The principal attraction of the Arcady of the pastoral is untrammelled nature, the most natural though idealized milieu, into which even the most highly cultivated city dweller is attracted by atavistic instincts. In its “closedness,” which is the principal characteristic of this milieu, it rivals the four walls of the artist’s study. But, and this is very important and was well understood by all manner of poets and painters, the milieu is master, because it creates a unified mood which assures its particular individual effect. It affords a musical mood of a perfection seldom rivalled by any other. But it is something special that until the Romantic era no German composer understood. Bach and Mozart were untouched by nature; only the old Haydn in his oratorios found the delightfully intimate sounds for depicting the pastoral, and this, significantly, after his English sojourn.
But worship of nature cannot be taken for granted. It is the poets who deepen our consciousness of the beauties of the landscape, reflecting and enhancing a mood stemming from creation. With all its cynicism and sentimentality, the standard mixture of the period, England had an entire school of gentle nature-worshipping lyricists. In 1642 Sir John Denham published his Cooper’s Hill, to which “landscape poets” paid homage and which they frequently imitated for two centuries. And there were the “topographical poets”—almost every hill and valley in England had its poem. Surely, few anthologies of English verse are complete without such poems as Pope’s Windsor Forest. And this English longing for nature becomes pronounced in the Century of Reason!66
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THE PAGAN WORLD WAS peopled with demons, man was dependent on nature and lived in fear of it, but he also felt a profound union with nature in which he saw a living organism which had a soul. Christianity led him out of this union, placing him in a higher sphere by making him an independent spiritual being. The regrettable part of the divorce from nature, however, was that the great Pan who brought man close to nature was banished, together with his domain. Thus the Christian liberation had a shadow. Christianity, because it is not a nature religion but a cultural-historical one in which the naive feeling for oneness with nature has been suppressed, had to frown on Pan. This is an important and characteristic attitude, especially prominent in the Middle Ages and in certain phases of Protestantism. Nature was too closely connected with the pagan world that was to be extinguished, therefore it, too, had to be condemned. The inner life of nature frightened Christian men, it smacked of commerce with the very body of paganism.
The orthodox Lutheran Bach had absolutely no interest in nature, not even noticing it, whereas Handel revelled in it and seldom missed an opportunity to set it to music; he was the greatest of musical naturalists. It is not difficult to see an almost Hellenic pantheism in his nature pictures. His conception of nature was neither naively realistic nor speculative, but purely intuitive and idealistic, a very subjective conception, a poetic conception, but differing from that of the poets and musicians of the 19th century, who made a sharp distinction between nature and culture. His musical metaphors and descriptions show him a keen and receptive observer who does not fall into sentimental ecstasy when contemplating nature’s wonders but simply and openly enjoys them. His was not a systematic view, but a dramatic necessity that he seized with alacrity whenever the situation offered. Every nature scene in his works fulfills a dramatic role. The scene in Joshua where the sun is arrested in its orbit by the prophet’s command is one of the overwhelming moments that stand out even in Handel. It is magnificently descriptive, yet not realistic, and its mighty impact rests on its dramatic effectiveness, the synthesis of the poetic, the fantastic, and the dramatic. Culture and nature were for Handel concentric forces, and he never regarded nature as a mere decoration to accompany human drama, as did the Romantics.
In studying Handel’s musical language one immediately notices its pictorial quality. This language is not necessarily descriptive music, though he often uses an almost plastic “imitation.” The depiction of darkness in Israel in Egypt and the orchestral background to the Witch’s aria in Saul are magnificent “tone-paintings” of darkness, while the representation of the rising sun at the opening of the second act of Ariodante and the enchanting “crystal streams” in Susanna glorify the wonders of the day. The literature devoted to descriptive music, program music, and so on, abounds in nebulous terminology, of which “tone painting” and “tone poetry” (Schweitzer) seem to be applicable to Handel’s nature pictures. But these authors often forget that nature and music cannot be identical; this penetration into the secrets of nature must not be thought of as the harnessing of nature for ordinary human purposes; it was purely artistic, without practical intentions. The artistically beautiful—that is, what in modern terminology is called the artistic-formal phenomena—can be examined with scholarly exactitude, but the beauty of nature can be discussed only in poetic description or by metaphysical reasoning. We too often look for naturalistic or realistic representation and forget that nature gives the artist the impulse but not the means; it cannot suggest how to arrange the notes in the score. The miracle is the artist’s creative power, which transforms factual reality. The exegetes of “tone painting” and “word painting” forget that beyond and above the reality and symbolism of this “painting” there is a musical logic that must remain inviolate. Handel never attempted to use anything that is not expressable in purely musical terms. There is little imitation of natural sounds. Handel, a true Baroque composer, is more interested in “tone painting” that offers musical analogies rather than realistic imitation, and that hence is on a high artistic plane which calls for cultivated listening. Very often, in fact in most cases, he achieves his expressive ends by subtle, purely “abstract” musical means: irregular phrase building, asymmetry, displaced accents, cross rhythms, harmonic, especially modulatory operations, an imaginative subjection of the da capo principle to all manner of unexpected changes, and of course by extraordinarily sensitive orchestration.
