Handel

by Handel- The Man

  A further consistency is afforded by the dramatic approach Handel adopts towards his material. The three parts of Messiah recall the three acts of an Italian opera and to see the work only as a series of disjointed meditations is to ignore its nature as a piece designed, in the best sense of the term, to entertain listeners in a concert room, and written by an operatic professional. Beyond the more obviously theatrical moments, such as the angel’s appearance to the shepherds, the intense visual allusions in ‘The people that walked in darkness’ and ‘Thou shalt break them’, or the shattering bar’s silence in the cadence of the Amen, there are innumerable reminiscences of the Haymarket and Covent Garden, in the bass rage aria ‘Why do the nations?’ with its shades of Boschi and Montagnana, in the siciliano ‘How beautiful are the feet’, which in another context might have been designed for Strada or Cuzzoni, or in ‘Oh death, where is thy sting?’ whose duet form surely owes something to recollections of similar penultimate duets celebrating achieved felicity in Giulio Cesare, Admeto and other operas.

  This all-embracing quality is typical of Handel and Messiah represents to perfection that stylistic synthesis of which much has been said earlier in this book. For example, other Italian strains than those of opera are recalled in the symphony (originally twenty-one bars, which Handel subsequently shortened to eleven) introducing the shepherds and in ‘He shall feed his flock’: both consciously allude to the music of the pifferari (the symphony is entitled Pifa), the mountain bagpipers from the Abbruzzi he would have heard in Rome. ‘He shall feed his flock’ has indeed some curious melodic parallels with that best-known of Italian Christmas songs ‘Tu scendi dalle stelle’, a pifferaro signature tune. Elsewhere in Messiah we hear echoes of German chorale in the Hallelujah chorus, where snatches of Wachet auf seem to be quoted in ‘The kingdom of this world’ and ‘And he shall reign for ever and ever’.

  What has always ensured the work’s unchallenged supremacy in the English choral repertoire is a certain not always easily definable Englishness in the character of Handel’s melody and word setting. Two of the most famous airs, ‘He was despised’ and ‘The trumpet shall sound’, follow the approved da capo model to which the audience would have been accustomed but from which he himself was starting very gradually to draw away, yet even here the rhythms of the language and the flexible quality of the text decree a greater lucidity and directness than he had ever contrived to produce before, even in the Funeral Anthem or Israel in Egypt. The best illustration of this is surely the sublime ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’, whose power defies analysis because its music is in a sense invisible, a clear current of unforced expressiveness supported on the sketchiest of basses. ‘Its effect’, as one writer on Messiah remarks, ‘rests primarily on Handel’s particular speech, the fusion in his arias of the almost instrumental melody of classical Italian bel canto with a speaking declamatory style bred up in England.’

  This is the kind of transcendent immediacy that not even the dreariest performance of Messiah can kill, yet, as Handel’s sketchbooks show, these ‘great effects by simple means’ were often arrived at through a series of calculated experiments. Nor was he satisfied with the work as it stood: fresh performers during successive London seasons meant serious modifications to several numbers. ‘But who may abide’, for instance, has no fewer than six versions, the original short form for bass, with no change of tempo at ‘for he is like a refiner’s fire’, the same a tone higher for the tenor Thomas Lowe, three forms of the version written for the castrato Gaetano Guadagni, and as a recitative used in the first Dublin performance.

  The fact is that no definitive text of Messiah exists, though a close study of Handel’s original manuscript, of his conducting score with its various revisions, insertions and alterations, and of the Foundling Hospital copy, is able to give us a clearer outline of what the composer himself would have expected to hear than is offered by traditional modes of performance dating from the vast Handel Commemoration festivals at the close of the eighteenth century. It is difficult to imagine a general return to this elephantine manner, with its massed choirs, orchestration thickened with flutes, clarinets and additional brass, and its inordinately slow tempi; the contemporary practice, favouring small forces, crisp rhythms and a respect of what is taken to have been an authentic performing style, will now, perhaps, be with us for ever.

