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Overplied in Music’s Cause
The last and greatest phase of Handel’s career as a composer saw him the approved master of a form for which his imagination had devised new dimensions. The term ‘oratorio’ seems altogether too limiting to apply to the type of work he had developed during the course of the 1740s. Though Semele and Hercules are not oratorios, they represent a crucial stage in this process, for without them Belshazzar and Judas Maccabaeus are inconceivable, just as none of these works is imaginable without the experience of Messiah, a piece that appears like a sublime exercise in the reduction of Handel’s genius to its essential components. Nor does any of the oratorios aim merely at formulaic repetition of another. Like the plays of Shakespeare or the operas of Verdi, each, despite external pressures from the entertainment world, creates its own individual dimensions. Though, like the English playwright and the Italian composer, Handel had occasional recourse to quickfire solutions and half-hearted fudging, the particular quality of his absorption in a given work gave it a unique character. Thus when we speak vaguely of ‘Handel oratorio’ we mean something whose connexion with the form as then accepted in Italy and Germany is only a general one. Yet the more closely we look at pieces like Susanna and Theodora, imparting an intimacy comparable to the novels of Richardson or the comedies of Goldoni being written in the same epoch, the stronger seems the relationship of such compositions to another cultural milieu altogether, that of the seventeenth-century Italian oratorios which established the musical genre, with their singular amalgam of introspection, intimacy and sensuality.
To carry his special kind of elastic expressiveness in the mature oratorios Handel significantly altered his approach to orchestration. He had never relinquished the very highest standards in his demands on all his performers. Burney recalled that ‘Handel wore an enormous white wig and, when things went well at the Oratorio, it had a certain nod, or vibration, which manifested his pleasure and satisfaction. Without it, nice observers were certain that he was out of humour.’ He could command some of the best musical hands in a city whose expectations went increasingly higher as each new Continental virtuoso arrived, and players such as the violinist Matthew Dubourg evidently found working with him a stimulating experience. But, unlike Bach or Vivaldi, he consistently refrained from treating his medium as a platform for instrumental display. After Sammartini’s oboe pyrotechnics had graced the operas of the late 1730s Handel never again sought to throw an orchestral soloist into such bold relief. Though his sense of instrumental colour in terms of appropriate shading is subtler than that of any other contemporary master, he created a deliberate and momentous area of difference between his opera and oratorio scorings in his resolute restriction of the oboes, in the latter, to the choral numbers. Not, of course, exclusively or dogmatically, but enough, in a piece like Solomon, where they do not participate in a single air, for their former function of giving bite to the string tone in the ritornelli of opera arias to be substantially abrogated.
It is not clear why he should have done this, unless he saw the oratorios as demanding a distinctive orchestral sound or was beginning to view the oboes in terms closer to those of his younger German and Italian contemporaries, anticipating the symphonists of the mid-century. Brass instruments are treated in similar fashion. The trumpet is still given an occasional solo outing, most notably in ‘With honour let desert be crown’d’ from Judas Maccabaeus, where the striking use of it in an unaccustomed A minor effectively pinpoints the moral underlay of the hero’s aria, but otherwise its use is to brighten moments of victorious festivity and religious assertiveness. Horns, as we have noted earlier in Athalia, could be used to conjure up the world of pagan revelry or to lend a dignified amplitude to pieces like ‘See, the conqu’ring hero comes’ (originally in Joshua and transferred to Judas around 1750), or the overture in Samson. The flute (recorders do not figure in any of the mature oratorios) has a special function in enhancing erotic tenderness, as in the nightingale chorus of Solomon, or in deepening an atmosphere of solemn sadness like that which broods over the prison scene in Theodora. Yet, like the other instruments of Handel’s oratorio orchestra, it is simply an artistic component of the score, never an obbligato in the full sense of the label.
