The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  On August 13, replenished in spirit and purse, Handel left Dublin, resolved to conquer England again. He must have been comforted to find that Pope, in the fourth book of The Dunciad (1742), had gone out of his way to praise him:

  Strong in new arms, lo! giant Handel stands,

  Like bold Briareus, with a hundred hands [the orchestra]:

  To stir, to rouse, to shake the soul he comes,

  And Jove’s own thunders follow Mars’s drums.

  So on February 18, 1743, at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, the rejuvenated composer presented his oratorio Samson. George II led London’s elite to the première; the lovely overture pleased everyone but Horace Walpole, who was resolved nil admirari; the noble aria “O God of Hosts” was almost of Messiahnic splendor; Samson, like Samson, “brought down the house.” But when, a month later (March 23), the Messiah itself was offered to London even the King, who then established a lasting custom by rising to his feet at the Hallelujah Chorus, could not lift the oratorio to acceptance. The clergy condemned the use of a theater for religious music; the nobility, still smarting from the failure of their opera company, stayed away. The Messiah was offered only three times in the next two years, then not again till 1749. In that year Handel, who was a philanthropist between bankruptcies, presented a handsome organ to the foundlings’ hospital so dear to his friend Hogarth; and on May 1, 1750, he gave the first of many annual performances of the Messiah for the benefit of those lucky unfortunates.

  On June 27, 1743, George II led his army to victory at Dettingen. When he returned to London the city greeted him with parades, illuminations, and music, and the Chapel Royal in the Palace of St. James resounded with the “Dettingen Te Deum” that Handel had composed for the occasion (November 27). It was a product of genius and scissors, for it contained passages pilfered from earlier and minor composers; but it was a miracle of agglutination. The King was pleased.

  Encouraged by royal smiles, Handel renewed his efforts to recapture the ear of London. On February 10, 1744, he presented another oratorio, Semele. It contained the exquisite song “Where’er You Walk,” which England and America still sing, but it could not exceed four performances. The nobles remained hostile; many titled ladies made a point of entertaining lavishly on the evenings scheduled for a concert by Handel; rowdies were hired to tear down his advertisements. On April 23, 1745, he canceled the eight concerts that he had announced; he closed his theater, and retired to Tunbridge Wells. Rumor had it that he was insane. “Poor Hendel,” wrote the current Earl of Shaftesbury (October 24), “looks a little better. I hope he will recover completely, though his mind has been entirely deranged.”64

  The rumor may have erred, for Handel, now sixty years old, responded with all his powers to an invitation from the Prince of Wales to commemorate the victory of the Prince’s younger brother, the Duke of Cumberland, over the Stuart forces at Culloden. Handel took as a symbolic subject Judas Maccabaeus’ triumph (166–161 B.C.) over the Hellenizing schemes of Antiochus IV. The new oratorio was so well received (April 1, 1747) that it bore five repetitions in its first season. The Jews of London, grateful to see one of their national heroes so nobly celebrated, helped to swell the attendance, enabling Handel to present the oratorio forty times before his death. Grateful for this new support, he took most of his oratorio subjects henceforth from Jewish legend or history: Alexander Balus, Joshua, Susanna, Solomon, Jephtha. By contrast Theodora, a Christian theme, drew so small an audience that Handel ruefully remarked, “There was room enough to dance.” Chesterfield left before the conclusion, excusing himself on the ground that he “did not wish to disturb the King in his privacy.”65

  5. Prometheus

  The oratorios are but one species of the genus Handel. His polymorphous spirit turned with almost spontaneous accord to any of a dozen musical forms. Songs that still touch the chords of sentiment, keyboard pieces of exquisite delicacy, sonatas, suites, quartets, concertos, operas, oratorios, ballet music, odes, pastorals, cantatas, hymns, anthems, Te Deums, Passions—almost everything but the nascent symphony is there, rivaling the profuse immensity of Beethoven or Bach. The Suites de Pièces pour le Clavecin sound today, on the harpsichord, like the voices of happy children still unacquainted with history. A second set of suites began with that prelude which Brahms frolicked with in “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel.”

