by Will Durant
Again in excelsis, Handel bought a house in London (1723) and became a British citizen (1727). He continued till 1728 the operatic war. He combed history for subjects, and put Flavius, Caesar, Tamerlane, Scipio, Alexander, and Richard I on the stage; Bononcini countered with Astyanax, Erminia, Pharnaces, and Calpurnia; a third composer, Ariosti, set Coriolanus, Vespasian, Artaxerxes, and Darius to music; never had history been so harmonious. In 1726 the triune conflict took on added fire with the arrival of Faustina Bordoni, a mezzo-soprano who had already overcome Venice, Naples, and Vienna. She had not the tender and dulcet tones of Cuzzoni, but her voice was seconded by her face, her figure, and her grace. In Alessandro (May 5, 1726) Handel brought the two divas together, gave them the same number of solos, and carefully balanced them in a duet. For some evenings the audience applauded them both; then it divided; one part hissed while the other applauded; a new dimension was added to the tuneful war. On June 6, 1727, when the rival prime donne sang in Bononcini’s Astianatte, the supporters of Cuzzoni broke out in a disgraceful pandemonium of hisses, boos, and roars when Bordoni tried to sing. A fight flared up in the pit and spread to the stage; the divas joined in it and tore at each other’s hair; spectators joyfully smashed the scenery—all in the presence of the humiliated Caroline, Princess of Wales.
This reductio ad absurdum might of itself have killed Italian opera in England. The coup de grâce was struck by one of the gentlest spirits in London. On January 29, 1728, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, John Gay presented The Beggar’s Opera. We have described its jolly, witty, ribald lyrics, but only those who have heard them sung to the music that Johann Pepusch composed or borrowed for them can understand why the theatergoing public turned almost en masse from Handel, Bononcini, and Ariosti to Pepusch, Polly, and Gay. Night after night for nine weeks The Beggar’s Opera played to full houses, while the sirens and eunuchs at His Majesty’s Theatre sang to empty seats. Moreover, Gay had satirized Italian opera; he had made fun of the silly plots, the coloratura trills and ornaments of sopranos of either sex; he had taken thieves, beggars, and prostitutes as his dramatis personae instead of kings, nobles, virgins, and queens; and he offered English ballads as better songs than Italian arias. The public was delighted with words that it could understand, especially if the words were a bit risqué. Handel came back with more operas—Siroe and Tolomeo, Re (d’Egitto (1728); they had fine moments but paid no bills. On June 5 the Royal Academy of Music declared bankruptcy and expired.
Handel did not admit defeat. Deserted by the nobles, who blamed him for their losses, he formed with Heidegger (June, 1728) the “New Academy of Music,” put into it ten thousand pounds—nearly all his savings—and received from the new King, George II, a pledge of a thousand a year in support. In February he set out on another Continental tour to recruit new talent, for Cuzzoni, Bordoni, Senesino, Nicolini, and Boschi had deserted his sinking ship and were trilling Venice. In their place Handel engaged new chanticleers and nightingales: Antonio Bernacchi, a male soprano, Annibale Fabri, tenor, Anna Maria Strada del Pò, soprano. On his way back he stopped to see his mother for the last time. She was now seventy-nine, blind and almost paralyzed. While he was in Halle he was visited by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who brought him an invitation to visit Leipzig, where the Passion according to St. Matthew had just received its first performance. Handel had to refuse. He had barely heard of Johann Sebastian Bach, and never dreamed that this man’s fame would one day eclipse his own. He hurried back to London, picking up on the way the Hamburg basso Johann Riemenschneider.
The new cast appeared in Lotario on December 2, 1729, without success. He tried again on February 24 with Partenope, without success. Bernacchi and Riemenschneider were restored to the Continent; Senesino was recalled from Italy; with him and Strada del Pò, and a libretto by Metastasio, Handel’s Poro— on which he had lavished some of his most moving arias—caught the ear of London (February 2, 1731). His Majesty’s Theatre filled again. Two further operas, Ezio and Sosarme, were favorably received.
