George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

  Perhaps the most essential difference, subtle on the surface but in reality the key to the situation, was the unwillingness of the English composers to trespass on the rights of the words. In opera there are situations when the music must go its own way, even if it violates proper prosody, but this the English would not accept; declamatory niceties must always be observed and musical rhythm must always yield to speech rhythm. This sort of music can be theatrical but it seldom becomes operatic. Yet the incredibly rapid triumph of Italian opera in London can only be explained by the fact that the ground was prepared for it by a number of English composers. Humphrey, Blow, and Purcell all knew and used the operatic musical language, their incidental music shows many examples of it, especially in the ariosos, which are essentially operatic essays. John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1683), the principal musico-dramatic work of the early Restoration, turns definitely toward the operatic; the decorative mythological figures begin to be dramatic human beings. With that we have arrived at the great figure of Purcell, who could have created English opera; that, however, is a problem by itself.63

  When the “new Italian Manner: all sung” reached England with full force in the first decade of the 18th century, a realignment took place of a swiftness unprecedented in English cultural history. Within six years opera became fully established, but was surrendered to the Italians; the English composers refused to go along and held onto their own form of musical theatre. Thomas Clayton, an insignificant composer but the first English musician to present a “full” opera, was aware of the opposition he had to face. In the preface to his Arsinoe (1705, see also p. 115), he tried to forestall it by the following statement:

  The Musick being recitative, may not, at first, meet with that general Acceptation, as is to be hoped for, from the Audience’s being better acquainted with it: but if this Attempt shall be a means of bringing this manner of Musick to be used in my native Country, I think my Study and Pains very well employed.

  The only serious attempt after Purcell and before the arrival of Handel was made in 1707 by John Eccles with his Semele, recognized as a full-fledged opera in the “new Italian manner.” But it never reached the stage.64

  Acis and Galatea, composed sometime during 1718, though called “a masque,” must have been regarded by Handel as an English version of the serenata. Indeed, in its third reworking—that is, in its second English version of 1732—Acis and Galatea was called a serenata, possibly because it was equipped with some Italian airs. Subsequently, when it became once more all English, “Pastoral Entertainment” was added to the title; but at its last revival, ten years after the revision, the title reverted to the original “masque,” and the score was published in 1743 under this heading. This alone shows that the problem Handel was facing was not so much that of a new genre as of a new language.

  Nothing differentiates men’s spiritual life more than language. We can scarcely think beyond the framework that the inherited national tongue sets up, for language is both manner and content, not only the tool of literature but its kernel, its primeval element, its inspiration. What style is to the individual writer, language is to the nation: c‘est l’homme, c’est le peuple. Those whose language refuses to be easily bent to foreign rhythms, like for instance the French, are restricted in the possibility of cross-fertilization and rapprochement. (Perhaps it is for this reason that the French are so chauvinistic.) Italian poetic language, which Handel had completely absorbed, was the oldest and most developed of modern languages; Dante died more than two centuries before Ronsard and Shakespeare were born. This language rhymes of itself, and can raise banality and nothingness to music. English with its many one-syllable words is as compact as Italian, but its verbal music is slower, and therefore when Italian texts are translated by anyone less than a good poet the English version cannot keep up with the tempo of the original. That English is more varied than Italian and capable of the most unexpected turns does not help in this regard. On the other hand, the advantages of original English versification over that of other modern languages are obvious when we see bilingual editions.

  Had Handel approached his task, as did his compatriot Pepusch, by simply setting English words the same way as he did Italian or German, the results would have been altogether different, but he espied the genius of the language of his adopted country. Contrary to popular belief, Handel appreciated good poetry for his texts—if he could obtain it. Nor is it true that he had little sense for the English language. He may have had a thick German accent, and he may have mispronounced words (though the many funny anecdotes are palpably exaggerations), and there are in his works some awkwardly accented places, but he knew the language well, down to the important detail of the position of single words. It is truly remarkable how felicitously Handel sets English words to music in his early works.

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  IT WOULD BE foolish to attempt a full historical sketch of the masque. In the first place, it is an enormously complicated and not yet fully explored territory of English literary and theatrical history; in the second, by the time Handel arrived on the scene, the species had little in common with the original masque.

