Handel

by Handel- The Man

  The ‘Risque’ was not sufficient to ensure the success of Hercules, aptly described in the advertisements as ‘a new Musical Drama’ and as such never destined to capture public favour during Handel’s lifetime. To be fair to Lady Brown and her coterie it was not only they who kept away the audiences. Mrs Cibber, in the newly expanded role of Lichas, fell ill on the first night and those bemused by Semele, angry at what may have seemed like yet another attempt to steal a march on the opera managers or disgusted by the presentation of such blatantly secular fare amid musical treatments of holy Scripture, were no doubt unwilling to be persuaded.

  It was their loss, for Hercules, though its libretto lacks the distinction of Semele, stands beside it as one of the peaks of Handel’s dramatic achievement, among those very few operatic works in the half-century before Gluck and Mozart which, by overwhelming the limitations of a traditional style, create a discourse of their own. Fusing several of Handel’s favourite plot interests, the violence of wifely jealousy, the relationships of parents and children, the collapse of the individual beneath a weight of personal folly and obsession, and the tension between private agony and public performance, its classical world mingles nervous radiance and anguished darkness like some canvas of the Italian Baroque. The union of Hyllus and Iole, the young prince and princess, which concludes the piece possesses a sort of exhausted determination to retain whatever order is left after the tragedy of their doomed elders, Hercules and Dejanira, has hewn out its course. The effect recalls Tamerlano and Alcina: we are less interested in those who survive than those who have departed from view.

  Based on Sophocles’s Trachiniae, with touches from Ovid, the drama, most capably managed by Thomas Broughton, a Salisbury clergyman, tells the story of Hercules’s return from war in Oechalia with the captive Iole and the groundless suspicions of Dejanira, whose use of the poisoned shirt of Nessus in a misguided effort at winning back the love she believes lost leads to the hero’s death and her own insanity. The recipe, as far as Handel was concerned, was the one perfected in Semele, a concentration not simply upon exhibiting voices and characters, but on a clear relationship between musical form and dramatic episode, on the validity of aria and recitative as vehicles of expression and, most interesting of all, on the essential function of the chorus.

  The musical language of Hercules is, quite deliberately, more restrained, less elastic than we mostly find in the oratorios. Yet this only strengthens the work. Hyllus’s ‘Where congeal’d the northern streams’ or Dejanira’s ‘The world, when day’s career is run’, both in Act I, ideally fulfil the terms of Baroque aria in expanding thoughts and desires which the formalities of recitative have kept constricted. Too heavily conditioned by the type of opera that celebrates complete emotional indulgence, we easily forget that much of the real power of opera seria at its best (and Hercules is a sophisticated variant on the form) lies in what its characters are forced to suppress and in the struggle between anarchic personal conflict and a dignified orthodoxy in outward behaviour: Iole’s grief-stricken re-enactment of her father’s death becomes, by the very nature of its tortured harmonic structure, a protest against the complacency of her captors and a harbinger of the ensuing debacle. By the close of the drama the ceremonious declamatory frameworks of the eighteenth-century lyric stage have dissolved into the dying gasps of the ravaged Hercules and for Dejanira a mad scene without parallel in the music of the age.

  ‘It seems to me that he is a little mad,’ said Count Flemming years before: now Handel’s eccentricities were distinctly pronounced, and friends occasionally feared for his reason. Lunacy was a more immediate and accessible phenomenon to his period than to ours, as Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress cycle famously demonstrates, and like many an imaginative genius Handel may now and then have contemplated the thin defences of his own sanity. His handling of Dejanira’s madness, with its alternations of snarling rage and delusively wistful calm, buoyed up by a free manipulation of tempo and key, has an eerie authenticity about it which makes the episode more deeply disturbing than the mad scenes of Italian opera, such as that of his own Orlando.