  Yet Messiah’s resilience is such that, like Shakespeare’s plays, it has taken a place among those works which every epoch moulds to its own fancies and desires. Too much has sometimes been made of Handel the populist, the poor man’s Bach, the glib melody maker for the vulgar enthusiast, but there is no denying that it was precisely this factor, of the art that conceals art, of the spontaneity that encloses an inexhaustible musical intelligence, which has guaranteed Messiah’s survival as one of the most popular pieces of music ever created. Ironically, as we shall see, it has been this same quality that has made the composer the victim of that cultural snobbery which so often surrounds the appreciation of art. Messiah gave Handel to the world: whether the world has always treated either the master or his work very well in recompense is still a questionable point.

  12

  Brave Hallelujahs

  Handel left Ireland on 13 August 1742 and, though he planned a further Dublin concert season, it was destined never to take place. Nevertheless he was grateful to ‘that generous and polite Nation’ and on several occasions in subsequent years must have looked back nostalgically to the enthusiastic welcome the Irish had given him. Lord Shaftesbury was correct in his forecast, made the previous year, that Handel seemed ‘like to come home a considerable gainer, if the great hospitality shown him does not kill him with good living’. According to Matthew Dubourg’s son-in-law, the oboist Redmond Simpson, the composer had indeed been ‘attacked by another Paraletic stroke’ while at dinner with Dubourg. ‘It was violent and universal’ but luckily ‘Doctors Barry and Quin, & Mr Nicols, Surgeon General, were present . . . By violent bleeding & other evacuations he was soon perfectly recovered, & never had any return of it.’ Just before leaving Dublin Handel paid a farewell call on Jonathan Swift, on whom mortality was stealing even more of a march. ‘The Servant was a considerable Time e’er he could make the Dean understand him; which, when he did, he cry’d “Oh! A German and a Genius! A Prodigy! admit him.” The Servant did so, just to let Mr Handel behold the Ruins of the greatest Wit that ever lived among the Tide of Time.’

  A more rational Church of Ireland cleric than the Dean, in the shape of Dr Edward Synge, Bishop of Elphin, had made some admiring critical comments on Messiah, which Handel forwarded to Charles Jennens. Judging the text ‘all Sublime or affecting in the greatest Degree’, Synge perceptively noted that the oratorio ‘seems to be a Species of Musick different from any other, and this is particularly remarkable of it. That tho’ the Composition is very Masterly & artificial, yet the Harmony is So great and open, as to please all who have Ears & will hear, learned & unlearn’d . . .’ as well as emphasizing the supposed advantages of there being no dramatic dialogue in the text. He had also studied the audience at the performance he attended. ‘They seem’d indeed thoroughly engag’d from one end to the other. And to their great honour, tho’ the young & gay of both Sexes were present in great numbers, their behaviour was uniformly grave and decent, which Show’d that they were not only pleas’d but affected with the performance.’

  No doubt Jennens was pleased with this, but the idea, suggested by later remarks in letters to Holdsworth, of himself as a sort of artistic mentor to the composer was discouraged through Handel’s independence of spirit. As the latter had said, ‘the report that the Direction of the Opera next winter is committed to my Care, is groundless. The gentlemen who have undertaken to middle [sic] with Harmony can not agree, and are quite in a Confusion,’ though when he added: ‘Whether I shall do some thing in the Oratorio way (as several of my friends desire) I can not determine as yet,’ he was perhaps trying to throw Jennens off the scent, for a new and h
itherto unperformed oratorio had already been written over a year before and in early January 1743, Handel and John Rich of Covent Garden were applying to William Chetwynd, inspector of stage plays, for a licence to present it.

  A month later, Samson was advertised as the opening novelty of a Covent Garden subscription season. Tickets were to be issued from Handel’s house in Brook Street at six guineas each, entitling subscribers to three box places at the first six performances. There was to be a new organ concerto (Opus 7 no. 2 in A) played by the master himself, and at the fourth performance Dubourg, who had returned to London for the concerts, played a violin solo. The first cast included Beard as Samson, Mrs Cibber as Micah, Signora Avolio as the Israelitish Woman, and the Irish comedienne Kitty Clive as Dalila. The most important addition to the little nucleus of musicians loyal to Handel and rewarded by him with a succession of outstanding vocal numbers in later works was the German bass Henry Theodore Reinhold, reputed to be a natural son of the Archbishop of Dresden, and who had already sung in Acis and Esther performances.