His setting of English texts had grown correspondingly more sensitive. He was never quite to rival Purcell in demonstrating the language’s full validity as a medium for song, and his own grasp of it led him now and then to some odd stresses – ‘extravagantly’ in Hercules, for instance, ‘to receive’ and ‘incorruptible’ in Messiah (though the seemingly Germanic ‘Philistine’ in Samuel’s prophecy to Saul is wholly owing to Jennens) – but his understanding of the colour and nuance of English words is comparable in its awareness to that of another great foreign Englishman over a century later, the novelist Joseph Conrad.
Certainly Handel’s turn from Italian to English not only gave an immense fillip to the growth of a native tradition of solo singing in its introduction of talents like those of John Beard and the Young sisters, Cecilia and Esther, but encouraged other composers to follow his example in the field of oratorio and its kindred forms. Younger masters, William Boyce, Thomas Augustine Arne and John Stanley among them, looked towards newer styles in their music yet simultaneously reflected the powerful impress of his manner, whether in form or idiom. When the progress of the blindness, which began its serious onset in 1751, put an end, despite flickering hopes of a recovery, to full-scale composition, there was the gratification for Handel of feeling that he had ended, not in stale repetition of trusted formulas, but at the height of his powers, extending even further the scope of the oratorio as a dramatic medium. Jephtha, his last original work, makes a memorable and impressive conclusion to half a century of unyielding dedication to his art.
Rivals were in any case now less likely to trouble him, the more so since foreign composers visiting London tended to concentrate upon opera and none of them seriously set up to dare him on his own ground. Some time in 1747 the news may have reached him of the death in Vienna, at the age of seventy-six, of his old challenger Giovanni Bononcini. Almost forgotten in circles where he had formerly reigned supreme, the Modenese composer lived in modest circumstances on the pension of fifty florins granted him by Maria Theresa in consideration of services to the imperial household. A pathetic list of his effects, made on the day after he died, includes, among such items as a mouse-coloured coat, an old hat, two wigs with a block, a spinet and a fiddle bow, a night commode and two tin lamps, the tantalizing mention of two travelling trunks ‘wherein various musical concertos’. But it was not much for the man whose pride had rebuked emperors and duchesses.
The contrast with Handel as he found himself at the opening of the 1749 season can scarcely have been more marked. Lady Shaftesbury went to the new oratorio of Susanna ‘in the light operatic style’ and told James Harris ‘I think I never saw a fuller house. Rich told me that he believed he would receive near 400 1.’ Sir Edward Turner urged his friend the talented amateur architect Sanderson Miller to come at once to London: ‘Will not the sedate Raptures of Oratorical Harmony attract hither an Admirer of the sublime in music? . . . Glorious Entertainment! Divine Efficacy of Music!’ and glorious entertainment the new piece indeed was, Handel depositing some £550 in his bank account after three performances.
He had begun work on Susanna the previous July, completing it within seven weeks on 24 August. Morell, for the time being, stepped aside as his librettist. Since there seem to have been no hard feelings over the issue on either part, some practical consideration doubtless forced Handel to turn elsewhere and choose an anonymous poet who supplied him with the texts of Susanna and Solomon. We know that both had a common source simply through the widespread and recurrent parallels in the poetry of each. The writer may have been Newburgh Hamilton, though only the vaguest evidence supports his candidature. For the time being these capably handled and often felicitous libretti retain their secret.
The
story of Susanna, with its inbuilt paradox of senile lust opposed to wounded innocence and wifely fidelity, had always been popular in Baroque art, but its most outstanding expression in music before Handel was in Alessandro Stradella’s vividly conceived oratorio of 1666, written for Queen Christina of Sweden, a score of which the younger composer may have seen in Italy. The elements in each, Susanna, the two Elders, the Prophet Daniel and a chorus, are more or less the same, with the addition in Handel’s setting of Susanna’s father Chelsias and her husband Joachim. Each, too, fully partakes of that essentially secular narrative quality, which has placed the tale alongside those of Tobit and Judith in the Apocrypha. As material for a sacred oratorio the little Book of Susanna is justified only by its Jewish background and the presence of the boy Daniel. Otherwise its atmosphere is that of a rustic folk tale, and it was in this vein that Handel and his librettist chose to treat it.
