Some of the orchestrally accompanied cantatas are miniature operas, or at least amount to a substantial portion of an act. Arresta il passo, to mention one, has nine numbers and many recitatives. These orchestral accompaniments are deft and full of happy invention. At times they are preceded by a fine overture or long ritornel. Handel now experiments with a far more complicated orchestra than the one to which he was accustomed. He uses gamba, the transverse flute, large lute, oboe, and even trumpet, and while most of the time the tone is that of chamber music, the full concerto grosso appears in the dramatic scenes.
There are many authentic masterpieces among these secular cantatas; they should be much better known, for they show Handel a master in the true sense of the word, a master doubly attractive because of his youthful ebullience. And they should be known not only for their intrinsic beauty, but because they represent an idea bank in which Handel deposited funds that lasted for the remaining half century of his life. Throughout his active career the depositor withdrew from his ample hoard, here little sums in the form of a theme or motif, there whole arias or even entire works to be used and elaborated in a new context. Chrysander was altogether wrong in assigning some of these cantatas to the Halle period; Handel could not have written any of them before he heard Italian singers in their own habitat. Very annoyingly, Chrysander often abbreviated the cantatas; like most other biographers and editors, he wanted to have done with what he considered youthful aberrations and move on to the “sacred works.”
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As A MATTER OF FACT, Handel also composed some sacred cantatas, though with few exceptions these do not compare with the secular ones either in quality or quantity. They are often in the old busy contrapuntal style, and their vocal line is instrumentally conceived. Moreover, Handel fails to reconcile the polyphonic with the homophonic, which results in a somewhat awkward mixture of heterogeneous elements. Some, however, are on the level of the fine secular cantatas; indeed, Silete venti, for soprano with orchestra, is placed by some in the Cannons period. This cantata obviously belongs among the Roman works, but with its French overture and secure workmanship it could be shifted a whole decade without suffering from the journey. The unusual feature of Silete venti is that it ends with an Alleluia, a long florid piece in the pastoral meter of 12/8. There are several others that end with an Alleluia, betraying the presence of old Protestant elements. Not that the Alleluia was unknown to the Italians; it often appears as the concluding da capo aria in sacred cantatas, and usually in the pastoral meter and vein. A number of such cantatas were published in the 1690s and also during Handel’s stay in Italy. But Buxtehude, Zachow, Bruhns, Krieger, and others whose works Handel knew well also composed rather elaborate Alleluia cantatas, which while showing Italian influence and differing markedly from the chorale cantata, are nevertheless within the orbit of the German cantata.
When examining Handel’s works of this type, one’s first impression is that perhaps they were brought with him from Germany, but his Alleluia cantatas were found in the Santini collection and therefore definitely were written in Italy. Handel entitled them “motets,” but this is of no particular significance; they are in fact solo cantatas. The concerted solo motet can be followed all the way to Mozart’s Exsultate jubilate. The terminology in the 17th and 18th centuries was flexible, motet being applied simply to call attention to their sacred nature. One cannot escape the conclusion that, as with the German Passion, Handel felt in some way inhibited by the conflict between his ambitions and desires and the traditions of his early youth; the spirit of his surroundings did not accord with the spirit of his heritage. As usual, he turned from what was problematic to what was congenial, and in his Latin-Catholic sacred music once more met the Italians successfully on their own territory.
The traditions and practice of Italian church music that Handel found in Rome was altogether new to him and must have astounded him. Such southern Catholics as the Austrian Mozart took to it naturally; but to the Protestant from the north it was a matter fundamentally affecting not only his music but his entire view of life. It is here, we think, that Handel’s eventual decision to leave Italy must be sought, and we cannot agree with Percy Young that had Handel stayed for another few years he would have become a Catholic. On the contrary, the more he penetrated into the spirit of this Latin-Catholic world—and with his marvelous ability to assimilate he indeed went to the core of this world—the more he stood by his ancestral faith. Nevertheless, the experience had vital consequences for his entire future, musically, humanly, and, we think, religiously.