But the struggle to keep an English audience with Italian opera was becoming ever more arduous; it appeared now to be a blind alley, in which physical and financial exhaustion was always around the corner. Handel had conquered England, but now England was apparently conquering him. His operas were too much alike, and were bound to wear thin. They were exalted by magnificent arias; but these were only tenuously related to the plot, they were in an unintelligible, however mellifluous, language, and many of them were composed for male sopranos, who were increasingly hard to find. Rigid rules and artistic jealousy governed the distribution of arias, and added to the artificiality of the tale. If Handel had continued on this Italian line he would hardly be remembered today. A series of accidents jolted him off his beaten track, and turned him into the field where he was to remain, even to our time, unsurpassed.
3. Defeat
On February 23, 1732, at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, Bernard Gates, to celebrate the composer’s forty-seventh birthday, gave a private production of Handel’s Esther, an Oratorio. It drew so profitable an audience that Gates repeated it twice—once for a private group, then (April 20) for the public; this was the first public performance of an oratorio in England. Princess Anne suggested that Esther should be presented at His Majesty’s Theatre with costumes, scenery, and action; but the bishop of London protested against turning the Bible into opera. Handel made now one of the pivotal decisions of his career. He announced that he would produce The Sacred Story of Esther as “an Oratorio in English” at the Haymarket theater on May 2, but added that there would be “no action on the stage,” and that the music was “to be disposed after the Manner of the Coronation Service”; so he distinguished oratorio from opera. He provided his own chorus and orchestra, and taught La Strada and other Italians to sing their solos in English. The royal family attended, and Esther bore five repetitions in its first month.
Another oratorio, Acts and Galatea (June 10), failed to please, and Handel turned back to opera. Orlando (January 27, 1733) had a good run; even so, the partnership with Heidegger faced bankruptcy. When Handel produced his third oratorio, Deborah (March 17), he tried to regain solvency by doubling the price of admission; an anonymous letter to The Craftsman denounced this measure, and called for a revolt against the domination of London’s music by the “insolent, … imperious, and extravagant Mr. Hendel.”53 As Handel had won the patronage of the King, he automatically lost the good will of Frederick, Prince of Wales, son and foe of George II. Handel, whose manners often yielded to his temper, made the mistake of offending Frederick’s drawing master, Joseph Goupy; Goupy took revenge by drawing a caricature of the composer as a monstrous glutton with the snout of a boar; copies of this were circulated through London, and added to Handel’s misery. In the spring of 1733 the Prince of Wales encouraged his courtiers to form a rival company, the “Opera of the Nobility.” It brought from Naples the most famous singing teacher of the age, Niccolò Porpora; lured Senesino from Handel and Cuzzoni from Italy; and on December 29, at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, it produced Porpora’s Arianna with great acclaim. Handel met this new challenge with an opera on a defiantly similar theme, Arianna in Creta January 26, 1734); it too was well received. But at the end of the season his contract with Heidegger expired; Heidegger leased His Majesty’s Theatre to the Opera of the Nobility; and Handel moved his company to John Rich’s Covent Garden Theatre.
Porpora scored by calling upon the world’s most renowned castrato, Carlo Broschi, known to all Europe as “Farinelli.” On this man’s singing we may dilate when we meet him in his native Bologna; here it need hardly be said that when (October 29) he joined Senesino and Cuzzoni in Porpora’s Artaserse it was an event in the music history of England; the opera was repeated forty times during Farinelli’s three-year stay. To compete with it Handel offered Ariodante (January 8, 1735), one of his finest operas, uniquely rich in its instrumental music; it earned ten performances in two months, and promised to make ends meet.
But when Porpora produced Polifemo (February 1) with Farinelli in the leading role, the King, the Queen, and the court could not stay away; its run exceeded that of Artaserse, while Handel’s Alcina (April 16) was soon playing to empty seats—though a suite from its score still appears on programs today. For half a year Handel retired from the battlefield to nurse his rheumatic pains with the waters of Tunbridge Wells.
