George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

  There was in this powerful, highly trained, intelligent, and virtuoso artist a genuine and unconscious naivete that was one of the principal strengths of his art, but at times it betrayed him. It is somewhat ironical that this appealing naivete can become the most refined means whereby a true dramatic continuity and development are diluted, drawing attention to sheer musical attraction at the expense of the drama. This presents a real obstacle to the modern hearer, though to Handel it was a well-respected tradition inherited from Scarlatti. The composers of the old opera seria tended to neglect the dramatic-human element—they could not do otherwise—because in their period every musical act that did not seek the purely aural-esthetic, the sensuous sound value, was bound to turn into allegory; it became a symbol rather than characterization. The development from this stage of opera to the Mozartean is a most complicated process in which the opera buffa was the catalyst. In Handel the purely “acoustic”—that is, the purely abstract—musical concordances between the dramatis personae are still very much within the spirit of the Baroque, and we must learn to understand it, to hear in the Baroque manner. This should not be too difficult: the musical-formal concept is fresh and interesting; precisely because the characters are essentially musical visions, nothing impedes the powerful effect of the music; through the sheer beauty of the aural impression the whole sensory apparatus of the listener is engaged. Perhaps a close parallel illustrative of this unusual phenomenon is to be found in Fra Angelico’s celestial landscapes, where the meadows clad in vernal ornament are not landscapes at all but optic impressions solely serving the purpose of providing a background for the beatified who disport themselves in it.

  In climactic moments the forces employed are of such intensity that at times the lyric beauty of the melody makes the situation seem almost grotesque, even undramatic, for the characters do not act but tell about the motives of their action. This was the original sin of the opera seria and was difficult to overcome. In such moments the confrontation of two human beings in extraordinary circumstances is transmuted into the expression of a profound and very human relationship, but it avoids the conflict of two points of view. Eloquence, lyric melody become the rulers over dramatic gesture. It is the form of the seria that forced Handel to this stylization, even though his own inclinations were against it. Thus in many of his operas there are uneven and irreconcilable contradictions which are jarring, yet just where objective expression overpowers the subjective the greatest beauties are revealed as pulsating life fills the most abstractly formulated da capo aria.

  Handel felt the incongruity between what was available to him and what he was striving for. He was to resolve all his doubts and problems in the oratorio, but in his operas this dichotomy created a certain vacillation and very personal problems of style not even remotely understood until recent times. He constantly struggled for equilibrium, and this had many consequences for his art. Characterization is sometimes developed to the neglect of dramatic relationships, or vice versa, and there is often disparity between the feelings of his dramatic figures and their expression. There are many wondrously intimate and delicate scenes where sensitive men and women insist on explaining their state of mind, but they keep on defining matters whose nature is precisely that they cannot fit any definition. When Handel does overcome this impediment it is usually despite the words rather than with their aid. This ability to override the libretto and compel it to disappear under the power of music is his most personal characteristic, particularly in the oratorios. The love all lyricists feel for the many-keyed instrument that is language explains a Handelian trait that to us appears to be a dramatic weakness: his sharp ear for the quality of the single, isolated word. Occasionally one is amazed to discover that Handel actually abandons the librettist’s lines; disliking them, he proceeds to set them in such a manner that they lose their meaning. He will concentrate on isolated words, lift them out of context by pouring significant music over them. This may altogether change the librettist’s intentions —which is the object—but satisfy his own, with the result that the poor libretto may turn into a fine opera. He is also capable of a feat that seems equally impossible and for which his librettists were totally unprepared: endowing a secondary figure with life even though that figure, as conveyed by the text, virtually excludes any semblance of character, his entire role being accessory and without influence or significance for the drama.

  When all such means fail to reconcile loose dramatic threads in a bad libretto, Handel’s phenomenal ability to create an atmosphere comes to the rescue. A persuasive atmosphere can bring disparate elements together, can lend the whole a tone and substance that reconcile even the sharp divergences and dissonances. True drama is built on dissonance and its resolution, therefore the gains achieved by atmospheric unity also harbor fatal weaknesses for the drama: it tends to dissolve the conflicts, the drama disintegrating into idyllic and elegiac lyricism. The dichotomy we have mentioned then causes Handel to struggle powerfully, for his instincts were severely and exclusively dramatic, and he saw his heroes essentially free of the atmosphere surrounding them. Thus he once more tends to a monumentality that does not tolerate accessories of any kind, and when this point is reached everything else—the rest of the cast and even the drama itself—disappears. It can be awe-inspiring and a little ridiculous at the same time. Also, in many instances tragedy occurs before the drama really gets under way, for the power of imagination, the creative urge, is impatient. In others he explodes the drama prematurely because of pragmatic reasons his librettist may have forced upon him. But when this eager and glowing capacity for creative work was under full critical control, his dramatic instinct could work wonders even while obeying restrictions and conventions. Passion was restrained until the way had been carefully chosen and defined in his mind—then it was released.

