Handel

by Handel- The Man

  Another disillusioned encounter with Belshazzar was that of Igor Stravinsky as an adolescent in St Petersburg at the turn of the century. ‘The music relies again and again on the same fugato exposition, the same obvious semicircle of keys, the same small harmonic compass; and when a piece begins with a more interesting chromatic subject, Handel consistently fails to develop and exploit it as soon as all the voices are in. Regularity, harmonic and otherwise, rules every episode . . . Handel’s inventions are exterior; he can draw from inexhaustible reservoirs of allegros and largos, but he cannot pursue a musical idea through an intensifying degree of development.’ Later he was to find Theodora ‘beautiful and boring. Too many pieces finish too long after the end’, and his judgement was ultimately destined to the facile summing-up: ‘Handel was the commercial composer of his time, Bach the inward one.’

  Such remarks say less about Handel than about the curious limitations of Stravinsky’s musical aesthetic. Similar criticism was to be voiced by Schoenberg, who offered the most eloquent evidence of a total failure to appreciate the composer’s methods and styles in his grotesque arrangement of the Concerto Grosso Opus 6 no. 7, published in 1933. He told Berg simply that ‘. . . it will be a very good piece, and I can say that it is not because of Handel’. No, indeed, simply for the reason that the delicacy and deftness of the original sink beneath the porridge and molasses of a treatment that sounds more like a malicious parody of the Baroque manner than a serious attempt at elaboration. Handel is here transformed into a neurasthenic Viennese Schlamper, and the piece, whatever its intrinsic technical interest, adds little lustre to an already well-established reputation.

  The inter-war years witnessed the nadir of Handel’s fortunes. During the 1920s Oskar Hagen at Göttingen had undertaken several of the earliest modern revivals of the operas, starting with Rodelinda. Fidelity to the text and the cultivation of a suitable performing style were scarcely conceivable during an age in which ‘pre-classical’ music was being gradually rediscovered with the aid of Wanda Landowska’s noble executions of Bach and Nadia Boulanger gallantly proposing Monteverdi with a piano continuo. Yet whereas Landowska and Boulanger treated their material with imaginative respect, Hagen’s attitude to Handel was cavalier in the extreme. The operas were not only to be hacked about, but rewritten in such a way as to destroy the fundamental balance of sonorities upon which real enjoyment of them depends. Teutonic imaginations could not embrace the idea of male roles in soprano registers and since Weimar Germany, whatever its other grotesqueries, was not forthcoming with castrati, down went Giulio Cesare, Bertarido and Serse to the achievement of a wholesome manliness and the effective emasculation of their musical characters. There was no ornament, and tempo markings were interpreted in the sluggish ecclesiastical fashion of the day. The English critic who observed of Giulio Cesare at Göttingen in 1923 that ‘a certain monotony was felt, produced perhaps by the everlasting, never changing beauty of the arias. The soul of man has undergone some changes since the time of Handel,’ may indeed be pardoned.

  Under the Nazis matters Handelian reached a level of lunacy in obsessive efforts to make the oratorios judenrein. It is a scarcely credible fact that Judas Maccabaeus was thus transmuted into Wilhelm, von Nassau and Israel in Egypt into Mongolensturm: Handel himself, grateful as he always was for Jewish patronage of his performances, must have turned in his grave. German scholars, meanwhile, continued their search for the essentially Germanic in the composer’s work, and the egregious Ribbentrop, in an address to the university of Oxford in 1939, depicted Handel in the unmistakable colours of National Socialism. The speech took place in the Sheldonian Theatre which, it was probably inopportune to remind the Nazi ambassador, had once echoed to the devout Judaic solemnities featured in Athalia.

