George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

  After the debacle of Nero (1705), Handel once more took stock, and his acts may once more seem aimless unless one considers his deliberate way of dealing with every phase of his life. Surprisingly enough, he resigned from the opera but stayed on in Hamburg, quickening the pace of his creative activity. Keiser’s successor commissioned him to write an opera, the memory of the eighteen or twenty performances of Almira having made him forget Nero. This new opera turned out to be an enormously sprawling affair that in the end had to be broken into two separate pieces named Florinda and Daphne. The unwieldy work must have caused all sorts of difficulties to the management, resulting in repeated postponements; the two operas were not produced until after Handel had left Hamburg; he never heard them, and the scores perished.

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  ABOUT HALFWAY BETWEEN his arrival in Hamburg in 1703 and his departure in 1706, Handel set to music the Passion According to St. John. There is so much ill-conceived speculation about this work that we must examine it in some detail.

  It is a mistake to see here either any wavering of his artistic intentions or even a return to tradition. On the contrary, there was a new trend in Germany (though familiar in Italy), in which opera composers also wrote oratorios and cantatas, the latter having become dramatic genres no longer exclusively intended for church use. This is attested to by the fact that Christian Postel, the author of the book of the Passion, was an opera librettist attached to the Hamburg theatre. As such Hamburg literature went, he was a relatively skilful man of letters (Chrysander modestly calls him “the German Metastasio,” and he is known to have had some influence on Klopstock); Keiser thought highly of him and set his texts by preference. As a matter of fact, it may well have been Keiser’s example that prompted the composition of the Passion, for the admired master was a successful oratorio composer.

  At the opening of the century the German cantata and oratorio were still largely a distinctly German genre and quite different either from what Handel ultimately created under the name of “oratorio,” or even from the German variety composed in the twenties and thirties by German masters already reconciled with the opera seria. By the century’s beginning the Passion was no longer a liturgical composition, a role it had originally filled in both the Catholic and the Lutheran rites; it had long since left the orbit of liturgical Gebrauchsmusik for the realm of quasi-independent dramatic art.

  The reading of the Gospel of the Passion of Our Lord, according to Matthew on Palm Sunday, Mark on Tuesday, Luke on Wednesday, and John on Good Friday, was an integral part of both liturgies during Holy Week. Even in its earliest form, when it was but a simple recitation with very few musical inflections, the Passion was dramatized, different types of voices being assigned for the dramatis personae. The designation of tenor for the role of the Evangelist, bass for that of Christ, and so on, with which we are familiar from the Passions of Bach, is a tradition of very long standing. By the 15th century the polyphonic Passion made its appearance, gradually supplanting the old monophonic variety, and the style employed was altogether within the spirit and technique of the motet. The attraction of the dramatic was so strong that even the old Gregorian Passion, which continued to live side by side with the polyphonic type throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, called on a many-voiced chorus in the turbae, the scenes representing the “multitude,” or “crowd.” But now the liturgical role of the musical setting of the Passion begins to diminish. Schütz opens the way for “free” Passion composition, and Theile (1673), with his arias and ritornels, definitely forsakes the liturgy. When Handel tried his hand at the genre, composers no longer dealt with Scripture but with a libretto fashioned on a scriptural subject.

  Handel knew all this literature. The motet-madrigal mixture combined with instrumental obbligatos he encountered in the works of Andreas Hammerschmidt (1611-1675), which were widely distributed and known. This fine composer was a great lyricist and a fastidious craftsman. His contemporaries attest the popularity of his works, which could be heard in the smallest village churches. He was indeed the most popular German church composer in the Middle Baroque and next to Schütz the most distinguished. But Hammerschmidt was a modern composer who exploited the affective implications of the text.

  There was still another kind of cantata (the oratorio being only an extended cantata or a string of cantatas even in Bach’s works) that Handel must have known intimately. Zachow, who had an independent mind and knew a great deal about Italian music, created a type of his own. He used scriptural texts in a distinctly dramatic manner, with recitatives and arias—da capo arias; the texture is often fugal, and obbligato instruments are given important roles. This was a far grander style than that of the German cantata of the closing decades of the 17th century and was not really matched until Bach came on the scene. Another composer who showed a similar bent was Johann Philipp Krieger, of whose approximately two thousand cantatas about sixty are extant. Krieger, the Weissenfels resident maestro, an opera composer, was more than conversant with the dramatic style, and he was, of course, well known to Handel, who was undoubtedly familiar with his historiae, of which we have a list from Krieger himself. Die Historia des Leidens und Sterbens unsers Herrn Jest Christi was presented in the Weissenfels palace chapel from 1685 onward, enjoying a reputation not unlike that of Messiah at the Foundling Hospital many years later. Finally, we must count upon the profound influence of Schütz, who, it should be remembered, used to be Kapellmeister in Weissenfels. Though it is impossible to ascertain whether Handel knew Schütz’s music, he could not have been unaware that the Halle order of service in his day still prescribed that the Resurrection be sung to Schütz’s music. In general, it is noteworthy that the Passion, or historia, was especially well cultivated in the Saxon-Thuringian region.

