We should not be too critical, however, of Morell’s decision to alter the ending in the interests of Baroque taste, or assume that Handel had nothing to do with this. The appearance of an Angel, ascribing Jephtha’s sacrificial pledge to the Holy Spirit and commuting Iphis’s death sentence to a species of nun-like religious virginity in an air of meretriciously spanking newfangledness, which already appears in the Foundling Hospital Anthem, is a disappointment only if we expect Jephtha to reproduce the authentic gloom of classical tragedy. We should nevertheless recall that none of Handel’s music dramas, not even Tamerlano, Saul or Hercules, ends in outright tragedy. Even if the composer himself privately failed to subscribe to the eighteenth-century ethos in this matter (though there is no concrete evidence for this) his audience demanded and nearly always got a happy ending.
Whatever we may think of such a solution, there is no denying the work’s superlative aptness as the crown of Handel’s unique achievement in music. ‘Swansong’ is an inappropriate cliché, since he was not to die for another seven years and we can scarcely believe, in any case, that he must have lacked all hope, as he composed it, of being able subsequently to write another oratorio. Yet the atmosphere of valediction that permeates Jephtha’s close has an ideal appropriateness. We are saying farewell not to a worn-out old man, but to a young girl who embodies the vivacity and self-renewal of her creator’s genius. Added to this, there is a degree of eclecticism which gives the whole piece an emblematic quality both in a purely Handelian context and in terms of the age in which it was written. For while it is the greatest musico-dramatic work of its decade, it is also fascinating in its mixture of references to what is past and what is to come in European music, especially in the choruses, where the classicism of Handel’s style is alloyed by a series of quotations from a work published only five years before Jephtha itself.
This was the collection of six masses, entitled Philomela Pia, by the Bohemian composer Frantisek Habermann, which Handel may have been sent by one of his Continental correspondents – Telemann perhaps – and to which he had already alluded in the organ concerto Opus 7 no. 3 and in Septimius’s air ‘From virtue springs’ in Theodora. Habermann’s work is vigorous, cheerfully melodic and very much au courant with the latest galant style. We can study Handel’s use of this material from his manuscript sketchbooks in the Fitzwilliam Museum and note, as usual, the subtlety with which his writing appropriated and transformed the original. In a chorus like ‘Cherub and Seraphim’, for instance, what seems most authentic is the opening string figure, a series of rising semiquaver patterns over a descending bass, which might easily have come from a page of the Dixit Dominus: it is in fact another Habermann quotation, but its Handelian character makes us wonder whether the younger man, who could quite easily have come across the published oratorio scores, had not already absorbed something from the master who now so effectively borrowed from him.
Whatever the condition of his eyesight, Handel was quick to spot other new material for borrowing. When he met up with Christina Passerini and her violinist husband in Holland they may have given him a copy of the serenata La vittoria d’Imeneo, recently composed by Baldassare Galuppi for a royal wedding in Turin. A number from this, ‘Cara, se madre’, provided the musical framework for the Act I duet in Jephtha, ‘These labours past’, in which Iphis and Hamor look forward to a happy future together. The striking modernity of idiom in a work by the most versatile and influential composer of the rising generation seems entirely appropriate to a young couple preparing to start out in life together and this, as much as sheer expediency, may have been Handel’s reason for folding it into his new oratorio. Galuppi himself had spent two years in London between 1741 and 1743 composing operas for Lord Middlesex. Though he never returned to England, did a score of Jephtha ever come his way, and would he have been flattered to identify this theft from his work by a distinguished older contemporary?
Structurally Jephtha is scarcely conventional. The whole of the first act and half of the second are carefully weighted towards the excitement of the Israelites asserting their freedom against Ammonite tyranny and towards the happiness of the young lovers. Only Storge, Cassandra-like, marks approaching disaster but is brushed aside, the F minor of her ‘Scenes of horror’ clashing with the prevailing major tonalities of the surrounding numbers and allayed besides by Iphis’s irrepressible gaiety. This mood is successfully carried over into the rejoicings attending the subsequent victory, thereby brilliantly encapsulating, by means of a head-on clash between the two, the conflict of public duty and private passion, which lies at the core of all Baroque drama. Iphis’s music, to an almost sinister degree, underlines her innocence precisely because we know that the story’s central irony lies in her disastrous unawareness of her father’s promise to God. As she prepares to ‘tune the soft melodious lute’, with flute obbligato over pizzicato strings, our impulse is to warn her not to.