  In England meanwhile attempts to secure the Brook Street house for a Handel museum attracted scant interest and in this connexion an acrimonious correspondence with Major Benton Fletcher, collector of the antique musical instruments at Fenton House, Hampstead, can have done little credit to Herbert Westerby, secretary to the proposed fund. The Musical Times drily commented of the BBC’s 1937 Handel revival concert that the hall was scarcely half full and that Alexander’s Feast had little to say to a generation uninterested in choral singing for its own sake. Conductors continued the heartless process of reorchestration – Henry Wood overhauled Judas Maccabaeus, Beecham re-orchestrated Solomon and Malcolm Sargent brass-plated Israel in Egypt for the massed choirs of Huddersfield.

  Now and then an ember or two crackled up: staged performances of the oratorios were given by the enterprising Cambridge University Music Society and the Falmouth Opera Singers, and in March 1933 Rinaldo was performed by girl students of the Hammersmith Day Continuation School under the direction of Miss Daunt. ‘Such a performance’, wrote a kindly critic, ‘is none the worse for being somewhat unsophisticated. One entered into the spirit of the thing, and shared the performers’ obvious delight in music and action. In spirit we all “prowlered up and down a bit”, and it was a jolly good show.’

  The admirable Miss Daunt was a lone pioneer in an English revival of the operas, which only really got going in the post-war years. Much is surely owing, in this connexion, to the interest already fostered in Handel as an operatic master by Edward J. Dent, whose scholarly enthusiasm had done so much to broaden awareness not merely of Handel but of the Baroque musical legacy in general. During the 1950s and 1960s, for example, the Handel Opera Society showed that his faith had been fully justified, presenting staged performances both of opera and oratorio, notable for their encouragement of promising young singers. Memorably enjoyable during the same period was the series given under the direction of Alan and Frances Kitching at Abingdon and Henley on a heroically limited budget. Appropriate costume and gesture brought the spectator closer to appreciating the essential rhetoric of the works themselves, and the gusto of these performances remains unforgettable. Conviction was, alas, not enough to balance the accounts and in an atmosphere further complicated by acrimony the splendid undertaking folded after the first revival of Lotario for over two centuries.

  One by one the best of the operas have found their way back into the theatre. If East Germany could still, in 1960, issue a practical edition of Poro with the hero unblushingly assigned to the bass register and the names of the two heroines altered with ethno-archaeological pedantry from Cleofide and Erissena to Mahamaya and Nimbavati, there was the compensation of performances such as that of Giulio Cesare given privately at Birmingham University’s Barber Institute in 1977, offering the work complete and following the relatively novel practice which restored the overlap of vocal and continuo lines in the closing cadences of the recitative. Singers in their turn began to study a style more suitable to the cantilena of Baroque lyric drama and the rise of a new breed of countertenor, though it might hardly supply an authentic Senesino or Caffarelli, at any rate offered an adequate solution to the problem of matching roles to voices. As one twentieth-century musicologist somewhat wearily observed, ‘there is no humane answer to the castrato problem’, but modern compromises have achieved some spectacular results.

  The gradual restoration of Handel’s operas to that theatrical domain where they belong has been, and continues to be, a controversial process. Few are likely to pine for the sort of production given Giulio Cesare at the New York City Opera in 1964, when the title role (in a version largely designed as a showcase for the prima donna Beverly Sills as Cleopatra) was sung by a bass. Yet both this and the 1962 Covent Garden Alcina, ‘sensitively re-ordered’ by its director Franco Zeffirelli so as to accommodate the vocal pyrotechnics of Joan Sutherland, were important in focusing attention on their composer from a public nurtured on works like Aida, La Bohème and Der Rosenkavalier. The classical recording industry, on an all too brief late-twentieth-century roll, played its own part in rediscovering Handel as a theatrical master. In an age when serious attempts were being made to recover an appropriate performance style for Baroque music,
it was inevitable that a new generation of singers, instrumentalists and conductors would turn to the incalculable treasury contained in his opera scores. The result has been that in the twenty-year period since the 1985 tercentenary celebrations of Handel’s birth, thirty-nine out of his forty-six existing stage works, including the third act of Muzio Scevola and at least one of his seven pasticci, have appeared in a commercial recording, and that for fourteen of these there is often more than one version available.