On February 19, 1736, he returned to Covent Garden with an oratorio set to Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast.” A contemporary reported that the capacity audience of thirteen hundred received the oratorio with applause “such as had seldom been heard in London”;54 Handel was comforted with receipts of £450; but though he gave a stirring organ recital in the intermission the ode was too slight to bear more than four repetitions; and the desperate composer-impresario-conductor-virtuoso turned again to opera. On May 12 he offered Atalanta as a pastoral play celebrating the marriage of the Prince of Wales. He had summoned from Italy a new castrato, Gizziello (Gioacchino Conti), for the soprano role, and had distinguished the part with an aria, “Care selve,” which is one of the most lovely and enduring of his songs. Frederick was so pleased that he transferred his patronage from Porpora’s company to Handel’s; but this victory was made sorrowful when the King, hearing of his son’s move, canceled his annual subscription of a thousand pounds to Handel’s enterprise.
Porpora gave up the battle in the spring of 1736. Handel filled his theater by alternating operas with oratorios, and adding to the cast of Giustino (February 16, 1737) “bears, fantastic animals, and dragons vomiting fire.”55 But the strain of his diverse responsibilities broke him down. In April he suffered a nervous collapse, and a stroke that for a time paralyzed, his right arm. On May 18 he staged Berenice, the last of the operas that he wrote for his company. He closed his theater on June 1, owing many debts, and vowing to pay them all in full; he did. Ten days later the rival Opera of the Nobility disbanded, owing twelve thousand pounds. The great age of opera in England was over.
Handel’s health was among the ruins. Rheumatism in his muscles, arthritis in his bones, gout in his extremities were capped in the summer of 1737 with a passing attack of insanity.56 He left England to take the waters at Aachen. There, reported Sir John Hawkins,
he submitted to such sweats, excited by the vapor baths, as astonished everyone. After a few essays of this kind, during which spirits seemed to rise rather than sink under an excessive perspiration, his disorder left him; and a few hours after … he went to the great church of the city, and got to the organ, on which he played in such a manner that men imputed his cure to a miracle.57
In November he returned to London, to solvency and honors. Heidegger had again engaged His Majesty’s Theatre. He paid Handel a thousand pounds for two new operas; one of them, Serse (April 15, 1738) contained the famous “Largo,” “Ombra mai fù.” The lessee of Vauxhall Gardens paid Roubillac three hundred pounds for a statue showing the composer strumming a lyre; on May 2 this figure, ungainly in pose and stupid in expression, was unveiled in the Gardens with a musical entertainment. More pleasing to Handel must have been the benefit tendered him on March 28, bringing over a thousand pounds in receipts. Handel now paid off the more urgent of his creditors, one of whom was threatening to put him in the debtors’ jail. Despite all honors, he was near the end of his financial rope. He could no longer look to Heidegger, who announced (May 24) that he had not received sufficient subscriptions to warrant his producing operas in 17 38–39. Without a commission and without a company, Handel, aged fifty-three and shaken with ailments, entered upon his greatest period.
4. The Oratorios
This relatively modern form had grown out of medieval chorales representing events in Biblical history or the lives of the saints. St. Philip Neri had given the form its name by favoring it as a means of devotion and religious instruction in the oratorio, or prayer chapel, of the Fathers of the Oratory in Rome. Giacomo Carissimi and his pupil Alessandro Scarlatti developed the oratorio in Italy; Heinrich Schütz brought it from Italy into Germany; Reinhard Keiser raised the genre to high excellence before his death (1739). This was the heritage that in 1741 culminated in Handel’s Messiah.
Part of Handel’s success came from his adaptation of the form to English taste. He continued to choose the subjects of his oratorios from the Bible, but he gave them, now and then, a secular interest, as with the love theme in Joseph and His Brethren and in Jephtha; he emphasized the dramatic rather than the religious character, as in Saul and Israel in Egypt; and he used an entirely English text, only partly Biblical. It was in good part religious music, but it was independent of churches and liturgy; it was performed on a stage under secular auspices. Moreover, Handel used Biblical themes to symbolize English history: “Israel” stood for England; the Great Rebellion of 1642 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 could be heard in the struggle of the Jews for liberation from Egyptian (Stuart) bondage and Hellenistic (Gallic) domination; the Chosen People was really the English nation, and the God of Israel was the same who had led the English people through trial to victory. Like the Puritans, Handel thought of God as the mighty Jehovah of the Old Testament, not as the forgiving Father of the New.58 England felt this, and responded proudly to Handel’s oratorios.