We return at once to the countryside of Allegro, Penseroso and Moderato, and while Susanna and Joachim don the straw hat and leather gaiters of figures in a Gainsborough landscape, the two Elders, unforgettably preposterous in their panting adoration, seem to have wandered in from the pages of Joseph Andrews. The quintessential Englishness of everything is brought home to us from almost the very beginning in the sophisticated naïveté with which Handel treats the married idyll of husband and wife in the duet ‘When thou art nigh’, whose very rhythms and harmonic simplicity relate it to the world of ballad opera, brought even nearer in the two little songs for Susanna’s companion early in Act II, the first of which, ‘Ask if yon damask rose’, is the most winsomely simple thing Handel ever composed.
Such a spirit becomes still more marked in the characterization of the two Elders, differentiated with all the shrewdness at Handel’s command. The First Elder’s music, in his introductory recitative and air ‘When the trumpet sounds to arms’, leaves us in no doubt as to how much the composer understood the subliminal eroticism of his text. In the agonized accompagnato shudders of the former and in the latter’s mocking glissandos and roulades we hear not so much a parody of nobler heroic passions as a grotesque attack of satyriasis matching the bawdy double entendre of the words. The bass Second Elder, on the other hand, has all the impatient bluster of Polyphemus, a genuine buffo figure embarrassed by his desires, at once fatuous and menacing.
Susanna herself gathers depth and dignity as the work progresses. From its very outset her airs communicate and retain a uniquely exalted beauty, linked on the one hand with graces which, as Handel implies in the limpid semiquaver accompaniment of her bathing song, must surely tempt a saint, let alone an elder, and on the other with the unassuming virtue in which she is finally to triumph. Such unadorned excellence is expressed in the vein of antique solemnity, already established in the overture’s quotation from a piece by John Blow, which animates the structure of ‘Bending to the throne of glory’, almost like a seventeenth-century instrumental canzona, and the grave wretchedness of ‘If guiltless blood’, where the central section, a hymn of serene resignation, is brusquely interrupted by the Second Elder. Similar qualities colour the longer of the two numbers given to the youthful prophet Daniel: the lines and textures of ‘Chastity, thou cherub bright’, using tied crotchets as points d’appui, are a study in luminous, unruffled calm anticipating ‘As with rosy steps the morn’ in Theodora the following year.
If Susanna has any flaw it is in the anonymous librettist’s approach to the chorus. They inhabit the first two acts solely as a guarantee that what we are hearing is an oratorio in the approved manner. The fact that their opening outburst, a lament of the captive Jews over a Purcellian ground bass, is as fine a piece as anything elsewhere in these late works does little to annul its monumental irrelevance to what follows. Sophistry alone can establish connexions between the central story and an utterance more appropriate to the world of Judas Maccabaeus or Israel in Egypt. This dichotomy between overall function and individual quality in the choruses is upheld until the close of Act II, when the massed voices are at last drawn into the drama as witnesses of Susanna’s supposed apprehension in flagrante delicto. Otherwise the magnificent architecture of ‘Righteous heaven’, with its four contrasted sections, seems, however excellent in itself, to lay a wholly disproportionate emphasis on the moral implications of the story. The work cannot effectively carry a chorus of such Michelangelesque stature, whereas the primitive rhythmic bite of ‘The cause is decided’ at the beginning of Act III is wholly apposite to the air of tension in the court scene.