  This, then, was the state of the German Lutheran Passion when Handel undertook the setting of Postel’s libretto. The indecision that Handel shows in his St. John Passion, poor timing, stiff and archaic recitation, and so on, is surprising in view of his already considerable experience, his already highly developed expressive powers, and his innate ability to appropriate styles practically overnight. To be sure, there are some very respectable, even beautiful, numbers in the Passion, but on the whole one feels that something is amiss here. Scriptural passages and the narrating Evangelist were retained by Postel, but he also added a good deal of original “poetry,” some of it scarcely conducive to lyric expression. When the soldiers are casting dice for Christ’s coat, they repeat the ludicrous line “you must lose your coat” again and again. These poems could not fire the mind of a composer so dependent on imagery as was Handel’s, and indeed with few exceptions the arias fashioned on them are rather drab and static, and most of the choral numbers are also lacking in life. But there are flashes of the real Handel even in this early work, for when Pilate contends with the people one feels a rising dramatic excitement that immediately affects the chorus. While Christ’s lines are set with dignity, it is perhaps significant that what characterization and dramatic ingenuity there is in the Passion is conspicuously vested in Pilate. He was a man, and Handel could deal with men. The final chorus, “Schlafe wohl nach deinen Leiden” (Sleep well after your sufferings), is Handel the future great master of the choral commentary, and if any proof is needed that he possessed this mastery to a remarkable degree while still a German composer in his homeland, this epilogue provides it eloquently.

  That Handel was thoroughly familiar with the Hammerschmidt-Zachow-Krieger style and capable of utilizing it to some degree even at this early stage in his career cannot be doubted. Everything we mentioned above that characterizes the work of these able composers is to be found later in Handel’s “English” music. While a little uneasy about this Passion, most biographers praise it, or if they admit weak points they blame the librettist, Postel, for it, as they blame Brockes for the failure of the next work in this genre. But the quality of the librettos was misjudged by writers unfamiliar with German literary and religious history as well as wi
th the musical esthetics that were a corollary to the former. As Friedrich Blume ably summarized in his history of Protestant music in the Bücken series, this represented not so much a low literary level as a certain positive concept aimed at providing the composer with opportunities for affective representation, the text being distinctly subordinated to the music.

  The curious mingling of archaic with modern elements in the St. John Passion cannot be ascribed solely to youthful inexperience. In fact, the hesitations represent a conflict in Handel’s mind that we fail to recognize because our evaluation of this work is based partly on Bach’s tremendous settings of the Passion, partly on Messiah and the other great works of the later Handel. A glance at the German Passion in the decade following the turn of the century should explain the dilemma in Handel’s mind, and we shall see that even in 1716, when for the second and last time he addressed himself to the setting of a German religious text, the dilemma still inhibited the mature composer.

  Hamburg had many churches, fine organists, and must have offered the highest type of traditional North German Protestant church music, with which Handel was thoroughly familiar. Yet the antiliturgical, even secular, tendency was unmistakable. In nearby Lübeck the grand master, Buxtehude, admired and revered by all, composed a very large number of cantatas on religious texts, conducting his famed Abendmusiken, which were the pride of St. Mary’s. But while the texts were religious, this was altogether “concert” music; only the locale where it was performed was churchly. Buxtehude and all the other “modern” composers mentioned above were no longer interested, or at least only intermittently, in the chorale; they wrote dramatic concerted music. It may seem strange that Pietism should have neglected the chorale, which was considered virtually the revealed word of God, possessing a spiritual strength and liturgical fitness almost equalling that of the Bible. Clearly, Pietism changed the point of gravity from formal religion to private, familial piety at home, preferring the naive ditties that were composed by the thousands to the sturdy old hymns of the Lutherans. The tendency in the Passions was toward explicatio, that is, interpretation of the scriptural story, which gradually eliminated the Gospels in favor of “poetic-meditative” songs. This did not appeal to Handel, who was attracted by the solemnity of a formal liturgy. Trained as a professional church musician, proud of the calling and of the métier, and fond of the artistic realization of the stated articles of faith, he wanted to be no party to the sing-song that had invaded the cantata and turned the Passion into sentimental—and even gory—“sacred” opera. A man of powerful instincts and with an innate feeling for style, he deliberately avoided what must have appeared to him an incongruity. Nowhere does he show a real interest in the cornerstone of German Protestant church music: congregational singing; therefore the Passion’s sole link with the liturgy, the chorale, is missing. In this connection it is significant that true to this attitude, and even though Handel was a passionate lover of the organ, he totally abstained from the Protestant art par excellence, which was the chorale prelude and chorale variation. Nor did he compose choral music for the Lutheran liturgy.