  The chorus lend weight and solemnity to the piece, as well as a note of rejoicing to lighten the gathering gloom. In the tremendous rhythmic swirl of ‘Crown with festal pomp the day’, with its trumpets and drums and Slavonic hints from Telemann’s Musique de Table, Handel gave them one of his most infectiously breezy numbers. He also rewarded them with the piece which, more than any other, encapsulates the essence of the tragedy. Like its counterpart ‘Envy, eldest born of hell’ in Saul, ‘Jealousy, infernal pest’ occupies a focal point in the drama, casting a prophetic shadow over events to come. In order to focus concentration, Handel paid special attention to the form of the piece, casting it as a rondo introduced by a series of unison string figures climbing down through the bass in diminished sevenths and thence battered into nothingness by the savagely discordant entry of the voices.

  Once again it is tempting to suppose that a score of Hercules may ultimately have found its way to Vienna, for there are premonitory echoes of late Mozart and Beethoven in this chorus. However much informed musical opinion may have admired the work, it was another in the array of brilliant commercial failures that punctuated Handel’s 1744 and 1745 seasons. His London audience, still fairly unsophisticated and conventional in its musical tastes, was simply not prepared to accept an English opera without the bonus of star singers and the usual trimmings of handsome sets and costumes, as Jennens sensibly pointed out to Holdsworth. Renting the opera house at £400 and buying a new organ for the concerts must have set Handel back, but to give ‘an English Opera call’d Hercules . . . on Saturdays, during the run of Plays, Concerts, Assemblys, Drums, Routs, Hurricanes, & all the madness of Town Diversions’ was to court disaster. He would have done better, said Jennens, to stick to his Covent Garden Wednesday and Friday series, where a mere dozen evenings in each case had brought him in £2,100 and £1,600 respectively.

  Handel and Jennens had been in collaboration again, despite their differences over Messiah, during the summer and autumn of 1744, and the composer’s letters to his librettist are precious to us not only because so little of his correspondence, private or professional, actually survives, but because they give us an invaluable insight into his working methods and prove, if proof is needed, how seriously he took the whole business of setting words to music. The last of Jennens’s three fine ‘scripture collections’ for Handel (possibly four if he provided the text for Israel in Egypt) was a dramatic oratorio on the story of Belshazzar’s feast, the prophecies of Daniel and the siege of Babylon by King Cyrus of Persia. It shares with Saul and Messiah an overall sense of a refined literary taste at work, allied to an intelligent awareness of Handel’s own priorities as a musical dramatist. However meanly Jennens may sometimes have felt towards Handel, he was never lacking in appreciation of his true gifts, and in Belshazzar he furnished precisely the sort of stirring and colourful narrative line the composer’s fancy most readily seized upon.

  Though his English summers by now often included visits to country friends and admiring aristocratic amateurs, Handel was still in London when, on 9 June 1744, he wrote to Jennens saying that he should be ‘extreamly glad to receive the first Act, or what is ready of the new Oratorio with which you intend to favour me’. Ten days later he was eagerly reading the first instalment: ‘Your reasons for the Length of the first act are intirely Satisfactory to me, and it is likewise my Opinion to have the following Act short.’ He settled down in the meantime to composing Hercules, and Jennens’s second act had arrived by 21 August. Belshazzar itself was started two days afterwards and on 13 September he was writing: ‘Your most excellent Oratorio has given me great Delight in setting it to Musick and still engages me warmly. It is indeed a Noble Piece, very grand and uncommon; it has furnished me with Expressions, and has given me Opportunity to some particular Ideas, besides so many great Chorus’s.’ By 2 October the last act was ready, but Handel was having doubts a
bout the oratorio’s length: ‘ . . . if I should extend the Musick, it would last 4 hours and more,’ he wrote, ‘I retrench’d already a great deal of the musick, that I might preserve the Poetry as much as I could, yet still it may be shortened,’ subsequently going into detail as to the layout of the final movement.