  The new oratorio was an overwhelming success and remained among the composer’s most popular works for the next two centuries. Horace Walpole, still biting his nails over the fate of Lord Middlesex’s operas, wrote to Horace Mann: ‘Handel has set up an Oratorio against the Operas, and succeeds. He has hired all the goddesses from farces and the singers of Roast Beef from between the acts at both theatres, with a man with one note in his voice, and a girl without ever an one; and so they sing, and make brave hallelujahs; and the good company encore the recitative, if it happens to have any cadence like what they call a tune.’ Lady Hertford told her son that the audience was ‘filled with all the people of quality in town; and they say Handel has exerted himself to make it the finest piece of music he ever composed, and say he has not failed in his attempt’. An anonymous correspondent to the Dublin Journal hinted that the enormous run on tickets, with crowds being turned away at the doors each night, was owing to a general disillusion with the way things were going over at the Haymarket. Jennens, however, was rather more tepid and selective: though he thought Samson was ‘a most exquisite Entertainment . . . yet it increas’d my resentment for his neglect of the Messiah. You do him too much Honour to call him a Jew! a Jew would have paid more respect to the Prophets. The Name of Heathen will suit him better, yet a sensible Heathen would not have prefer’d the Nonsense foisted by one Hamilton into Milton’s Samson Agonistes, to the sublime Sentiments & expressions of Isaiah & David, of the Apostles & Evangelists, & of Jesus Christ.’

  Jennens’s carping is understandable. He had not been asked to write the libretto, was probably not aware that Messiah was to receive its first London performance a few days later and may have been somewhat irritated at not having known about Samson’s composition. In fact, Handel was probably considering the project as early as the winter of 1739, having heard Shaftesbury’s brother-in-law James Noel read through the whole of Milton’s Samson Agonistes. ‘Wherever he rested to take breath Mr Handel (who was highly delighted with the piece) played, I really think, better than ever, & his harmony was perfectly adapted to the sublimity of the poem.’ Newburgh Hamilton’s oratorio text is an extremely competent adaptation, with generally discriminating additions, in both airs and choruses, from Milton’s shorter poems like ‘At a Solemn Music’ and ‘On Time’ to create a blend of varied material ideal for Handel’s setting. So as to heighten contrast and narrative continuity Hamilton introduced a Philistine chorus and a confidant role, Micah (probably motivated by the composer’s consideration for Susanna Cibber). Whatever faults the libretto has are owing in part to Samson’s essentially passive role as a series of temptations are flung at him by his father Manoa, his ex-wife Dalila and Harapha, the Philistine miles gloriosus, and in part to Hamilton’s over-eagerness to deliver the goods.

  Most of Handel’s more extended works justify their length (it is instructive to hear the operas in their all too rarely performed entirety) but is it blasphemy to suggest that Samson loses little by occasional cuts? Handel revised the piece in preparation for the Covent Garden season, adding, among other numbers, the jubilant ‘To song and dance’ and the magnificent mutual taunting between Israelites and Philistines ‘Great Dagon has subdued our foe’, as well as a new finale which, in approved eighteenth-century fashion, redeemed the reflective Miltonic ending with a brightly toned soprano solo and chorus, the well-loved ‘Let the bright seraphim’. The result of all this is something distinctly top heavy, if not a ‘loose, baggy monster’ then a work whose stateliness of pace is easily confused with loftiness and solemnity – the sort of work, indeed, which Handel’s public in its more moralizing moods felt that it ought to be enjoying as an antidote to the frivolity of balls, masquerades and ridottos. True, the choruses are tautly and economically constructed. An air like ‘Total eclipse’ is as dramatically compelling as anything else in the oratorios, and even the pallid Micah is rewarded with the stark grandeur of ‘Return, O God of Hosts’. Yet at times the whole seems not quite the sum of its parts.