What follows should be essential study for anyone interested in music as a dramatic medium. When Iphis and her maidens dance inexorably forward to a jolly little gavotte, they and their music seem calculated to determine a chain reaction in which one number magnificently sets up the next. Jephtha’s breathless and hauntingly inchoate ‘Open thy marble jaws, O tomb’ tell us everything about the father’s horror at what greets him, as do the close welding of recitative and air (more like arioso) in Storge’s appalled remonstrance with her husband and Hamor’s ‘On me let blind mistaken zeal’, which knocks into being the superb, multi-textured quartet ‘O spare your daughter’. In this piece music works on manifold levels: an insistently chromatic bass supports a three-part string accompaniment independent of the vocal lines, in which Storge, Hamor and Zebul’s pleadings are set in rhythmic and melodic contrast against Jephtha’s obstinate constancy to his vow.
What moves him most, however, is the unaffectedly simple resignation of his daughter to her fate. His anguish, a kind of nervous breakdown in music, shows Handel as unequalled in his age for the imaginative exploration of what we are nowadays all too ready to dismiss as the ‘dry’ or ‘static’ medium of recitative. ‘Deeper and deeper still’ carries Jephtha not merely through a wide range of emotions but through such an astonishing variety of keys that the customary tonal flexibility of recitative has seldom been more effectively linked to expressiveness.
The chorus, one of Handel’s longest, which concludes the act is a world away from the buoyant aggressiveness flourished by the Israelites in the oratorio’s opening section. Neither Habermann nor anybody else could have written an extended choral statement of the drama’s essential metaphysical dilemma (well summed up in the opening line, ‘How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees! all hid from mortal sight’) which so urges upon us a sense of the limitless perspectives of human moral experience in relation to God. Those who accuse Handel of not being ‘profound’ in the sense that Bach is apparently so should be made to listen to this chorus and then return, if they can, to so stale a charge. The piece’s four sections, beginning with a significant reminiscence of ‘The people shall hear’ in Israel in Egypt, leading to a gloomy canon, followed in turn by a groping chromatic fugue and concluding with a wearily hopeless iteration of Pope’s words ‘Whatever is is right’, are the philosophical essays of a cultivated eighteenth-century mind.
Nowadays among the most highly regarded of all Handel oratorios, Jephtha enjoyed a comparative success in its own time. There was, however, only one Covent Garden performance in 1752, with the composer himself directing, as he was to do at the other oratorios and at the Foundling Hospital that year. On 4 November he was couched once more, this time by the Princess of Wales’s surgeon William Bromfield, ‘when it was thought there was all imaginable Hopes of Success by the Operation, which must give the greatest Pleasure to all Lovers of Musick’. Mrs Delany, nevertheless, recalling Samson, thought ‘how feelingly he must recollect the “total eclipse”’ and lamented his ‘dark and melancholy circumstances’. On 27 January 1753, after a brief spell of
hopes for a positive recovery, one newspaper told its readers that ‘Mr Handel has at length, unhappily, quite lost his sight’ and the depressing announcement was shortly followed up with an even more dismal rumour that he was now engaged on his own funeral anthem. The Foundling Hospital governors, touchingly concerned and ‘expressing their surprize thereat, RESOLVED That the Secretary do acquaint Mr Handel, That the said Paragraph has given this Committee great Concern; they being highly sensible that all Well-Wishers to this Charity must be desirous for the Continuance of his Life, who has been, and is so good and generous a Benefactor thereto’. Is such solicitude, we may wonder, unique in the annals of music history? Were the administrators of the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice similarly anxious for the asthmatic Antonio Vivaldi? Viewed in its most cynical light, the resolution perhaps simply shows that the Foundling governors knew where their advantage lay. The news was, as it turned out, quite baseless.