  This last letter offers valuable supporting evidence to that presented by the manuscripts that Handel nearly always composed with a specific group of singers in mind. The parts in Belshazzar were cast long before the work’s first performance, on 27 March 1745. Under the circumstances it is needless to add that it was a total failure. The loyalty of Handel’s partisans had not helped to fill the King’s Theatre and one of his most impressive artistic achievements was favoured with a beggarly three performances. ‘This proved a very bad season, and he performed with considerable loss,’ noted Lord Shaftesbury. The bluestocking Elizabeth Carter wrote at greater length to her friend Catherine Talbot, with some meaningful italics: ‘Handel, once so crowded, plays to empty walls in that opera house, where there used to be a constant audience as long as there were any dancers to be seen. Unfashionable as I am, I was I own highly delighted the other night at his last oratorio. ’Tis called Belshazzar, the story the taking of Babylon by Cyrus; and the music, in spite of all that very bad performers could do to spoil it, equal to any thing I ever heard. There is a chorus of Babylonians deriding Cyrus from their walls, that has the best expression of scornful laughter imaginable.’

  The presence in the story of three national groups, the Babylonians, their Jewish captives and the attacking Persians, gave Handel the chance to develop a type of contrast he had already illustrated in Athalia and Samson, where worshippers of the true God and pagan idolaters receive distinctive musical treatments. In Belshazzar each nation is clearly identifiable. With its fierce, foot-stamping rhythms, the Babylonian music reaches a pitch of primitive exultation in the drunken orgy, ‘Ye tutelar gods of our empire look down’, which sets the scene for the Writing on the Wall. Who else but Handel could have achieved such an effect with so confident a simplicity of means? The Persians, on the other hand, give utterance with a sturdiness and lucidity that emphasize their uncompromising resolve. In the limpid fluency of ‘See, from his post Euphrates flies’ (later effectively transformed into a movement for the first of three double wind band concertos written for the 1747–8 season), we can hear a gleeful rejoinder to the facile laughter of the Babylonians ‘deriding Cyrus as engag’d in an impracticable Undertaking’. For the Jews, grave, patient and dignified, an altogether more thoughtful vein is exercised, and both Israel in Egypt and the Funeral Anthem are recalled in their hieratic solemnities.

  Belshazzar, though nuanced with Jennens’s dissident politics and his personal absorption with the significance of biblical prophecy, deals as cogently with individuals as with abstracts. The opening soliloquy, in which the King’s mother Queen Nitocris (pertinently borrowed from Herodotus) contemplates the ‘vain, fluctuating state of human empire’ in an accompanied recitative of profound gloom, sums up the entire nature of the work in the tension sprung between the realities of power and destiny on the one hand, and the human beings who confront them on the other. There is no romantic interest, nor do we feel a need of it, but the characters’ emotions and motives are varied and convincing throughout. Nitocris, a matriarch of truly Racinian grandeur, ultimately finds her peace in the counsels of Daniel, an eloquent alto role, and in the heroic magnanimity of Cyrus, the ‘new man’ in the imperial struggle, who is given appropriately modern-sounding airs (‘Destructive war’ might easily have been composed by Hasse or Graun). Belshazzar himself is an insouciant bon vivant, a noisily drunken aristocrat of apparently imperishable breed.

  The great scene of the Writing on the Wall, the drama’s pivotal episode, offers a check to the King’s arrogance which, though only temporary, is yet severe. In the midst of his defiance of Jehovah’s power, the music crumbles into recitative and the astonished chorus of feasting nobles loses all tonal foundation as the horrified King watches the spectral hand spelling out the doom of his realm. The authentic quality of sheer terror must have been enhanced here by recollection of the Bible’s vivid ‘his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another’. In come the hastily summoned Chaldean soothsayers, to an ‘Allegro Postillions’ borrowed from Telemann’s Musique de Table to evoke their fussy inconsequence. Only Daniel can resolve the enigma, which he does with awesome, almost contemptuous remoteness, after which the scene closes abruptly with Nitocris’s sombre ‘Regard, O son, my flowing tears’, a largo siciliano charged with all the pathos at Handel’s command.

