George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

  The opera season, interrupted by “ye Rebellion of ye Tories and Papists,” ended late. It was a troublesome year, indeed. The Jacobites, among them prominent Tories, though losing a powerful backer in the death of Louis XIV, had not given up hope of installing “James III” on the throne; a rebellion started in Scotland in September and threw London into a fright, but it was put down within a month. The Old Pretender himself landed in England at the end of December, but by February 1716 he too was routed and everyone breathed freely. George, not quite au courant, was bored and could not even wait for the end of the opera season. He left on July 7 for Hanover to get away from high politics and the tedium of the monarchy; he longed for the carefree life of the country squire he was at heart. Handel is supposed to have followed the King within a day or two, but it seems that this was more likely a week. On July 12 Handel’s youthful idol, Attilio Ariosti, newly arrived in London, played the viola d’amore between the acts of Amadigi; it is difficult to imagine that Handel would have been absent on the occasion.

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  BACK IN HANOVER, Handel was as much out of his element as the King was genially in his. Having no duties at court, he took the opportunity to travel. The family seat came first, but we know of no particular event connected with the visit; Handel’s mother was by now an aged lady, and her famous son a rather distant figure to the household in Halle. His old master Zachow was dead, and Handel found his widow in straitened circumstances. With his innate generosity—which kept pace with his improved means—he eased the financial distress of the poor woman. Nor was this the only time he paid homage to the memory of his teacher by helping the widow; Frau Zachow was the recipient of several remittances from London. Another trip took Handel to Ansbach. This might very well have been a diplomatic errand on behalf of Caroline, Princess of Wales, whose family resided there—at least no other purpose is apparent. While in Ansbach, Handel was reunited with an old companion from Halle University days, Johann Christoph Schmidt. Schmidt, a wool merchant, but a lover of music, was eking out a less than modest living, once more touching the generous heart of Handel. The old friend was persuaded to come to London where Handel promised to look after him, and he arrived there with his small son soon after Handel’s return in the fall. The rest of Schmidt’s family was left behind while he reconnoitered; then rejoined him when Schmidt saw that Handel was capable of providing a safe existence for him. We shall meet in each John Christopher Smith, senior and junior, as devoted a combination of friend, servant, secretary, major domo, and business manager as any man has ever had.

  Handel also made a mysterious visit to Hamburg, which interests us particularly because the one major work composed during this period, a Passion, is supposed to have been written there. The circumstances of this trip to Hamburg are a riddle. True, Handel had been famous there for years, his operas were in the repertory—only a year before, Rinaldo had been presented with great acclaim—and he had several acquaintances residing there, but not a single document exists to show that the visit to Hamburg, mentioned by everyone, actually took place. Mattheson, writing in his Ehrenpforte (1740), explicitly states that he corresponded with Handel while the latter was in Hanover in 1716, but says nothing about a visit to Hamburg, which could not have escaped him. Nor was the Passion performed at that time, and it is a matter of record that Handel sent a fair score of the work to Hamburg after his return to London, the performance taking place in 1719. Nor have we any sign of Handel having visited Germany between the two documented trips of 1716 and 1719. We do lose track of him for about a year and a half after July 1717, but the chances are that he stayed at Cannons.

  But why then did he compose a German Passion? He had few ties left with Germany besides his family, the Hanover post, kept up for the sake of appearance only, was obviously abandoned after his trip in 1716, and we have seen that except for the early St. John Passion he consistently refused to compose liturgical or “sacred” music for the Lutheran service. Though Handel was always ready to accept a challenge, it is a little tenuous to surmise that he composed Brockes’s Passion because it was famous and had been set to music by the leading musicians of the day; but in the absence of other explanations, and given Brockes’s eminence, perhaps there is something to this motive. At any rate, while Handel made use of the good parts of his Passion in different contexts—among them Giulio Cesare!—he never made any attempt to present it in its original form, which of course was unsuitable for England anyway. It is only fair, though, to add that the Passion itself is indebted to the Utrecht Te Deum and other works.

  Barthold Heinrich Brockes, a member of the Hamburg Senate and one of the famous literary men of the age, was no stranger to Handel. He studied at the University of Halle in 1700-02, where they must have met, especially since Brockes was fond of music. In his autobiography, the Senator speaks of concerts held “several times a week” in his little flat, the thrifty bourgeois adding that “it did not cost much.” Handel, who though scarcely more than an adolescent was by that time a well regarded local musician, could not have missed these soirees. Brockes was a widely travelled, highly educated, learned man, a diplomat, lawyer, man of letters, and legislator. But he had a strong streak of Pietism in him, aggravated by a very offensive religious hypocrisy, and his was a most unpleasant, grasping, and devious character. On the other hand, having come in contact with English thought in Hamburg (he translated Pope and Thomson), he was also touched by the Enlightenment. Some biographers writing in English dismiss him as a nonentity and call his Passion text “preposterous,” but that is historiography based on ignorance of German history and literature. We must look at the state of the German Passion-oratorio at the time of Handel’s composition of his second so-called St. John Passion.