All this was lost with the decline of the Baroque. Haydn still appreciated the “tone painting” of the Handelian era, though his wonderful little nature scenes were dismissed in the 19th century as childish tricks. But even before, Johann Georg Sulzer’s famous and influential Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771-1774) was already scornful of such Mahlereyen, singling out Handel as the worst offender. Whoever wrote the entry in this early lexicon of esthetics could not understand how a man of Handel’s talents, devoted to “the highest religious aims,” could so debase his art as to depict in an oratorio such “tasteless” things as the “jumping of locusts and lice.”
But Sulzer mistook the occasional literal realism for the principal aim and—together with most of the more recent critics—failed to understand that Handel was concerned less with the scenes through which he strolled than with the moods and memories they evoked. In truth, the relationship of the artist with nature is not perceptual but expressive; he does not so much want to paint the landscape he sees as to convey to us what nature has told him. Handel’s nature pictures are, like good landscape painting, not a bit of nature within a picture frame but poetically experienced reality, the realization of the artist’s dream. An esthetic phenomenon, such as music is, clearly differs from the physical in essence; we know that an open-air picture cannot be carried out of doors for it will immediately pale next to the colors and lights of nature. It must be understood that pictorialism in music is not so much imitation of physical effects as a peculiar sensibility that is able to avail itself of the most varied techniques, not for themselves, but for lyric-dramatic appropriateness. The artist’s relationship to nature is an expressive one; he can even represent with absolute conviction such moments as nature has forgotten to create or as no man other than he has seen. Or has there ever been a centaur? Such subjective experiences of the painter or composer cannot be turned into objective intentions.
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IT IS PERHAPS significant that at this late stage of the masque its early 18th-century librettists, led by John
Hughes (see p. 122), attempted to go beyond the “English” or “semf”-opera and create a sort of national opera by utilizing and assimilating the principal elements and devices of Italian opera. To their chagrin, they could not find English composers to realize this ambitious plan—the successful composers of even the masques were mostly foreigners, among them Germans. This is not difficult to understand. Italian musicians would not and could not make the necessary adjustment to English and the English stage, while English musicians had a very limited experience with Italian opera. Humphrey and Purcell would perhaps have been successful, but both were dead. On the other hand, the German immigrants were experienced musicians, thoroughly acquainted with Italian opera, but since this was to them an acquired form and style, they could adapt it to other purposes.
Thus it happened that Handel’s models for his genuinely English masque-pastoral were the works of another German, a well-trained and well-educated musician, John Christopher Pepusch (1667-1752), whom we have already encountered but who now looms as an important figure in Handel’s career. In some ways Pepusch was a kindred soul. He left his native Prussia because of dissatisfaction with the lack of political freedom and social dignity there, and he settled in London in his early thirties. He first played in the Drury Lane theatre orchestra, as Handel had played in the orchestra in Hamburg, advancing by 1707 to the post of staff arranger and composer. Pepusch was a learned theorist-historian, a passionate student of the writings of the authors of classical antiquity. In 1710 he was instrumental in founding the Academy of Ancient Music, the prototype of the modern collegium musicum, two years later becoming director of music at Cannons, a post he retained until 1732. In 1713 Oxford University created him Doctor of Music. When he married the celebrated and wealthy singer, Margherita de l’Épine, the affluence so acquired enabled him to devote more time to his antiquarian researches, which earned him a fellowship in the Royal Society. He was an excellent teacher and among his pupils we should mention William Boyce.
