes, as a kind of professional signature, a striking harmonic flourish in which modulation becomes a positive coup de théâtre. To heighten the dramatic element even further, the soloists (in the first performance those redoubtable Handelians Beard and Francesina) take on the role of evangelist narrator and angelic visionary, the soprano tessitura kept ethereally high, perhaps taking its cue from ‘Sing ye to the Lord’ in Israel in Egypt. Once again inspiration for several of the ode’s numbers lies in a work by another composer, in this case Gottlieb Muffat’s Componimenti Musicali, a set of brilliant and learned harpsichord suites by the son of the great Georg Muffat, so influential in introducing German musicians to the French court style in his instrumental suites and concertos.

  War fever, quite as strong as the cold weather, gripped London and must have diverted much popular attention from Lincoln’s Inn Fields concerts. Fury at Spain’s failure to honour the financial terms of the Treaty of Madrid, made some eighteen years previously, was incensed still further by her high-handed behaviour towards the English merchants and their ships, and vulgar patriotic sabre-rattling was stirred up by Lord Gage’s angry remonstrance to the House of Lords in July and by Captain Jenkins’s production of a shrivelled human ear, said to be his own, as a proof of Spanish atrocity. The War of Jenkins’s Ear began in earnest during the autumn and the dashing exploits of the aptly named Nicholas Haddock, commanding the Mediterranean fleet, monopolized everybody’s interest. A disgusted friend wrote to Horace Walpole: ‘Plays we have none, or damned ones. Handel has had a concerto this winter. No opera, no nothing. All for war and Admiral Haddock.’

  11

  A British Sixpence

  During that troubled autumn of 1739 Handel had been at work on a series of twelve string concerti grossi, his Opus 6, ten of which were to be given their premières during the forthcoming season. With typically feverish energy he completed the entire set in the space of one month, beginning number 1 in G on 29 September and dating the last, subsequently issued as number 11, 30 October, Walsh having already proposed a subscription for ‘Twelve Grand Concerto’s, in Seven Parts, for four Violins, a Tenor, a Violoncello, with a Thorough-Bass for the Harpsichord. Compos’d by Mr Handel’. Publication was held over, for obvious reasons, until near the season’s close, and a hundred subscribers, including most of the royal family (King George and the Waleses were significantly absent), Jennens, Tyers, Rich and a host of country music societies, among them the ‘Ladies Concert in Lincoln’, took 122 copies.

  It was no more than a respectable subscription list – there were fewer takers than for Arminio or Giustino two years earlier, for instance – and an
y hopes on Handel’s part for a spectacular commercial success must inevitably have been disappointed. Yet the concertos made their mark, appealing as they must to the already well-established English taste for the sort of music that emphasized ensemble playing and orchestral groups rather than exhibition solo performance.

  Unlike the organ concertos, the concerti grossi were heirs to a solid tradition, but it would be wrong to suppose that there is anything especially traditional in Handel’s approach to composing them or that they mark a terminus ad quem in the history of English instrumental music. Though it is true that the framework of these pieces is on the lines provided earlier in the century by Giuseppe Torelli and Arcangelo Corelli as ‘the model of grand concertos for a numerous band’ and sedulously followed by writers for the English market, they are far less specifically Corellian than those of the popular London concert violinists such as Geminiani, Pietro Castrucci and Festing, at whose recently published sets Handel seems to have had a glance before embarking on his own. Nor did Opus 6 stop this particular style dead in its tracks. Far from doing so, it inspired a crop of respectable imitations among English masters, Stanley, Avison, Alcock and others, as well as being followed up in the succeeding years of the decade by collections from Locatelli, Geminiani and Sammartini.

  Handel would have been well aware of the continental penchant for the newer three-movement Venetian layout so brilliantly developed by Vivaldi, yet something more than a mere wish to please the Lincoln ladies or the ‘Monday Night Musical Society at ye Globe Tavern’ must have inspired his choice of the Corellian model, in which a variety of movements in differing tempi and styles, mingling the idioms of church and stage, allowed him the free exercise of his mercurial genius. For the success of Opus 6, which stands beside Bach’s Brandenburgs and Vivaldi’s great string sets at the summit of all achievement in the Baroque concerto genre, lies in the remarkable consistency of its refusal to compromise with received ideas of ‘correctness’ and ‘kinds’ in musical form. Both the consistency and the refusal are fundamentally Handelian. Rather than imitate Corelli, Albinoni, Georg Muffat or Telemann, he absorbs the characteristic manner of each, mixing it with his own virtuoso treatment of the various forms and styles.