  If this number brings back reminiscences of Cuzzoni and Faustina, the association is scarcely accidental, for Belshazzar is among the most markedly dramatic of the oratorios. It was not written for stage performance, but that did not prevent composer and librettist from conceiving it in histrionic terms, with detailed stage directions to help the audience with wordbooks in hand, and the airs, choruses and recitatives are often thrillingly theatrical. The debate endures as to whether or not the oratorios may be adequately staged, but the directions in Belshazzar frequently seem less like real indications for performance than hints to the audience as to how Handel and Jennens wanted them to imagine the various scenes. In fairness, however, to advocates of dramatic presentation, it must be said that the piece undoubtedly works in the theatre and holds out splendid opportunities to the imaginative director.

  Three of Handel’s new works written for the 1744 and 1745 seasons had been rejected by his London public, and his subsequent attempts to rehabilitate them by carefully adapted revivals were wholly unsuccessful. Each was a creation of bold originality in design and intention, displaying its composer’s authoritative grasp of musical idiom as something from which he had fashioned his own markedly personal, rich and cosmopolitan language, to make each piece into something unique in the dramatic music of the day. It has taken over 200 years for Semele, Hercules and Belshazzar to gain their due of admiration from those less hidebound either by conventional genres or by notions of sacred choral proprieties. An indication that Handel realized that he might have gone too fast for the taste of his audiences to catch up with him is given by the fact that each of his next four oratorios represents an effort to regain popularity by appealing to the simpler, louder, less intellectual elements among the concert-going English. He knew what the people wanted and was ready to give it to them.

  13

  Next to the Hooting of Owls

  Handel was now sixty years old, and despite the bewildering uncertainties of his professional career, the malice of his enemies and the incalculable fluctuations of popular favour, he had established himself as the doyen of London’s musical life. More significantly, from a personal aspect, he had surrounded himself with a select circle of loyal and trusted friends, able to appreciate his stature as an artist as well as valuing his cheerful presence as a dinner guest, a travelling companion or a country visitor. Younger musicians and amateur performers, playing at his concerts or meeting him socially, noted their impressions, and gradually a wealth of anecdote and reminiscence began to surround him. He was, in short, becoming the great man.

  Portraits convey a physical image, but for a more rounded impression we turn to the comments of contemporaries like Dr Charles Burney and Sir John Hawkins. Burney, who, as a schoolboy, had seen him at Chester, later joined his orchestra and formed a lifelong admiration for him. ‘Handel’s general look’, he recalls, ‘was somewhat heavy and sour; but when he did smile, it was his sire the sun, bursting out of a black cloud. There was a sudden flash of intelligence, wit and good humour, beaming in his countenance, which I hardly ever saw in any other.’ Hawkins, who came to know him during his final years, tells us that ‘he was in his person a large made and very portly man. His gait, which was ever sauntering, was rather ungraceful, as it had in it somewhat of rocking motion, which distinguishes those whose legs ar
e bowed. His features were finely marked, and the general cast of his countenance placid, bespeaking dignity tempered with benevolence, and every quality of the heart that has a tendency to beget confidence and insure esteem.’

  Evidence, however, tends to contradict Hawkins’s notion of Handel as a demure hermit, with ‘no impertinent visits, no idle engagements to card parties, or other expedients to kill time’. We can readily accept his impression of a composer perpetually brimming over with ideas and always eager to be composing, so much so that the keys of his ‘favourite Ruckers harpsichord . . . were hollowed like the bowl of a spoon’, but those suppers at Mrs Delany’s, Mainwaring’s comment apropos of Handel and food that ‘he paid more attention to it than is becoming to any man’ and the eloquent jotting by the composer himself in one of his sketchbooks ‘12 Gallons Port 12 Gallons French’, besides the attribution to him of the dictum that ‘the goose is a most inconvenient bird, too much for one and not enough for two’, rule out any idea of a recluse whose ‘social affections were not very strong’. A satire published in 1750, The Scandalizade, has Heidegger describing Handel thus:

  How amply your corpulence fills up the chair –

  Like mine host at an inn, or a London Lord Mayor!

  Three yards at the least round about in the waist;

  In dimensions your face like the sun in the west.

  But a chine of good pork, and a brace of good fowls,

  A dozen-pound turbot, and two pair of soles,

  With bread in proportion, devour’d at a meal,

  How incredibly strange, and how monstrous to tell!

  Needs must that your gains and your income be large,