There have always been very important cultural energies that cannot be distilled into the other-worldly. The Italian-Latin loves life, not only in its nobler aspects, but even in its vulgarity, and he sees it whole, not arranged in tight compartments. When Handel first visited Italy he found church music, opera, and instrumental music all mingling together. In Baroque Italy, church and opera house were the focal points of musical life; the difference between liturgical and nonliturgical music was slight and often nonexistent. Instrumental music itself was often used for liturgical purposes; hostility towards instrumental music in the church, so pronounced in our time, was unknown. Throughout its history, the Church wisely compromised with such irresistible artistic tendencies, for she knew that a religion unrelated to culture, language, or national ethos would experience great difficulties, if it survived at all. In the case of instrumental music, Benedict XIV officially recognized in 1749 a situation that had been tacitly sanctioned for a long time.
In large measure this secular tendency was not restricted to Italy, for the national spirit had been gaining ground in church music in Germany and France for a long time, but the incentive and the model came from Italy. The innate, original characteristics of the European peoples, bolstered by the new, free philosophy and literature of the Renaissance, introduced elements that hitherto had been considered alien in the church. Secular modes supplant the ecclesiastic and the original melodic treasures of various regions overcome the remnants of Gregorianism in secular music. The materials and precepts of national-secular music making intrude more and more into the music of the church, and the great and celebrated masters build their successes increasingly on secular grounds. Though church music retains its tremendous importance, the reigning taste converts it to its own image, to a style substantially identical with the secular. Whatever is composed in the codified church style of old is indeed so labelled: stile antico, stylus gravis, or stylus ecclesiasticus. Therefore, while its importance in its own sphere remains unimpaired, church music is no longer the focal point from which everything else derives its guidance; rather church art becomes assimilated to secular art, and secular art now represents the central force.
Since Handel knew all this from Buxtehude, Zachow, and the other German masters, a mere regional-stylistic difference should not have created any difficulty for him, especially since as we have seen he was a well-trained and experienced composer, acquainted with Italian music even before his trip to Italy. Nevertheless, the age-old spirit of this Italian church music, bound with a thousand threads to life as it is lived on earth, must have been to him an experience of revelatory force.
The religious poetry of the Franciscans, the laudi, faithfully expresses the spirit of Italian church music as early as the 13th century. The laudi are not simple conventional hymns like the religious folksongs of other nations, but rhapsodic and personal. In them we find an important clue to the spirit of Italian sacred music that never left it across the centuries, for this music, singing of heavenly love, was in reality love poetry in the most sensuous meaning of the term, only its symbolism covering its true nature. And we must not think that because the industrious ants of the Renaissance, the humanists, severely separated themselves from this ardently popular tone, even shunning the vernacular for Latin, this spirit had departed; all we have to do is to look at the music, for the music of the frottola, which even the somber Netherlanders found irresistible, this fresh, popula
r, earthbound music, is interchangeable with that of the laude. Even Lorenzo de’ Medici, head of one of the most aristocratic courts the world has ever known, which was filled with the learned pedants of humanism, and himself fully conversant with that learning, was a poet nurtured on this popular song. In the elaborate carnival festivities he gave back to the people in rispetti, strambotti, and canti carnascialeschi what he had taken from them. Savonarola could, for a moment, freeze this secular orgy; he cast fear into the people, and it seemed as if Italy would do penance and turn to the fanatical mystic dreamer’s Republic of Christ. But the new prophet failed, and the people’s zeal and fire began to subside even before the real flames consumed Savonarola.
Then the sacra rappresentazione appeared and, though church drama, soon was suffused with popular music, worldly music, and with romantic decoration. With this we are in the vicinity of Italian church and sacred music as it was constituted in Handel’s time, a church music inextricably tied to the dramatic-concerted music of cantata, oratorio, and opera. But at this point we find a most bewildering contradiction, or at least what appears to us a categorical contradiction: the survival and warm appreciation of the Palestrinian ideal of music.