Alive Handel still was and, though by the beginning of 1754 the eclipse was total, he had lost none of his authority in the preparation and direction of the oratorio seasons. The Covent Garden performances, of course, went on attracting a solid following, but more interesting than these in respect of the development of Handel’s English reputation are the records of oratorio in the provinces. By now, owing perhaps to an impetus begun by Athalia some twenty years before, Oxford had taken the composer to its heart and his music had found an ardent champion in the Heather Professor William Hayes, who had come out strongly in his favour in a set of published strictures on Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression (1752), a work designed to establish the primacy of Geminiani’s style against the less orthodox but more ‘old-fashioned’ Handelian manner. In evoking the spirits of Milton, Poussin and Claude in his praises of Handel, Hayes had touched upon the fundamental element that was beginning to gain the composer a following when in certain respects he no longer needed it. We cannot categorize Handel as a ‘pre-Romantic’, whatever that may be, but neither can we ignore that mid-eighteenth-century sensibility in his work, which appealed to the nascent Romanticism of contemporary England and Germany.
The English, in short, were ready for Handel, and Oxford now witnessed regular performances on a par with those in London and featuring such well-known Handelians as Frasi and Beard. At Bath, meanwhile, Thomas Chilcot, one of the most able of younger provincial masters, was dispensing Judas Maccabaeus and other pieces to the fashionable ‘hot-waterers’, while at Bristol the new music room opened in 1756 ‘with the oratorio of the Messiah’. More significant yet was the annual Music Meeting of the Three Choirs of Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford, the world’s oldest surviving musical festival, and a positive and vital force in English music. Here, by the mid-1750s, Handel was part of the staple fare: at the Hereford meeting of 1756, for example, Samson, L’Allegro and the St Cecilia Ode were all given, and the following year Gloucester heard Acis and Messiah, with ‘Three Trumpets, a Pair of Kettle-drums, Four Hautboys, Four Bassoons, Two Double basses, Violins, Violincelloes and Chorus Singers in Proportion. The Music to be conducted by Dr Hayes . . .’
Meanwhile, as London grew, so did its concert life, and the town rang with Handel. The increase of the cult of ‘feeling’ and ‘sentiment’ had the practical outcome of encouraging the promotion of various hospital schemes, and what Dublin had been doing for well over a decade was now taken up in the City and Westminster, as each new charitable foundation publicized its endeavours with first-rate music. Boyce directed the band at St Margaret’s for the Westminster Hospital and Stanley did the same for the Hospital for Smallpox and Inoculation, but who was the ‘Widow Gentlewoman in Great Distress’ for whom, presumably with the composer’s consent, an Acis and Galatea was given at the Great Room in Dean Street, Soho? We can appreciate the old man’s anxiety lest his music fall into improper hands: a letter of Shaftesbury to James Harris, dated 31 December 1757, says, ‘I will give directions for sending the score of Joshua to you at Salisbury. But desire when you deliver it that Mr B . . . may be requested to take care not to dirty or hurt the book; and Farther, that on no account he suffer any copy to be taken of the Chorus’s etc. lest it should be performed elsewhere. For this, in justice to Mr Handel, I ought to insist on.’
Apart from Messiah, gaining continuously in popularity throughout the decade, the favourites seem to have been Acis (variously described as masque, serenata and oratorio), Esther, Samson and Judas. Alexander Balus, Susanna and Solomon were each revived for a single season. Saul made its way successfully into the provinces and Deborah, perhaps for specially local or topical reasons, was always a draw in Ireland. Athalia returned to Covent Garden after a twenty-year absence and even Joseph found a niche in the London programmes. Semele alone, of all the eighteen English dramatic works, was never brought back during Handel’s lifetime after its six 1744 performances. As for the non-dramatic works to English texts, while the St Cecilia Ode and Alexander’s Feast maintained a more or less constant success rate, the fortunes of Israel in Egypt rose as those of Allegro, Penseroso and Moderato declined – the blooming landscapes of Gainsborough and The Seasons giving way, as it were, to the awful and sublime prospects of Blake and Turner.