So awkward a juxtaposition was easily avoided in Solomon, written before Susanna but brought on after it. Here the chorus is more of a participant than in any of the other dramatic oratorios and thus, though it is not an obvious link in the chain of historical influences through which musicology traces the progress of the art, the work can be said to occupy a singular position in the development of non-liturgical choral writing. From the very beginning, in the eight-part ‘Your harps and cymbals sound’, whose meticulous layout, with concertino and ripieno groupings, typifies one of Handel’s richest and most imaginative scores, the chorus establishes its primacy. It is, in a sense, the presenter of the vivid and contrasting tableaux of the piece, inset like brilliant fresco panels into the sturdy musculature of a Baroque ceiling. Its responses firmly govern the succeeding moods: it can take on the guise of a solemn assembly of temple priests, as in the opening modulations of ‘with pious heart and holy tongue’, or assume the role, closer to the Song of Solomon, of a wedding party hastening bride and bridegroom to bed with the captivating ‘May no rash intruder’, in which a pair of flutes over whispering strings become the nightingales who ‘lull them to sleep with their song’. In the final act it provides, using the King himself as a master of ceremonies, an entertainment which is in effect a Cecilian ode celebrating the varying charms of music, from serene harmonies through martial clangour and the anarchies of passion to an emotional calm in the closing analogy to the passing of a storm at sea.
Not that Solomon is by any means the type of static chorus and aria sequence represented by a piece such as Judas Maccabaeus. The anonymous librettist cleverly shaped his drama around four different aspects of Solomon’s kingship, all of them appropriate within the eighteenth-century context. First we see the King as, by inference, head of the Church, in his newly built temple, then as the ardent lover of his Egyptian queen, then as the wise judge in the famous incident of the two harlots wrangling over the child, and finally as the welcoming host to his illustrious foreign guest the Queen of Sheba ‘from Arabia’s spicy shores, bounded by the hoary main’. Fittingly the title role is given to a mezzo-soprano, embodying those qualities of youthful positiveness and optimism that emerge in similar castings for high voice elsewhere in the oratorios (Cyrus in Belshazzar, for example). Yet Solomon’s own music is less memorable than the exuberant numbers given to the tenor Zadok (the priest, indeed) especially the whirring instrumental Catherine wheels of ‘Sacred raptures’, the Egyptian Queen’s ‘With thee the unshelter’d moor’, which has the same graceful cleanness of line as ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’, or the exalted radiance of the Queen of Sheba’s ‘Will the sun forget to streak’, another of Handel’s inimitable evocations of dawning light, worthy to set beside ‘As steals the morn’ in Il Moderato.
For vigour and pathos, however, it is the two harlots who steal the show, and their judgement scene is a perfect example of Handel’s accomplished dramaturgy. The child’s real mother wins our sympathy at once in her initial F sharp minor plea at the opening of the extraordinary trio ‘Words are weak to paint my fears’, couched in rhythms and harmonies reminiscent of the more poignant moments of the Brockes Passion; the false claimant bursts in with skipping A major quavers, ‘False is all her melting tale’, and the King himself establishes an E major balance through Handel’s punning treatment of ‘Justice holds the lifted scale’, before the pair fall away to leave the first voice in its plaintive solitude. Restlessly, in suitably meretricious mod
ern vein, the second harlot flatters the monarch’s wisdom, but her rival, by piercing to the heart of true parental anguish in the despairing phrases of ‘Can I see my infant gored’, whose eleven-bar closing adagio reduces her to a figure of noble abjection, conquers and earns her right to join Solomon in a final duet.
Both trio and duet bear witness to Handel’s interest in the potential of ensemble, something Baroque lyric drama, with its focus on solistic glamour, tended understandably to shy away from, but which he had already begun to develop in middle-period operas such as Partenope and Orlando. The mature oratorios feature several outstanding examples, such as Semele’s quartet in Act I, and the confrontation between Susanna and the two Elders, in which, as with the Solomon trio, the rhythmic patterns of the several lines are carefully adjusted to the character and intentions of the protagonists.
Susanna enjoyed a modest success at its first performances, and several individual numbers in Solomon, such as ‘With thee the unshelter’d moor’, became popular favourites. At the season’s close, with a Messiah performance (the first since 1743) on 23 March, Handel turned to an altogether different project in the composition of what has since become one of his best-known works, the Music for the Royal Fireworks, designed to be given as ‘a grand Overture of Warlike Instruments’ to the opulent pyrotechnical display in the Green Park to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, signed with France the previous October.
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