  By 1716 Pietism and the early Enlightenment had made considerable inroads into the concept of the Passion; the serene and severe biblical tone of a Schütz was long since forgotten. The influence of Christian Friedrich Hunold (1681-1721), also known by his pseudonym, Menantes, and Erdmann Neumeister (1671-1756) changed the German cantata and Passion considerably. Both of these literary men insisted on infusing poetry and a theatrical element into concerted sacred music, but while Hunold’s Passion text, The Bleeding and Dying Jesus, obviously reflected Pietist leanings, Neumeister, the orthodox Lutheran clergyman, preferred to embrace warmly all the new dramatic means coming from Italy. It was he who established the free, “madrigalian” style of cantata construction, based on recitative and da capo aria, and it is well known that Bach composed music for several of his “reform cantata” texts.

  Brockes’s place in this picture is somewhere between Hunold and Neumeister, and his great influence can be explained by his attempt to animate the biblical story with dramatic elements of a more personal nature. To be sure, he diluted the strength of the Gospel with his sentimental and wordy poetry, but in the absence of an abler poet he naturally became the most admired model for those who wanted to move with the spirit of the times. It was Brockes who restored to the Passion the biblical element that distinguishes it from the purely operatic. In particular it was to his credit to have restored the role of the Evangelist as narrator of scriptural paraphrases (a figure that provided Bach with a most important vehicle for dramatic expression), and it was he who gave the chief characters a recognizable dramatic personality by attempting to probe into their thoughts. By assigning definite places for the chorales, and by clearly dividing the action into self-contained scenes and numbers, he greatly facilitated the composer’s task. Even though full of verbose allegories, tasteless pictorialism, and overelaborated word play, Brockes’s passion libretto was so highly regarded that it was translated into French and Swedish, besides being circulated all over Germany. Incidentally, it was this “preposterous” litterateur who introduced into German letters the contemplation of nature, and even though today his poetry strikes us as a sort of watery pantheism, its significance cannot be belittled, because Brockes’s influence on the future of German poetry was consid
erable.

  As we look at Handel’s score, or rather at its copies, because to complete the mystery the original manuscript is lost, the first thing we notice is the title. The work is always referred to as the Brockes, or St. John Passion, but the original full title is The Story of Jesus, suffering and dying for the sins of the world, presented according to the narrative as related by the four [!] Evangelists. Clearly, this is the Pietist approach, and that was anathema to Handel. Accordingly, the music is only too often the routine work of an experienced craftsman, and surprisingly enough, this quality extends even to some of the choruses, of which there are few. But where dramatic interest is present Handel is roused.27 Several numbers are very remarkable. We may single out Christ’s noble aria, “My Father,” while among the many numbers given to the Daughter of Zion the one where she pleads with Pilate is superb, and so is Mary’s song, “O God! My Son is dragged away and torn from me.” The entire scene from the prayer in Gethsemane to the denial of Peter is major Handel, and a particularly magnificent scene is the ensemble “Awake!” which later was used in Esther.

  Yet, as in his first setting of the Passion, we once more find Handel strangely embarrassed by the tradition, style, and tone into which he was born and for which he was originally trained. He could not compose such quasi-liturgical, churchly music, nor could he really unfold his natural dramatic talents because of this inhibiting tradition. Chrysander is far out of line when he calls this work a giant step toward the final peaks of German Protestant church music. True, Handel used chorales and used them well, but he also used the old rage and revenge arias from the Hamburg opera and all manner of other incongruous elements that do not accord with the more elevated moments. It is possible that he was thinking along the lines of Keiser’s setting of the same text, a similarly uneven work. Up to the Last Supper scene Keiser often rises to engaging serenity, but thereafter he descends to a tone that is sheer low comic opera. These extravaganzas mix strangely with the “liturgical” elements. When Handel composed the anthem The King shall rejoice he was not inhibited; he wrote for the entire populace, from King to commoner, music that was so simple—yet grand—that everyone could understand and enjoy it. But when he wrote a German Passion he was not at ease. As to the chorales, it is interesting to compare the Passion with the great Funeral Ode for Queen Caroline. In both works Handel uses the chorale, and in both of them he plainly intends to conjure up a churchly tone and attitude, but while in 1737 he warmly and pensively reminisced of his youth, which was also the beloved Queen’s youth, in 1716-17 he tried to conform to a tradition. As a “sacred” composition, the Passion pales before the tremendous opening number, “The Ways of Zion mourn,” of the Ode.

  Comparisons with Bach and his Passions are also futile. Everyone hastens to remark that Bach copied out Handel’s Brockes Passion, as he assuredly did—more precisely, half of it; the rest was done by Anna Magdalena. More than that, he studied the score rather carefully, for Handel was a famous man and Bach was a student of famous men’s works. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine what he saw in Handel’s Passion beyond the fact that here was the most widely admired Passion text (a text he himself was to use in part), which had been set to music by Keiser, Mattheson, Telemann, and now by the famous dramatic composer, Handel. Bach did actually make use of his study of Handel’s score in his St. Matthew Passion, but the two composers were worlds apart; what was a casual effort for the great London dramatic composer was the life work of his erstwhile compatriot in Leipzig.28 Winton Dean sums up the difference most convincingly when he says that, unlike Keiser and Handel in their Passions, Bach “created an artistic and spiritual unity. It was left to Handel to achieve this later in his English oratorios.”