  Those who meet this opera taken out of its historical context, and out of Handel’s own musical development, are surprised by his genuine respect and love for classical antiquity, his constant recourse to this heritage, for they see all this as a mere residue of a post-Renaissance cult, a fad that from Rinuccini to Metastasio was kept alive and made into a convention that no longer had connections with the spirit of classicism, a virtual caricature of a faded and no longer understood culture. But in Handel this classical heritage does not signify an arbitrary or a literal return to the past, it is rather an esthetic kinship, a recognition of the power of a concept of art that sees man as a whole.

  Seen from this angle, Handel’s opera is clearly the antithesis of naturalism and realism. Today’s naturalism and psychologism make it difficult to see in this opera anything but a type, both in the dramatis personae and in the dramatic situations—nothing but endless repetitions, whereas naturalism represents the unique, the never recurring. Modern naturalism demands easily followed and effective plots; the story has independent strength, the figures of the drama lean on it. In Handel the story leans on the figures of the drama, for his shaping force is guided and nourished by lyricism. He was a lyric dramatist like Aeschylus. It is the force of this lyricism, its tremendous scale, that breathes life into the sketches provided by his librettists, and it is the expression that creates dramatic figures, compelling them to act dramatically. The Handelian opera does not deny the values of the Baroque world even though it purports to represent antiquity, nor does it deny the plasticity of human relations or the dynamism of mood and mind. But it does oppose chaos of mood and ecstasy of color, because to the Baroque mind the cult of constantly varying color and mood destroys the oneness of man. Swinburne thought that “the fusion of lyric with dramatic form gives the highest type of poetry”; this is particularly true in music, and this is, indeed, what a Rodelinda and a Giulio Cesare offer. But they also give us a vision of life that a modern audience, its imagination kept within bounds by exposure to realistic scenery, lighting, and various effects and techniques of the spoken theatre, finds hard to apprehend.

  The undeniable anomalies in the old Baroque op
era have been judged so overwhelming that its revival has been thought practically impossible. These anomalies can be made bearable once they are recognized and once their causes are understood. Perhaps we of the second half of the 20th century can approach these problems and resolve them—the 19th could not; but then we must completely cleanse our mind of 19th-century ideals of dramaturgy. First of all we must realize that the “classicism” of the Handelian stage was the vehicle for a thoroughly Baroque spirit. Archaeologically, Handel’s Greek or Roman heroes and heroines, bewigged and crinoline-clad, are undoubtedly false, but as noble patriots or lovers they are true and compelling figures. Historical accuracy and authenticity of décor and costumes neither add to nor detract from their integrity. The view that verisimilitude is the aim of art is no longer what it once was, though it is not yet extinct. Art strives to create illusion, to convince that this illusion is of the essence, that it can only be this way and no other way. We do not interrupt the storyteller when he says “Once upon a time there was a wicked old witch ...” to say that there is no such thing. Rather, supposing that there might be such a thing, we wonder what he knows about it. Baroque opera does not depend on verisimilitude; we should not confuse its musical logic of structure with the verbal logic of the spoken theatre. With suitable changes that remove the nones-thetic limitations, the seemingly inevitable conceptual blocks, and with careful editing of the score, we should be able to present many of these operas in such a manner that our musical imagination will recognize the reality of the esthetic sphere. The ignoring of the “realities of life” in the re-creation of Handel’s operas would enable us to hear resonances of such subtlety as the realistic stage is incapable of. Naturalism with its marvelous analyses does present human documents—but this is not necessarily art; the copying of life can be a criticism of life, but not necessarily the solution of its problems.

  This does not mean, however, that we should neglect the theatre in the Baroque opera. A knowledge of the technique of the lyric theatre, by which we understand the sum total of the means and procedures peculiar to this particular art, is neither the supreme requirement it is considered to be by theatrical people not conversant with opera nor is it the negligible matter so many musicians think. Every true opera composer has his own technique peculiar to himself. The musico-dramatist must know the contours of the stage and stagecraft in general—how to make appearances telling, how to make his figures communicate, how to articulate the action, and where to place accent and emphasis. But the stage director must always make his dispositions with the score in hand; if he proceeds from the point of view of the spoken theatre he is lost, and so is the opera he is directing. When dealing with Italian opera, the director must remember the maxim: “What is truth this side of the Alps may be error beyond them.”

  The proponents of the illusionist stage, with its scientific-historical exactitude and sobriety, flatly maintain that Handel’s operas present insurmountable staging difficulties, but these cannot be accepted as constituting a serious hazard any more than those presented by Shakespeare’s plays. As with Shakespeare, Handel does not need much in the way of décor; the work has the décor in itself. It is unnecessary to recreate Rome or Carthage or any other ancient city, its houses and courtyards and yellow lamps, and tack them down onto the stage with nails. It is in Handel’s musical diction that we must seek the lyric stage, not in ethnographic and historical accuracy but in the intelligent manipulation of singing actors with a fine sense for balance and plasticity,

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  THERE REMAINS THE serious question of the castrato parts, opinions about which remind one of the boat in the fairy tale to which were harnessed an eagle, a pike, and a lobster; the one pulling up, the other down, and the third sideways. Dent and others maintain that it is “fatal” to assign castrato roles to tenors or baritones to sing them in transposition. I cannot agree to that. It is perfectly true that in so doing we are “destroying” a very special quality, but since this quality was entirely artificial in the first place and can never again be recaptured, there is no use championing it. Unquestionably, in this complete reversal of the natural function of voices there must have been a very sophisticated aural refinement, but to us it has become an extravagance no longer realizable. It is also true that the Baroque did associate heroic stature with high tessitura and coloratura. This the castrato supplied in full measure, but by the end of the 18th century the heroic conception was transferred to the tenor. Both the Italian heroic tenor, as exemplified in Verdi, and the Wagnerian Heldentenor still represent it.