  The sea change in Handel’s operatic fortunes seems to have taken place in the wake of the very same tercentennial mentioned above. A shift in sensibility not easily explicable in purely musical terms, but certainly encouraged by the pervasive impact of vocal and instrumental styles and sonorities which owed little to traditional formation in the context of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century opera repertoire, succeeded in returning works like Serse, Rodelinda and Agrippina to a theatrical mainstream. At the same time attention turned to the oratorios and it became possible to hear such unfamiliar pieces as Deborah, The Occasional Oratorio and Alexander Balus in professional performances which made a convincing case for each of them. New audiences were found, meanwhile, for L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato through its incarnation as an enchantingly lyrical and humorous ballet devised by the American choreographer Mark Morris. Most remarkable of all was the rediscovery, in the unlikely context of the 1995 opera season at Glyndebourne, of that Cinderella among Handel oratorios Theodora. Not everyone liked Peter Sellars’s drastic rethink of the work as a modern political drama, whose penultimate scene involved the heroine and her Didymus singing ‘Streams of pleasure’ on their way to the electric chair, but the impact on Glyndebourne audiences of the music’s sombre beauty suggested that the time had come at last for both Theodora and, in a broader and more meaningful sense, for Handel himself.

  Other works had benefited from this sudden receptivity to the composer’s unique voice. Even if the idea of a 1707 ‘Carmelite Vespers’ was subsequently shown to have been an ignis fatuus, it served to remind us that behind the shock and awe of Dixit Dominus lie comparable riches among Handel’s Italian church music and early oratorios. Their lineal descendant Messiah had been memorably revitalized, almost as if in answer to Bernard Shaw’s rage against the ‘multitudinous dullness’ of traditional interpretations, in the 1966 recording by Charles Mackerras (whose earlier performance of the Fireworks Music using the original wind and brass specifications had already achieved classic status). Using carefully reduced choral and orchestral forces, as well as several unfamiliar textual variants, the recording revealed the sinew, momentum and resourcefulness at the heart of the oratorio. A similar experience was vouchsafed by Christopher Hogwood in his 1980 reconstruction of the 1754 Foundling Hospital performance, presenting us with something which at times sounded almost like a newly discovered work.

  That there can never be any such thing as a canonical Messiah text embodies what many writers on music, and even more who listen to it, identify as a quintessential problem regarding Handel, that of his elusiveness. The modern biographer, expected to lay bare every detail of an artist’s private life and its bearing on his work, meets a continued challenge in a man whose intimate friends were few in number and left no personal records of him beyond a handful of anecdotes. As a composer Handel was unorthodox, both in certain of his working methods and practices, and in the pursuit of his professional goals. The inevitable comparison between him and Johann Sebastian Bach, his exact contemporary, has traditionally been to the advantage of the latter, represented as a semi-divine embodiment of the perfect musician, imbued with a spiritual profundity in which Handel, according to the same invidious parallel, falls short. Setting aside the doubtful value of such a contrast between two artists so widely different in character, experience and musical discourse, we have the right to ask those who seek to belittle Handel in this way how much of his work they actually know. To Theodor Adorno’s dictum, more obtuse than lapidary, that ‘Handel is not Bach’, the retort should be ‘Precisely’. He is not a writer for the textbook, a fount of flawless technical example, or in any sense an ideal musical visionary, intellectual and artisan, like the kapellmeister of the Leipzig Thomaskirche. Matthew Arnold’s famous sonnet on Shakespeare begins with the line ‘Others abide our question: thou art free’ and the same applies to Handel, in his untrammelled universality the most Shakespearian of composers. Canny, venturesome, competitive and more than a little unscrupulous, he was the first great musician to harness shrewd entrepreneurship to the public promotion of his work. One modern Handel scholar indeed calls him ‘an active opportunist who ignored or denied the affiliations of his birth and upbringing in order to advance his career and find an outlet commensurate with his talent’.