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  HANDEL PRECEDED THE King by a few weeks in his return to London, arriving towards the end of the year. The opera season opened on December 8, and by January 5, 1717, Rinaldo was back in the repertory, followed in a month by Amadigi, both of them successfully running until the closing of the theatre on June 29, 1717. Now a curious silence descends around Handel. After the Haymarket Theatre closed in June, Italian opera seemed to be extinct in London; three years were to elapse before the Haymarket resumed operatic production. Then it was again Handel who gave it new life, and an altogether new epoch of opera, both for Handel and for London, was to begin. There had already been a hiatus between the Utrecht Te Deum (July 1713) and Amadigi (May 1715), but at least we know what Handel was doing during those years. The year 1718 and much of 1719 are barren of notices and records. There was no opera at the King’s Theatre, only dances, masquerades, concerts, and comedies. Heidegger would have preferred opera, but being a rational businessman made the most of “Subscription Masquerades.” Handel’s silence can be explained, for he undoubtedly watched and studied the scene—as he had in Italy—to acquire its feeling, taste, and tone. As Rolland so aptly and graphically says, “Handel was waiting without hurry to be saturated by the English atmosphere.”

  After the close of the season Handel left Burlington House and is supposed to have taken up residence at Cannons, remaining there for two years. James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon, later Duke of Chandos (1673-1744), had built himself a magnificent residence at Cannons. As paymaster general of the English forces in Queen Anne’s reign, and hence throughout the turbulent War of the Spanish Succession, he had made an immense fortune which caused him to be generally regarded as an embezzler on a royal scale, but he manipulated his malfeasance with such skill that the Royal Commission, appointed to investigate the many angry accusations, could not pin him down on any point. Since Brydges was “tolerably moral” as far as women were concerned, even Sir Newman Flower speaks rather gently about this rogue. The Duke was vain and ostentatious; Swift called him “a great complier with every court,” and Pope also scorned him, though more guardedly, but all of them sat at his table, a bountiful table at which the Burlington group was often augmented by other literary, artistic, and political lights.

  Whether the Duke really cared for music is not known, but no sumptuous princely household could be called complete without a permanent musical establishment; therefore Chandos founded for himself a ducal chapel with all the necessary appurtenances. It was placed under John Christopher Pepusch, who occupied the post of director of music at Cannons from 1712 to 1732. It is therefore clear that Handel was not engaged in the capacity of music director or master, as is usually stated, but as resident composer—that is, in the largely independent role he always preferred. Mainwaring was aware of the rather unusual situation, because he remarked that “having such a Composer, was an instance of real magnificence, such as no private person or subject; nay, such as no prince or potentate on earth could at that time pretend to.” This accords well with the character of the Duke, who was given to such exhibitionism as to take some mustered-out veterans of Marlborough’s army and dress them up as Swiss palace guards. To him Handel was another emblem of power and possession: he had the most talked-about musician of the day attached to his court.29

  Handel’s actual residence at Cannons is somewhat uncertain though quite plausible. The Duke spent a great deal of his time in his London house, and since Handel surely did not interrupt the music lessons given to the royal princesses (he may have had other noble pupils also), he could not have stayed away from London for the entire two years he is supposed to have spent at Cannons. He did move out of Burlington House and undoubtedly entered the “services” of Chandos, but probably lived most of the time, working and studying quietly, at the Duke’s house in Albemarle Street in London, with seasonal visits to Cannons, or whenever the Duke had his famous parties.30 The Duke was not the kind of man who listened to anthems in private. The numerous stories connected with Cannons, such as the romantic tale about The Harmonious Blacksmith, or the organ “on” which Handel composed, now suitably marked with a tablet, are all canards invented long after the composer’s death. It is clear that by the spring of 1719, if not earlier, Handel reverted to his independ
ent status and may very well have gone back to Burlington House; he remained on cordial terms with the Earl, whom he liked and esteemed.

  As resident composer, Handel turned out music carefully tailored to suit the forces available at Cannons: anthems, a masque, and a pastoral. This was English music, and in order to be able to deal with this momentous change in the life and work of the composer of Italian opera, we shall once more deviate from strict chronology, making a fresh start after pursuing Handel’s other activities that round out this period.

  During the late summer of 1718 Handel’s only remaining sister, Dorothea Michaelsen, died in Halle. Handel was very fond of her and deeply grieved by her premature death—she was barely thirty. Characteristically, he thanked his brother-in-law Michaelsen for his kindness to Dorothea. Later, in November, another death, that of Kielmansegg, though not, of course, one that touched Handel so personally, nevertheless deprived him of a person always friendly to him. Both the King and Handel lost “a great Encourager of Arts and Sciences,” for, while little more than an ordinary courtier, the Baron really liked and understood music.