  We no longer have any sense for the older conception. Ever since the opera buffa and the “reformed” opera seria of the latter half of the 18th century we have identified operatic roles with vocal timbres belonging to and representing the sexes; this makes it permanently unsatisfactory to hear a man sing with a woman’s voice. Once we have established inseparable union of voice timbre and sex there is no turning back, for they cannot be sundered. The opera buffa was a natural rebellion against the unnatural; musicians and the public alike felt a profound and intimate relationship between voice and sex, vocal color and character; between the masculinity of the male voice and the femininity of the female there is no middle ground, and even less a neutral ground. The Encyclopedists had already castigated the Italians for their “blunder of having Alexander, Caesar, and Pompey settle the destiny of the world with women’s voices.” Even the countertenor is strange to us and will gain only limited acceptance. The handful of very fine countertenors active at present sing delicate Elizabethan music delightfully but in dramatic music, including the Handelian opera and oratorio, the ambiguous quality of the voice makes them only characterless puppets no matter how sensitively musical their phrasing and delivery.

  The singing voice is a direct expression of a personality. The castrato had neither sex nor natural personality; he was an instrument of prodigious versatility and perfection, but still a musical instrument and not a living human character. He destroyed the efficacy of the female voice by duplicating its register without the passion and the expressivity of the woman incarnate in her voice. Correspondingly, he could not truly express the instincts and desires of a man in the vocal range of a woman.38 It is generally assumed that sex as a distinction between singers did not matter very much in the age of the castrato. This is true to a certain extent; it is also true, however, that Handel was not unaffected by the sexless quality of the castrato voice. In any number of operas we find that while he did compose elaborate and very fine arias for the castrato hero, these arias seldom compare in warmth and passionate expression with those composed for women, for the bass, and later, in the oratorios, for the tenor. The indignant, or rollicking, or raging, or grieving bass part was one of Handel’s favorites and was seldom transposed; its register and the masculinity of the singer were positive attributes. Even the tenor, in those days almost always assigned to minor roles, received heroic tasks from Handel in a number of operas. In fact, Handel was among the first to establish the present role of the tenor in the dramatic scheme, though this took place in the oratorios. We may go even further and observe that if there is merely conventional music for the principal characters in a Handelian opera—and even some of the best contain such music—it is usually allotted to the castrato. Handel’s imagination was not as a rule fired by them; he had to put up with a convention he could not question in Italian opera, but which he eventually discarded in the English oratorio.

  In general, the Baroque composer often regarded the castrato as a virtuoso rather than a dramatic figure, belonging more to the décor than to the drama itself. This should be borne in mind when considering the shifting of coloratura arias written for soprano or alto to the tenor or baritone range, where they may be idiomatically strange. But since the castrato part was in many instances “concert music,” it could be simplified by removing excessive roulades and ornaments. Sung by a man, these arias would gain in compatibility with the fine “sex-conscious” songs written for natur
al voices. “There are two causes for Beauty,” says Sir Christopher Wren, “natural and customary. Natural is from Geometry consisting of Uniformity (that is Equality) and Proportion. Customary Beauty is begotten by the use of our senses to those objects which are usually pleasing to us from other causes, as particular Inclination breeds Love of Things not in themselves lovely.” It would be well if this important distinction were borne in mind whenever the question of preservation or reconstruction of a work of art arises, clearing the issue from the “woodsman, spare that tree” kind of argument. In sum, this loyalty to the original register of the castrato part is a lost cause. An able and historically schooled musician can always adjust the score with tact and taste to accommodate men to sing the parts of the “Italian capons.” Unless we are willing to accept the early 18th-century taste that ranked virtuosity above drama—and that is impossible to a public used to the modern opera theatre—we cannot resuscitate this Baroque opera in its original form.

  The makeshift subterfuge of giving the castrato part to a female soprano only aggravates a bad situation. A woman wearing the armor or toga of a man appears ridiculous to us. Orpheus, in Gluck’s opera, is about the only such principal role in the standard operatic repertory, and it concerns an alto castrato’s part. Although the female alto who these days sings the role has acquired a certain sanctioned musical quality, she has lost her personality in the bargain. Gluck, who lived at the time when the castrato was beginning to pass into limbo, was aware of the need of saving from oblivion a good opera designed for one, nor was he unmindful of the merciless satire he would draw from the French, who looked upon the castrato with scorn. His Orphée, the French version of Orfeo, in which the castrato part was altered to fit a tenor, is a far better opera—a least for us—than the original.