  Our information concerning the period when the masque left the court and entered the theatre is scant, but we know of course that when the Italian wave of dramatic music reached England in the 17th century it found there a highly developed dramatic literature that was unique in post-classical times. The Latins have an innate sense for form and construction that led them to the creation of patterns, such as the commedia dell‘arte or the Spanish drama. Formal patterns tend to create types: the types of the commedia dell’arte became treasured figures for centuries. The Italian and Spanish public, like the public of the Greek and Latin theatre, knew the pattern, the types, the characters, and their stories; what they demanded was variety in action and inventiveness in the application of the métier. The English concept was different, for the English were attached to individual character and its representation, and whenever the Mediterranean prototype took root in England it was subjected to the dictates of the national taste. In extreme cases, such as the opera seria, the differences remained irreconcilable, for to the English a drama purely in music was unnatural and a contradiction in terms. They did accept a pattern in the early masque based on a succession of dances, but eventually the pull of the national tradition proved to be stronger. The core of this tradition was the belief that however closely music, dancing, and decor may associate themselves with certain forms of the theatre, their role should not be more than adventitious. Music and the dance are external, though effective, adjuncts which, as we have seen when discussing opera in Chapter VII, can have structural importance, but which cannot usurp the primacy of brisk and vivacious dialogue, the heart of the theatre. Dryden’s dictum that “the greatest pleasure of the audience is a chase of wit, kept up on both sides, and swiftly managed” is the perfect summary, the basic maxim of the English theatre. The English were not disposed to permit their spoken theatre to go the way of the Italian Renaissance theatre, to allow it to be extinguished by (to use Voltaire’s phrase) “that beautiful monster, opera.” The Italians were willing and eager to create a tabula rasa, not so the English; they took the large step from madrigal to masque, but at the final important step, an independent musical stage, they balked.

  We do have a concrete statement from Ben Jonson about a masque presented in 1617 at Lord Hayes’s for the entertainment of the French Ambassador, which clearly refers to an operatic construction. “The whole Masque was sung after the Italian manner, stylo recitative [!] by Master Nicholas Lanier.” This is a remarkable statement for so early a date in operatic history, and it is remarkably explicit, but if it really represents what the words say, which is doubtful,65 it was an exception that created no school. By the time of Davenant’s Salmacida Spolia (1640), the last and most splendid of the Stuart masques, the fate of this genre was sealed; it merged into the semi-opera long before Handel arrived on the scene.

  At this poi
nt the question arises: what about Milton’s Comus, one of the most enchanting poems in the history of English letters? It was called a masque. But Comus is sui generis, and as such exempt from any classification, for although clearly a pastoral play, in Milton’s hands that genre took on a multitude of new colors from the mixture of Hellenic rhythm, Platonic philosophy, classical beauty, and the enchantment of nature.

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  THE RENAISSANCE rediscovered and imitated the Greek idyll and the Latin eclogue, uniting them in the pastoral play or drama, the earliest known example of which is Poliziano’s Favola di Orfeo (1472). The humanists were, of course, not able to graft onto the living tissue of Italian culture an artificially resuscitated species—the pastoral soon turned into opera, an altogether original creation of the Baroque—but classical taste, the sense for crystalline form, which the pastoral imparted, took root and sprouted. The much admired models of this genre were Tasso’s Aminta (1581) and Guarini’s Pastor Fido (1590). By Guarini’s time pastoral poetry was perhaps the finest branch of Italian lyricism, admired and imitated everywhere. Curiously, and in contradiction to the rappresentazione, the pastoral, the naive love story, while of popular origin, was less close to the people. It developed into a great literature of lyric poetry, but its artificial shepherds and nymphs, its manneristic virtuosity of style, which enraptured the connoisseurs, did not move the people.

  The exquisitely artificial construction of the pastoral love poetry of the late 16th century and its stylized vocabulary, at times so dazzling and yet so often monotonous, gave little scope for original expression. But the pastorals proved to be wonderfully congenial for musical setting; they may have had little variation except in the melodious versification and in the range of allegorical invention, but they often possessed considerable beauty of poetical detail, combining fancy and artificiality in such a degree that the impression made was one of romantic caprice. The pastoral became a world genre, and its beautiful artificiality seems to have clung to it in all its national variants all the way from Sannazaro to Metastasio, from Rémy Belleau to Quinault, and from Sir Philip Sidney to Pope.

  The pastoral was introduced into England during the reign of Elizabeth, Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) being its first example. In the beginning the English pastoral was deliberately “popular” compared to the aristocratic Italian variety, but with Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia the colloquial idiom was abandoned and the spirit became rarefied. Shakespeare liked to blend elements from it into his plays, and others found it appropriate as a vehicle for lyricism. In individual instances Jonson, Fletcher, and others actually tried to rival Tasso and Guarini, as can be seen in such works as Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, or Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd. The neatness and symmetry of the Italian pastorals was at times opposed by the reckless extravagance of diction and rhetoric in the English ones, the flowing rhyme in the lyrics by impetuous blank verse. In Italy, after reaching its peak early in the 17th century, the pastoral declined, but in Jacobean England it continued to flourish, calling forth a rich lyric poetry whose most noted figure was Robert Herrick (1591-1674). What interests us particularly is that with Herrick we leave the spirit of abstract humanism of the Italians and enter the world of that peculiarly English appreciation and quiet worship of the countryside which so profoundly affected Handel. When Handel came to England some of the older pastorals were still known, as well as the newer ones of Ambrose Philips, Congreve, and Pope, though in Pope’s pastorals artificiality overpowered the genuinely bucolic. The line of demarcation remains, however, indistinct. Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess is sometimes referred to as a masque, while Comus, called a masque, is closer to the pastoral drama. A variant of the pastoral drama was the “piscatorial” in which the place of the shepherds is taken by fishermen. In the next century it was Shaftesbury’s philosophy as set forth in his Characteristics (1711) that provided the intellectual and sentimental basis for the preoccupation with nature (as Ruskin did in the 19th century), though sentimental naturalistic tendencies are, and always have been, part of the English character. Soon this renewed nature worship developed into a furor hortensis, a passion for landscape gardening, but it also influenced the poets just at the time when Handel joined the Chandos circle. His librettist, John Gay, was imbued with this spirit and also with the Latin classics, selecting his story from Ovid. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the work of a poet who said that even as a child whatever he had to say came out as poetry, was the favorite storybook of the centuries. The stories of Pyramus and Thisbe, Daedalus and Icarus, Philemon and Baucis, were all set to music, but Acis and Galatea was a special favorite.