  The indecision evident in his Passion rests on this conflict. He tried to reconcile it but was unsuccessful; reversion to more archaic practices did not help. If we refer to Bach for comparison we are using an inadmissible yardstick. By the time Bach composed his Passions the genre was in irrevocable decline, and indeed, its history ends with him forever. However, it must be borne in mind that Bach’s Passions, which raised the musical rendition of the Gospels to its unsurpassable peak, were deliberately archaic and in contradiction of the prevailing trend and style. At a time when Keiser and others composed Passion-oratorios that no longer had any connections with the liturgy, with the scriptures, or even with the church, Bach put together gigantic works consisting of strings of cantatas. He utilized all the secular means that had come to dominate church music—recitative, arioso, da capo aria—but every one of the cantatas that makes up the oratorio ends with a chorale. No one but this immense genius, profoundly rooted in Lutheran tradition, could have achieved this blend without risking utter failure—vide Graun and his almost ludicrous Der Tod Jesu. Granted, there are moments, especially in the great St. Matthew Passion, where the contemplative, Pietistic libretto misleads Bach, and the drama comes to a temporary halt, but the music reflects such genuine faith, is so overwhelmingly beautiful, that it overcomes the stylistic and dramatic pitfalls. In the first chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, a tonal mural of incredible vastness and grandeur, which is not scriptural and clearly takes a dramatic turn with the two choruses thundering questions and answers, every churchly tradition is flouted; this is pure music drama. But then, at the height of the tumultuous scene, the treble choir intones the chorale “O Lamb of God,” which floats serenely over the animated choruses, suddenly investing the scene with the strength of the old Lutheran profession of faith. This was the work of a sturdy, unflinching, and seasoned composer for whom the outside world scarcely existed, who held the fort all by himself with rocklike conviction in traditional beliefs and ideas that were being assaulted all around him. Handel was a very young man when he composed his Passion, a man to whom the outside world meant a great deal. The born dramatist in him rebelled at any thought of compromise, and it is for this reason that this first essay of the future great oratorio composer remains an inconclusive and insignificant episode in his life work.

  The Passion was ready for performance for Holy Week in 1704, and Handel wanted his friend Mattheson, who had departed for Holland, to be present. The younger man valued the more experienced Mattheson’s judgment, and the latter, though bound for England, changed his plans to oblige his friend. Handel’s letter (in Mattheson’s Ehrenpforte) is one of the few, and one of the three in German, that have been preserved at least indirectly. Mattheson did not arrive in time to witness the performance, but subsequently examined the score, which he censured rather severely. We are told that this “vicious” review was written a quarter of a century after the event and was the result of hindsight, poor memory, and jealousy; but Mattheson’s critique, even though published later (perhaps even for the second time), was certainly written soon after his return. The review is no flippant treatment from memory. It analyzes everything, from text declamation to part-writing, demonstrating careful study of the score, which he could no longer have possessed nor examined in 1725. It is unreasonable, moreover, to see in the review a retrospective attack on Handel, for had it been written years after the event, the possible original motive of jealousy would long since have ceased to influence Mattheson; and by that time Handel had not only given up this type of sacred music but had become a pronouncedly secular composer, a master acclaimed in England. In any case the critique was not “vicious.” It was perhaps severe, but certainly not unreasonable, for aside from a few impressive numbers, especially in the choruses, there is little of value when measured in Handelian terms. As late as 1760, Marpurg, the most respected musical scholar and critic of the 18th century, declared this “review” the first competent musical criticism of vocal music.

  While not particularly successful, the Passion raised Handel’s professional standing in the community, and the young musician seems to have been on the threshold of a career similar to that which Keiser had carved for himself in Hamburg. As mentioned earlier, Almira and the St. John Passion have been cited by almost all biographers as having been regarded by Keiser as the works of an incipient dangerous rival. But Handel now abandoned Hamburg and left for Italy.

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  THE CIRCUMSTANCES surrounding his departure are once more shrouded in conjecture. Biographers wonder who made the decision and who provided the funds. In all his life Handel always made his own decisions and nothing and no one could change them. As to funds, the frugal and astute businessman who had collected the allowance for his lodging while cathedral organist in Halle but who had lived in the family house undoubtedly was saving money throughout his stay in Hamburg for precisely this purpose. That
Handel’s earning and husbanding of money started early is demonstrated by the fact that in 1703 he had already returned to his mother the money she had sent him and began to support her with modest remittances. From every account it appears that the young harpsichord instructor was well paid for the lessons he gave to well-to-do pupils. Mattheson mentions a saving of two hundred ducats, a respectable sum, if not sufficient for the journey. But this was merely an estimate on Mattheson’s part; Handel was just as close-mouthed about his business affairs as he was about his religion or his love affairs. He undoubtedly had the necessary means for the journey, for there was no one else who could have provided it for him.