It is not the infinitely suave, balanced, and crystalline counterpoint of Palestrina that we find in the concerted works of Handel’s Italian contemporaries, for that had disappeared; what remained was only the suavity and the crystallinity: euphony is the key to this art. But while the Palestrinian counterpoint was not employed in the current dramatic and concerted vocal music, it was ever present in most composers’ minds and was diligently taught in the conservatories in the later 18th century by the very maestros of the frivolous opera buffa.
The Baroque concern with the stile antico was quite different from the historicism of the 19th century, as it is from that of our age. This vocal music was the Italians’ very own territory; they knew that in true vocal music the text, no matter how great the poetry, is completely turned into song, drowned in melody. This is what they associated with the Palestrinian spirit, music that is pure song, that sublimates the conceptual text. Or, as Prunières eloquently summarized it in Lavignac’s Encyclopédie: “elle est le symbol de la revanche que la musique prit sur la littérature, à laquelle les florentins avaient prétendu l’asservir.” These Italian musicians simply became “bilingual,” to use Bukofzer’s felicitous term: able to speak with equal fluency the language of classical polyphony and that of modern concerted music.
What the Italian Palestrinians worshipped was not so much the letter of this marvelously logical system, as the spirit that animated it, the effortless part-writing and the wondrous euphony of choral sound. At first both the letter and the spirit were observed by the great Palestrina disciples and descendants: Nanino, the two Anerios, Soriano, Allegri, Cifra, and others, but the “bilingual” composers of the next generation were also thoroughly familiar with the essence of this art. Under the influence of the “Colossal Baroque” they increased their choirs to double, triple, and quadruple tiers: even the Roman opera was rich in choruses, Rossi and Landi already liking opulent eight-part ensembles at the end of acts.
Pasquini, in the preface to one of his volumes of motets, calls any musician who does not know the works of Palestrina “a miserable wretch,” and even Domenico Scarlatti (as Kirkpatrick reports) was devoted to the Palestrina ideal, though his own activity was far removed from it. The others, the bilingual composers, form an impressive chain: Vitali, Legrenzi, Bassani, Lotti, Pitoni. Handel heard their music everywhere. The great Venetians we shall meet presently, but a word must be said about Bassani and Pitoni.
Giovanni Battista Bassani (1657-1716) was a composer of the stature of the Roman and Venetian leaders, a magnificent choral composer whose freely moving but seldom “strict” counterpoint should have had particular appeal for Handel. Though he was more famous outside Italy for his fine cantatas and instrumental music, he is definitely one of the imposing figures in the main line of choral art. Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni (1657-1743) was for a while the resident composer at the Collegium Germanicum in Rome but moved around a great deal. He composed a fantastic amount of a cappella music, Masses, motets, Psalms, and so on, for from four to sixteen parts. This music is distinguished by a wonderful clarity of choral texture and sound, and virtuoso counterpoint, yet everything in it is song, pure, even popular, song, and the tonality is modern.