  The literary circle in which Handel moved was very much interested in the pastoral, and they knew not only their English, Italian, and Latin poets, but also Theocritus and Longus. There was nothing like this in Germany during Handel’s youth, nor was there, in fact, until the Romantic era. But even the Italian serenata, glittering with a constant reproduction of the same family of stories, while elegant and charming, did not have the enchanting bucolic spirit of the English pastoral which (with Herrick) sang

  ... of brook, of blossoms, birds and bowers

  but also of

  ... bridegrooms, brides, and their bridal cakes.

  This is the rich musical accompaniment to the natural setting of England. Little mythology is left in these pastorals, only the gods of nature and of love, and there is no empty decoration. Yet the mood of the idylls can be akin to that of tragedy—their beauty comes from the same roots. Idyll and tragedy, these are the two extremes reached by Handel’s dramatic works. The tragic and majestic Handel we know, but the idyllic we do not, because those who have regarded him as a seer with a sacred mission have been embarrassed by the man of the theatre, the ardent lyricist, and the lover of pagan nature. The affection for nature that is the stamp of the Englishman only fortified in Handel an innate quality. The pastoral-bucolic is seen in his work throughout his life, beginning with Il Trionfo o del tempo e del disinganno of his youth, and ending with its English version, The Triumph of Time and Truth; he could still see the beauties of nature after his eyes were darkened. The lark and the nightingale, the turtledove and the linnet sing in solos and choruses, the wind rustles and the brook bubbles, the flies buzz and the bees hum to make the “Heart the seat of soft delight.” Even the dales and groves, the valleys and “shady woods” and the “barren breasts of the mountains” have their music. In the first Acis, the Italian serenata of 1708, there is a delicate scene in “S‘agita in mezzo all’onde,” where a boat rocks gently on the waves created by the violins. But the bucolic quality is not restricted to the serenata and pastoral; many of the cantatas, even the sacred ones such as Silete venti (see p. 67), are suffused with it.

  Handel’s orientation as an artist was towards man and nature. What in the eyes of the champions of the Enlightenment appeared as the speculative theses of Reason implicit in Nature, to him appeared as the divinations of a universal life pulsating in the veins of nature. His sense of the country scene and the unhurried enduring life of its uninvaded quietness was never jaded; its everlasting miracle, its inexhaustible felicity, gives radiance to his music. As an observer he sees with the perception of a poet and with the selective eye of an artist, and nearly always he convinces his hearer that he has been there and speaks truly. But nature is a dangerous and destructive force from the point of view of Christian thought, and those who profess to see in Handel Klopstock’s flaming Christian fervor are still afraid of nature and are blind to her beauties conjured up by Handel with the most delicate poetic grace. They know but dare not admit that in Acis and Galatea that “strange God” who silenced the great Pan and the sweet eroticism of nature is nowhere to be found. Because this important and profoundly characteristic facet of Handel’s genius, his ability (in Blake’s words)

  To see a world in a grain of sand

  And a heaven in a wild flower

  is almost completely obscured by the image of the scriptural
composer, we had better take a closer look at it before we proceed.

  When Taine, the philosopher and art historian, promulgated his famous doctrine that the artist is determined by his race, environment, and times, he attempted to transplant an idea from the natural sciences into the world of the spirit. The upshot of the rigorous application of a doctrine only certain elements of which hold true was that man was thought to achieve undisturbed personality and unity only in his ancestral place, being everywhere else rootless, if not entirely lost. This is a very shaky theory, amply contradicted by Handel himself, though for a time it seemed plausible.

  Still, there are occasions when the environment, the attractive milieu becomes dominant, as in the pastoral. In its idealistically closed valleys, its meadows grazed by sheep with silver bells on their necks, it completely overshadows the men in the picture. This countryside has its own laws, and its inhabitants, whether nymphs and fauns and shepherdesses, or merely city folk seeking the idylle champêtre, see the world in different colors. Earthly worries, earthly ties, and earthly consequences are far removed from this dreamlike atmosphere; what happens here is not very important, only how it happens.