The ascent to the Messiah began with Saul, produced at His Majesty’s Theatre January 16, 1739. “The solemn and majestic Dead March would alone immortalize this work.”59 But the audience was not accustomed to the oratorio form; Saul could sustain only six performances. With unbelievable energy Handel composed and presented (April 4) another masterwork, Israel in Egypt. Here he made the chorus the hero, the voice of a nation in birth, and wrote what many consider his supreme music.60 It proved too vast and heavy for the current appetite, and Handel finished this historic season with new debts.
On October 23, 1739, England plunged into war with Spain for Jenkins’ ear. Amid the turmoil Handel hired a small theater, and on the feast of the patron saint of musicians he offered his setting of Dryden’s “Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day” (November 22, 1739). Even in the cold and chaos of that wintry night London could not resist the bright melodious overture, the ethereal soprano aria in the third stanza, or the “soft complaining flute” and “warbling lute” in the fifth; while the “double double double beat of the thund’ring drum” accorded with the spirit of war that was rumbling through the streets. Handel took heart again, and tried an opera, Imeneo (1740), which failed; he tried another, Deidamia (1741); it too failed; and the tired giant retired for almost two years from the London musical scene.
These two years were his finest. On August 22, 1741, he began to compose the Messiah. The text was adapted by Charles Jennens from the books of Job, Psalms, Isaiah, Lamentations, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi in the Old Testament, and, in the New, the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, the Epistles of Paul, and the Book of Revelation. The score was completed in twenty-three days; in some of these, he told a friend, “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God himself.”61 Having no early prospect of finding an audience for it, he went on to write another major oratorio, Samson, based on the Samson Agonistes of Milton. At an unknown date during these ecstasies he received an invitation to present some of his works in Dublin. The proposal seemed to come from an appreciative Providence; actually it came from William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
He reached Dublin November 17, 1741. He engaged the best singers he could find, including Susannah Maria Cibber, the accomplished daughter of Thomas Arne. Several charitable organizations arranged six concerts for him; these were so successful that a second series was presented. On March 27, 1742, two Dublin periodicals carried an announcement that
for the relief of the Prisoners in the several Gaols, and for the support of Mercer’s Hospital, … on Monday the 12th of April, will be performed, at the Musick Hall in Fishamble-street, Mr. Hendel’s new Grand Oratorio, called the Messiah, in which the Gentlemen of the Choir of both cathedral
s will assist, with some Concertos on the Organ by Mr. Hendel.62
Tickets were sold also for the rehearsal on April 8, which Faulkner’s Journal reported as “performed so well that it … was allowed by the greatest Judges to be the finest Composition of Musick that ever was heard.” To this was added a notice postponing the Monday performance to Tuesday, and requesting the ladies “please to come without Hoops, as it will greatly increase the Charity, by making room for more Company.” A later item requested the men to come without their swords. In these ways the seating capacity of the Music Hall was raised from six hundred to seven hundred seats.
At last, on April 13, 1742, the most famous of all major musical compositions was presented. On April 17 three Dublin papers carried an identical review:
On Tuesday last Mr. Hendel’s Sacred Grand Oratorio, the Messiah, was performed.… The best Judges allowed it to be the most finished piece of musick. Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crowded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestic and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear. It is but justice to Mr. Hendel that the world should know he generously gave the money arising from this Grand Performance to be equally shared by the Society of relieving Prisoners, the Charitable Infirmary, and Mercer’s Hospital, for which they will ever gratefully remember his Name.63
The Messiah was repeated in Dublin on June 3. It has been repeated a thousand times since; yet who has yet grown weary of those muted or majestic arias, with their subdued and gracious accompaniments—“He Shall Feed His Flock,” “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” “He Shall Be Exalted,” “He Was Despised and Rejected”? When, at the Dublin première, Mrs. Cibber sang this last air, an Anglican clergyman cried out from the audience, “Woman, for this thy sins be forgiven thee!” All the depth and fervor of religious hope, all the tenderness of pious song, all the art and feeling of the composer came together to make these arias the supreme moments in modern music.