Practically all the composers just enumerated, with whom Handel came in contact either personally or through their music, are known to us as composers of operas and concerted vocal and instrumental music; it is perhaps difficult to imagine them as worshippers of the “emotionless” and “other-worldly” Palestrina ideal. Once we look at their melody we will understand, however, why Verdi still claimed descent from Palestrina. Indeed, a Stradella was but an early Bellini, and a vocal quality is present even in the great instrumental composers, for the Palestrinian ideal was not only choral sound but sculptured vocal melody. Coloratura writing, with its breathless runs, scales, arpeggios, and sequences, is definitely an instrumental element within this vocal art, brought about by the phenomenal virtuosity of the castratos, which drove composers to bravura even in ensemble music. Yet, even if in a very restricted sense, the Palestrinian melody was also partial to scalelike melodic runs; “l’esthétique de la gamme,” André Pirro used to say in his class. Rapprochement between vocal and instrumental melody under the suzerainty of the former was one of the characteristics of the Italian Baroque.12
The Italian language’s large proportion of open vowels and terminal vowels encouraged a free, melismatic extension of phrases flowing into each other without undue caesuras. This “long melody” favored the aria over the chorus but could also be employed in part-writing if the treble assumed the unquestioned leading role. This songlike quality infused Italian choral style, giving it its particular charm. But there is also polyphony in this Italian choral music of the Baroque, and it can be elaborate, but it wants to sound well; its very point of departure is that of sound. This is still the “Palestrina” ideal and tradition, even if latent and considerably modified. Handel immediately tried his hand at it in La Resurrezione, for as can be seen, in contrast to his German choruses, the lower voices here merely support the treble.
Although Handel was used to good choral music, it was in Italy that he first came to know really great singers and singing. The German Protestant church choir was mostly a school choir, it came from the Kantorei, which was not specifically a church body; throughout the Baroque professional choirs were unknown in the Protestant churches in Germany. Bach’s Thomaner were students, treble and alto from the secondary school, tenor and bass from the university or from the public. It was only a few years before Handel’s time in Hamburg that Kusser began to train German singers—coming from the cantors’ schools and having absolutely no experience with opera—in the expressive Italian manner, and coloratura made its first appearance in German works. Still, this was a rather awkward superimposition of an altogether foreign musical style upon the German song idiom, and it was not until Keiser that a German composer was able to handle with skill and imagination the new manner of vocal writing; he was the first German to write real arias. Another vast difference between the Italian and the German singer in the early 18th century was the systematic professional training the former received, not only in voice production but in musical theory and composition. He was expected to, and usually could, improvise with the skill of a composer. Handel also discovered that the great Italian singer was often a tyrannical potentate who ruled both librettist and composer and whose whims had to be respected.
All this was new, but we must not forget the very considerable experience in choral composition that Handel brought with him to Italy. He knew not only the involved cantus firmus work of his German colleagues and predecessors, but also the dramatic choral declamation, offset or contrasted by running orchestral accompaniment. This form of German choral music owes a debt to the chorale prelude
, and at times the similarity to the organ species is so obvious that one is tempted to call such works choral chorale preludes. He also knew the old German imitative motet style with its phrases interwoven in a continuous polyphonic pattern, with motifs varied and broken up, inverted, augmented, diminished, and so on, the choral fugues, and the choral recitative. The marked tendency towards concerted choral writing that we see in his Italian works was also known in Germany; Zachow and others used it, often with felicity, and even the “choral aria” we see in some of the Roman compositions he must have encountered in the works of Nicolaus Bruhns (1665-1697). Bruhns, a Schleswig-Holstein composer of great repute and a disciple of Buxtehude, was an early German exponent of the choral aria. Handel may have encountered him personally in Zachow’s circle, and certainly knew his works. Mattheson cites Bruhns’s amusing ability to play two parts on a violin while seated on the organ bench playing the bass of the trio on the pedals. But that sort of instrumental virtuosity does not negate the fact that Bruhns’s cantatas belong among the finest before Bach’s works in the genre and show a lyric quality unusual in the German cantata. 13 In addition, there is the interesting fact that around 1700 much more choral music was composed in Germany than in Italy.14
But choral composition took on an entirely new hue and meaning when Handel faced vocal music in Italy and felt the pervasive spirit of the “Palestrina ideal.” His problem was the reconciliation of the German cantus firmus style with Italian choral lyricism. That this choral lyricism, of which an excellent example is Stradella’s Serenata, later quoted in Israel in Egypt, profoundly affected him is demonstrated not so much by what he immediately did in Italy as by his use of it decades later in his English oratorios.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 10