At nearly every revival Handel made some sort of adaptation or interpolation, based variously on the quality and nature of the performers or on his sense of what the public desired. For many works there can thus be no standard text because of the essentially elastic aspects of the piece as conceived in a practical sense. A modern conductor or editor will prefer to recommend one version as opposed to another, but can scarcely afford to be dogmatic. In at least one case, that of Esther, the composer, as we have already noted, seems never to have been satisfied with leaving the work alone and its immensely complex textual history offers a fascinating indication of his approach to an individual composition. With others, however, we are on safer ground. A revival of the extraordinary 1759 Solomon, for example, in which the work’s original shape has undergone a truly Procrustean revision (it opens with the judgement scene, excising practically the entire first act) would simply be an exercise in antiquarian perversity and modern performance has rightly returned us to the 1749 text.
Whatever additions were made cannot, of course, have been Handel’s own, though he must certainly have authorized them, and it was in the crucial capacity of intermediary between the blind composer and his audience that the talents of John Christopher Smith came fully into play. The new numbers, including such pieces as ‘Wise men flatt’ring’, initially designed for a 1758 Belshazzar but later coming to rest in Judas Maccabaeus, and ‘Lost in anguish, quite despairing’ for the 1755 Theodora, were derived from earlier Handel works on which Smith set his own imprint, that of a musician more closely in touch with newer mannerisms but far more limited in the actual extent of his gifts. It is quite easy, simply by listening to this music, to know that what we are in fact hearing is not quite all by Handel himself, and nothing more blatantly proclaims this than The Triumph of Time and Truth, the third and last incarnation of Il Trionfo del Tempo e della Verità, produced as a novelty in the Covent Garden season of 1757 and revived the following year.
The Triumph is fascinating for several reasons. On one level it develops the tendency of Smith and Handel in reworking earlier material to concentrate on music from the Italian years, which Londoners were unlikely to know. On another, though its ad hoc quality recalls Deborah and The Occasional Oratorio, it noticeably lacks the sense of homogeneous control which, whatever their faults, permeates those two works. Most important of all, it provides one of the clearest illustrations in all music of the fact that, however powerful the modern arguments in favour of vernacular words for local audiences, the sound and syntax of an original text dictate the composer’s disposition of melody, harmony and phrase lengths in communicating his awareness of its meaning to the listener. Handel wrote extensively in two modern languages (his German compositions are few in number) and the tones and rhythms of Italian and English ordained distinctive
idioms. Except in one or two isolated cases, such as ‘La mia sorte fortunata’ in Agrippina, pressed comfortably into service as ‘Freedom now once more possessing’ in Jephtha, the Italian airs do not easily carry English texts and the awkwardness of Morell’s words in conjunction with the vocal lines of Il Trionfo is manifest throughout. Together with Smith’s well-grounded but earthbound muse and the additional numbers from the 1707 and 1737 versions, The Triumph of Time and Truth, however engaging, represents the reductio ad absurdum of the Baroque synthetic principle, a pasticcio in the fullest sense of the word. Mrs Delany, whose instinct was generally right, told her sister ‘it did not please me as usual’.
Judas and Messiah wound up a successful season, at the end of which Handel was able to bank the impressive sum of £1,200, evidence that the oratorios were rather belatedly finding their market. Elsewhere in London their commercial bullishness was being exploited: the New Theatre in the Haymarket presented Acis and Galatea for the benefit of child prodigy Jonathan Snow, probably the son of Handel’s trumpet soloist Valentine, and two months later the evergreen serenata featured again, this time at Ranelagh House, ‘for the Benefit of the Marine Society, towards cloathing Men and Boys for the Sea to go on Board his Majesty’s Ships . . . Tea, Coffee, &c. included as usual.’ The latter performance was conducted by Stanley, also at the keyboard for a Samson evening at the Great Room in Dean Street, Soho, for Frasi’s benefit. Despite the high fees she commanded (six guineas for a Foundling Messiah) the soprano’s debts were a continuing problem and ultimately forced her to flee the country.
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