  Just as he had taken the oratorio from Carissimi and Keiser and brought it to its peak, so Handel took from Torelli and Corelli the concerto grosso—for two or more solo or duo instruments with a chamber orchestra. In Opus 6 he left twelve such concerti grossi, pitting two violins and a violoncello against an ensemble of strings; some of them strike us as monotonous today, some come close to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. There are also, in Handel, delightful concertos for a single solo instrument—harpsichord, organ, violin, viola, oboe, or harp. Those for keyboards were performed by Handel himself in preludes or interludes. Sometimes he left place in the concerto scores for what we should now call a cadenza, wherein the performer could free his imagination and display his skill. Handel’s improvisations in such openings were the wonder of many days.

  In July, 1717, George I arranged a royal “progress” in decorated barges on the Thames. The Daily Courant of July 19, 1717, reveals the scene:

  On Wednesday evening at about eight the King took water at Whitehall in an open barge, wherein were also the Duchess of Newcastle, the Countess of Godolphin, Madam Kilmanseck, and the Earl of Orkney, and went up the river towards Chelsea. Many other barges with persons of quality attended, and so great a number of boats that the whole river in a manner was covered. A city company’s barge was employed for the music, wherein were fifty instruments of all sorts, who played all the way from Lambeth … the finest symphonies, composed express for the occasion by Mr. Hendel, which his Majesty liked so well that he caused it to be played over three times in going and returning.66

  This is the Water Music that is today the hardiest and most pleasant survivor of Handel’s instrumental compositions. Apparently there were originally twenty-one movements—too many for modern auditors lacking barges and hours; generally we hear only six. Some are a bit tiresome in their melodious wandering; but most of them are healthy, joyous, sparkling music, as if flowing from a fountain to make a lullaby for royal mistresses. The Water Music is the oldest piece in today’s orchestral repertoire.

  A full generation later, for a second George, Handel dignified another outdoor occasion. To celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle the government arranged a display of fireworks in the Green Park, and commissioned Handel to write the Royal Fireworks Music. When this was rehearsed in Vauxhall Gardens (April 21, 1749) twelve thousand persons paid the then considerable sum of two shillings each to hear it; so great was the congestion that traffic on the approach over London Bridge was held up for three hours—“probably the most stupendous tribute any composer ever received.”67 On April 27 half of London pushed its way into the Green Park; sixteen yards of its wall had to be torn down to let them enter in time. A “band” of a hundred musicians played Handel’s music, and fireworks sparkled in the sky. A building erected for the occasion caught fire; the crowd panicked; many persons were injured; two died. All that remained of the festivity was Handel’s music. Designed to commemorate a victorious war and to be heard at a distance, it is a blare of bravos and a din of drums, too noisy for an adagio ear; but one largo movement falls gratefully upon tired nerves.

  England at last came to love the old German who had striven so hard to be an Englishman. He had failed, but he had tried, even to swearing in English. London had learned to forgive his massive corpulence, his broad face and swelling cheeks, his bow legs and heavy gait, his velvet scarlet greatcoat, his gold-knobbed cane, his proud and haughty air; after all his battles this man had the right to look like a conqueror, or at least a lord. His manners were rough, he disciplined his musicians with love and rage; he scolded his audience for talking at rehearsals; he threatened d
ivas with violence. But he muffled his guns with humor. When Cuzzoni and Bordoni took to fisticuffs on the stage, he said calmly, “Let them fight it out”; and he accompanied their tantrums with a merry obbligato on the kettledrums.68 When a singer threatened to jump upon the harpsichord because Handel’s accompaniments attracted more attention than the singing, Handel asked him to name the date of this proposed performance, so that it might be advertised, for, he said, “more people will come to see you jump than to hear you sing.”69 His bon mots were as remarkable as Jonathan Swift’s, but one had to know four languages to enjoy them.