  Does this hucksterish, almost low-life quality diminish his artistic stature? No more, surely, than his studied distance from what was going on around him in the European musical culture of his day. Always ready to borrow material from younger composers when it suited him, he never felt the need for a complete stylistic makeover in order to blend in with them. A marginal figure in the historical development of opera, Handel might be considered more significant as a writer of oratorio, essentially creating the English form of the genre, yet even here he neither set a fashion nor established a school. As for his approach to instrumental composition, with the obvious exception of Opus 6 this seems more often governed by expediency and the force of circumstance than by any interest in creating a benchmark for other masters in the field through the publication of carefully prepared sets of concertos and suites. Nurtured by a variety of different traditions, he managed to remain semi-detached from them, never wholeheartedly espousing a German, French, Italian or English musical idiom but nonchalantly fluent in each, as he was in the respective languages they accompanied.

  Unable to pigeonhole Handel satisfactorily, critical musicology has seldom found it easy to explain the way his music works or its power to convince and inspire us with the help of what are sometimes the very simplest of gestures and resources. Performers, in this respect, are often more articulate than critics in identifying his command of effect, whether as an inexhaustible melodist, an absolute master of vocal writing or a dramatist whose grasp of character, situation and emotional predicament never fails. Epic and painterly, his gift for narrative is as potent in works like Messiah or Alexander’s Feast as in the grand episodic sequences of Saul, Belshazzar and Jephtha. He is passionately absorbed with who we are and how we stand in relation to one another or to the powers we worship, heavenly and earthly. From the humane wisdom of this perspective springs that warmth and immediacy of personal engagement with which Handel binds audiences to him. His music gives us a reason for existence.

  Notes

  Unless otherwise indicated, full details of works cited are included in the bibliography.

  1 The Liberal Arts

  1 Georg Händel medical practitioner Friedlaender: ‘Einiger archivalische Nachrichten über Georg Friedr. Händel und Seine Familie’

  Rudloff’s operation details and illustration in Dreyhaupt: Pagus Neletici et Nudzici

  2 Georg Händel’s career J.O. Opel: Mitteilungen zur Geschichte der Familie des Tonkünstlers Handel &c, from Neue Mitteilungen aus dem Gebiete historisch-antiquarischer Forschungen, Halle, 1885

  3 She always took pains Piechocki: ‘Die Familie Handel’

  4 From his very childhood Mainwaring p. 2

  5 Halle details from Günter Thomas: ‘Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow’

  6 Gymnasium curriculum Cambridge Companion to Handel p. 13

  7 Handel’s journey to Weissenfels Mainwaring op. cit. pp.2–3

  9 Mourning poem quoted in Deutsch pp. 6–7

  Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow Thomas op. cit. See also Bernd Baselt: ‘Handel and his Central German Background’ in Hicks & Sadie eds. Handel Tercentenary Collection pp. 43–60

  10 Handel as cathedral organist Deutsch p. 9

  11 Handel and the King of Prus
sia Mainwaring pp. 22–23

  12 Addison on Hamburg Letters ed. Graham, 1941 p. 146

  Hamburg opera Wolff: Die Barockoper in Hamburg

  14 Johann Mattheson Beekman C. Cannon: Johann Mattheson, Spectator in Music. See also Deutsch op. cit. p. 14

  16 Handel to Mattheson Deutsch pp. 11–12

  20 How is a musician ibid p. 16

  2 Caro Sassone

  22 Ferdinando de’ Medici Mario Fabbri: Alessandro Scarlatti e il Principe Ferdinando de’ Medici, Florence, 1961 pp. 19–21, 31

  25 Scarlatti on Corelli Burney: A General History of Music vol. 2 p. 443

  28 Moral cantatas Carolyn Gianturco: ‘Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno’

  Cardinal Pamphilj Lina Montalto: Un Mecenate in Roma barrocca