  To a large extent this is compensated for by Handel’s innate dramatic alertness to every possibility afforded by the text. The slightly laborious quality of Act I is amply made up for by the oratorio’s excellent closing scenes, which so successfully encapsulate the essence of the story as a whole that the work might almost begin here. The braggart Harapha hurls his final threats at Samson and the chorus, with terrifying suddenness, breaks into ‘With thunder arm’d’, a piece couched in that musical language which Handel had perfected in the choruses of Israel in Egypt, set off to greater advantage by the delicacy of Samson’s ensuing ‘Thus when the sun’. The note of calm resignation to the divine will is retained in the airs for Micah and Manoa that follow, but no amount of foreknowledge either of the biblical history or of Milton’s play is likely to have prepared us for the ultimate catastrophe, superbly illustrated by the ‘symphony . . . of horror and confusion’, which interrupts Manoa’s recitative and through which we hear the despairing cries of the Philistines as the hero pulls down Dagon’s temple on top of them. Samson himself is commemorated in a series of elegiac movements obviously suggested to librettist and composer by similar features in Saul but altogether more flexibly handled, and the work as nowadays performed closes with the brilliant affirmations of ‘Let the bright seraphim’ and its pendant chorus.

  The individual characters make their impact. In casting Samson as a tenor Handel may have recalled the suffering Bajazet in Tamerlano, but was able here to project a figure of more obviously heroic proportions and in so doing show his confidence in John Beard, who ‘constantly possessed the favour of the public by his superior conduct, knowledge of Music, and intelligence as an actor’. The two bass parts of Harapha and Manoa offer a piquant contrast between the older type of raging operatic thunderer and the benign priests and fathers to be found in later oratorios. Dalila, meanwhile, is the perfect foil to her husband, winsome in ‘With plaintive notes’ but stung to comprehensible fury in the duet ‘Traitor to love’. Handel’s casting of Kitty Clive in the role tells us much as to how he envisaged it. The daughter of an Irish lawyer fallen on hard times, she had scored her early triumphs on the London stage as a singing actress in farces and comic afterpieces, achieving her greatest success as a definitive Polly in The Beggar’s Opera. After a brief and unhappy marriage, she went to act in Dublin in 1741, renewing her acquaintance with Handel, who had written a theatre song for her some years earlier.

  While Samson won new audiences for Handel, Messiah, the other Lenten oratorio, met with a more mixed reception. A writer to the Universal Spectator for 19 March 1743, signing himself ‘Philalethes’, identified a problem that must have been shared by others in the audience. ‘An Oratorio either is an Act of Religion, or it is not; if it is, I ask if the Playhouse is a fit Temple to perform it in, or a company of Players fit Ministers of God’s Word.’ Before Messiah had even been given its first London performance, questions were being asked as to its fitne
ss for this kind of secular presentation. A few days later a short poem by ‘a Gentleman’ offered support for Handel’s project:

  To Harmony like his, Celestial Pow’r is given

  To exalt the Soul from Earth, and make of Hell a Heaven.

  In the next issue Philalethes launched a counter-attack, repeating his earlier objections in verse.

  It was owing to scruples such as these, Lord Shaftesbury later noted, as well as to the audience ‘not entering into the genius of the composition’, that Messiah ‘was but indifferently relished’ at its London première. Jennens berated Handel for being ‘too idle & too obstinate’ to retouch the score’s supposed weak points, though in fact he had revised the Dublin version from several significant aspects. ‘Thou art gone up on high’ was given a fresh setting for soprano, ‘But who may abide’ was transferred from bass to tenor soloist, ‘Their sound is gone out’ appeared for the first time and the angel of the Lord announced the nativity in the engaging person of Kitty Clive to the awestruck shepherds.

  Samson’s continued popularity guaranteed several revivals during Handel’s lifetime and made it a favourite with English provincial music societies. Its triumph in 1743, however, was compounded for Handel himself by what Mainwaring calls ‘some return of his paralytic disorder’. Horace Walpole, too, told Mann that ‘Handel has had a palsy, and can’t compose’. The Harris brothers attributed the illness to his eating habits, describing him as ‘so much of the Epicure, that he cannot forbear going back to his former luxurious way of living, which will in the end certainly prove fatal to him’. The onset of the attack seems to have been during April, immediately following the close of the Covent Garden season, and was perhaps exacerbated by Jennens’s nagging intransigence in insisting that Messiah should be retouched. ‘I have not done with him yet . . .’ he gleefully told Holdsworth, who answered from Florence with commendable humanity: ‘You have contributed by yr. own confession, to give poor Handel a fever, and now He is well recover’d, you seem resolv’d to attack him again. This is really ungenerous, & not like Mr Jennens. Pray be merciful: and don’t you turn Samson, & use him like a Philistine . . .’