  In 1752 he began to lose his eyesight. While he was writing Jephtha his vision became so blurred that he had to stop. On the autograph manuscript in the British Museum are strange irregularities—“stems placed at some distance from the notes to which they belonged, and notes which had obviously lost their way.”70 At the foot of the page appears a line by the composer: “Have got so far, Wednesday, 13th February. Prevented from continuing because of my left eye.” Ten days later he wrote on the margin: “The 23rd February, am a little better. Resumed work.” Then he composed the music for the words “Our joy is lost in grief, … as day is lost in night.”71 On November 4 The General Advertiser reported: “Yesterday George Frederic Hendel, Esq., was couched [for cataract] by Wm. Brom-field, Esq., surgeon to her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales.” The operation seemed successful, but on January 27, 1753, a London newspaper announced that “Mr. Hendel has at length, unhappily, quite lost his sight.” Later reports indicate that he retained some vestiges of vision till his death.

  He continued composing and conducting for seven years more. In six weeks (February 23 to April 6, 1759) he gave two performances of Solomon, one of Samson, two of Judas Maccabaeus, three of the Messiah. But on leaving the theater after the Messiah of April 6 he fainted, and had to be carried to his home. Regaining consciousness, he asked for one more week of life; “I want to die on Good Friday, in the hope of rejoining the good God, my sweet Lord and Saviour, on the day of His Resurrection.”72 He added to his will a codicil bequeathing a thousand pounds to the Society for the Support of Decayed Musicians and Their Families, and substantial bequests to thirteen friends, and “to my maidservants each one year’s wages.” He died on Holy Saturday, April 14, 1759. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on April 20, before “the greatest Concourse of People of all Ranks ever seen upon such or indeed upon any other Occasion.”73

  He left an unparalleled quantity of music: forty-six operas, thirty-two oratorios, seventy overtures, seventy-one cantatas, twenty-six concerti grossi, eighteen organ concertos, and so much else that the whole fills a hundred bulky volumes, almost equaling the works of Bach and Beethoven combined. Some of it was repetition, and some of it was theft, for Handel plagiarized, without acknowledgment, from at least twenty-nine authors to help him meet a deadline;74 so the minuet in the overture to Samson was taken, so to say, notatim from Keiser’s opera Claudius.75

  It is difficult to estimate Handel, for only a small part of his oeuvre is offered to us today. The operas, except for some captivating arias, are beyond resurrection; they were adjusted to Italian modes that seem irrevocably gone; their extant scores are incomplete, and use symbols and abbreviations now largely unintelligible; they were written for orchestras of quite other constitution than ours, and for voices of a third sex quite different from the intermediate sexes of our time. The concertos remain, a happy hunting ground of forgotten treasures, and the Water Music, and the oratorios. But even the oratorios are “dated,” having been written for embattled Englishmen and grateful Jews; those massive choruses and proliferated vowels require a musicological stomach for their digestion—though we should be glad to hear Jephtha and Israel in Egypt again. Musicians tell us that in the neglected oratorios there is a solemn grandeur, a sublimity of feeling, a power of conception, expression, and drama, a variety and skill in compositional technique, never again reached in the literature of that form. The Messiah survives its repetitions and dismemberments partly because it enshrines the central doctrines of Christianity, dear even to those who have shed them, but chiefly because its profound chants and triumphal choruses make it, all in all, the greatest single composition in the history of music.

  England realized his greatness when he was gone. As the anniversary of his birth approached, the nobility, once hostile, joined with King and commoners to commemorate it with three days of his music. As his birth had fallen in 1684 by the English calendar, the first performance was given on May 26, 1784, in Westminster Abbey; the second and third on May 27 and 29. These having failed to meet the demand, two more were given in the Abbey on June 3 and 5. The singers numbered 274, the orchestra 251; now began the custom of making Handel overwhelmingly monumental. Similar immensities celebrated later Handel anniversaries, until in 1874 number of performers swelled to 3,500. Burney, who heard one of these enormities, thought that the quantity of sound had not injured the quality of the music.76 In any case these were the most massive commemorations that any musician has ever received. Now that they have subsided it may be possible to hear Handel’s music again.

  V. VOLTAIRE IN ENGLAND: 1726–28

  There was a young Frenchman, in the England of 1726, who was to prove far more important than Handel in the history of the eighteenth century. Voltaire touched English shores at Greenwich, near London, on May 10 or 11. His first impression was enthusiastic. It was the week of the Greenwich Fair; the Thames was almost covered with boats and stately sails; the King was coming downstream in a decorated barge, preceded by a band. On shore men and women moved proudly on prancing horses; on foot were scores of pretty girls, dressed for a holiday. Voltaire, thirty-two, was stirred by their graceful figures, demure modesty, and rosy cheeks. He forgot them when he reached London and found that the banker on whose funds he had a letter of exchange for twenty thousand francs had declared bankruptcy. He was rescued by Everard Falkener, a merchant whom he had met in France; for some months he stayed at this generous Briton’s estate at Wandsworth, a suburb of London. George I, hearing of Voltaire’s contretemps, sent him a hundred guineas.

  He had letters of introduction from Horatio Walpole, British ambassador to France, to many celebrities; sooner or later he met nearly everyone of any prominence in English letters or politics. He was received by Robert Walpole, prime minister; by the Duke of Newcastle; by Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough; by George Augustus and Caroline, Prince and Princess of Wales; and finally by the King, who gave him a valuable watch, which Voltaire sent as a peace offering to his father. He visited “mylord and my-lady Bolingbroke,” and “found their affection still the same.”77 In August he made a flying trip to France, still eager to fight Rohan, but probably to regulate his financial affairs. For three months he lived—part of the time with Swift—as guest of the third Earl of Peterborough. For another three months he enjoyed at Eastbury Manor the hospitality of Bubb Dodington, corrupt politician but kindly Maecenas to Fielding, Thomson, and Young. Voltaire met the two poets there, and read them with no profit. He set himself resolutely to learn the language; by the end of 1726 he was writing letters in English.78 For the first months he confined himself to circles where French was understood; but nearly all men and women of consequence in English letters or politics knew French. The notebooks that he now filled were written in either language, and show that he learned the wicked words first.

  He developed such an acquaintance with English literature as no Frenchman of note acquired again till Hippolyte Taine. He read Bolingbroke, but found the Viscount’s pen less brilliant than his tongue; however, he may have taken from Bolingbroke’s Idea of a Patriot King the belief that the best chance of social reform would be through an enlightened monarchy. He made his way through Swift’s distilled hatreds, learned from him, perhaps, some arts of satire, and pronounced him “infinitely superior to Rabelais.”79 He read Milton, and pounced at once upon the fact that Satan was the real hero of Paradise Lost.80 We have seen elsewhere his confused reactio
n to Shakespeare—admiration of the “amiable barbarian’s” eloquence, “pearls” of sublimity or tenderness in an “enormous dunghill” of farces and vulgarities.81 He imitated Julius Caesar in La Mort de César, and Othello in Zaire. So Gulliver’s Travels reappeared in Micromégas, and Pope’s Essay on Man in the Discours en vers sur l’homme.

  Soon after his arrival in England he went to see Pope. He was shocked by Pope’s deformity and sufferings, amazed by Pope’s sharpness of mind and phrase; he rated Pope’s Essay on Criticism above Boileau’s Art poétique.82 He visited the aging Congreve, and was piqued to find that the once great dramatist wished to be considered “not as an author but as a gentleman.”83 He learned with envy of the sinecures and pensions given to authors by English ministries before Walpole’s, and contrasted this with the fate of France’s leading poet, thrown into the Bastille for resenting a nobleman’s slur.

  From literature he passed to science, met members of the Royal Society, and began that study of Newton which would enable him later to replace Descartes with Newton in France. He was deeply impressed by the ceremonial funeral given to Newton by the elite of England, and noted how the Anglican clergy welcomed a scientist into Westminster Abbey. Though he had become a deist before visiting England—had learned the art of doubt from Rabelais, Montaigne, Gassendi, Fontenelle, and Bayle—he now derived corroboration from the deists of England—Toland, Woolston, Tindal, Chubb, Collins, Middleton, and Bolingbroke; later his library would be armed with their books. Stronger still was the influence of Locke, whom Voltaire praised as the first to make a realistic study of the mind. He observed that very few of these insistent heretics had been imprisoned for their views; he remarked the growth of religious toleration since 1689; he thought there was no religious bigotry or fanaticism in England; even the Quakers had subsided into comfortable businessmen. He visited one of them, and was pleased to be told that Pennsylvania was a utopia without classes, wars, or enemies.84