Pepusch should not be judged solely on the strength of the Beggar’s Opera. He was a good if not highly original composer, his influence on music in the Georgian era was considerable, and he was the first English musicologist—and one of the first in modern times anywhere—whose example undoubtedly spurred Burney and Hawkins to their efforts in musical historiography. Burney said that “Handel despised the pedantry of Pepusch, and Pepusch, in return, constantly refused to join in the general chorus of Handel’s praise.” The two composers were not on friendly terms, but that Burney goes too far in his judgment of this relationship and that Handel esteemed Pepusch’s qualities is proved by his entrusting part of the musical education of John Christopher Smith, Jr., whom he regarded almost as a son, to Dr. Pepusch. But more than that, he studied his quasi-rival’s music. Pepusch’s music to the English librettos was pleasant and workmanlike, but it could have served any other purpose, while Acis and Galatea, Handel’s very first venture in the genre, carried the English pastoral to its summit. The English quality is as securely present in this first essay at dramatic music for the English stage as it was in his first ceremonial music.
As we have seen in the chapter devoted to Handel’s Italian journey, he had composed an Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo in Italy. It was an intimate theatrical piece, the kind the Italians called a componimento da camera as opposed to the larger opera, the componimento teatrale. The English and the Italian works are not identical, though a good deal of the Italian serenata spirit as well as some thematic elements were taken over into the English pastoral. This is not to say that the early Italian work is not a delightful composition in its own right; its freshness and genuine youthfulness are as affecting as the beauty of the unsullied world of the fairy tale. But the work of the composer in his mid-thirties is not an essay; it is an incomparable masterpiece, one of the greatest he ever created, and it is also the crowning glory of a genre in both Italy and England. Upon arriving in England, Handel had discovered that the post-Renaissance flowering of the classic idyll was duplicated in English literary circles, notably among the men who gathered in Cannons, but that the particular genius of the English language and the air that flows over the English countryside endowed it with a tone of its own.
When Handel picked up the story in Italy it is very doubtful that he knew Lully’s fine setting, but in England he certainly came to know John Eccles’s masque. Eccles’s librettist was Pierre Antoine Motteux (1663-1718), a Frenchman by birth whose command of English was extraordinary. He translated the works of Rabelais and Cervantes’s Don Quixote, both in masterly fashion; we are dealing with a literary man of stature. But Motteux was nevertheless a wretched playwright and had no sense for the spirit of the classics. Judging from the silly farrago that is his libretto, he too was ignorant of Lully’s work. Handel’s libretto, like Eccles’s, was a pasticcio, but it was put together from the works and classical translations of several of the able Cannons literati, among them Pope, and some use was made of “Mr. Dryden, the Poet,” the chief redactor being Gay. Ovid was a facile and very elegant poet, and some of this elegance rubbed off on Gay, whose text is pleasant, full of colorful words and descriptive metaphors such as always affected and inspired Handel. Upon this text Handel created an idyll, an intimate little drama, which was once more a componimento da camera. Such idylls were by no means rare in England—the greatest of them undoubtedly being As You Like It—but Handel created from the intriguing mixture of Baroque pathos and Renaissance bucolic poetry what one might call a heroic-sentimental idyll, no longer the naive-exotic of the Renaissance and of his early Italian Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo, but a highly artistic stylization altogether free of the ingenuous. It gives the impression of realism but this effect is attained by pseudo-naturalistic techniques. The composer’s imagination does not create a new world from reality, rather it eliminates essential conditions of the latter, for it sees the world through the glass of an artistic optimism, creating a utopian Arcadia of the past. But it is also of the present, because this kind of idyll is an artistic symbol, a picture in which the poet or composer lives out a natural desire.
The greatest difference from the early Italian setting of this pastoral theme, and one that in fact was an altogether new departure for Handel, was the use of the chorus. With “Wretched lovers” he far exceeds the boundaries of the serenata and is within the region of the choral music drama. The incentive came, of course, from English poetry and English theatre music, though the power of characterization through music he could not have received from Pepusch: it is Handel’s own. Even this master of choral writing seldom achieved such a dramatically “through-composed” scene as this. The beginning, a slow dirge in which the contrapuntal parts are loath to release the suspensions, introduces something new in Handel’s artistic world: this, in tone and attitude, is the chorus of the Attic tragedy. Once the contemplative and commentary part ends, the pace quickens and so does the excitement, until the intricate counterpoint is replaced by shouts. Handel charged the bucolic atmosphere with tragedy, but realizing that despite all its expressive beauty this chorus could destroy the spirit of the pastoral, with a master stroke he removed the anguish by the simple means of not taking the raging Polyphemus too seriously. In less subtle hands Polyphemus would have become a plain villain. Handel made the ungainly giant fierce but in a blustery way, and this monster is also amorous; his confession of love, “O ruddier than the cherry,” restores the fairy tale atmosphere. The opening chorus, “Oh the pleasures of the plains,” is the quintessence of the pastoral, the drone bass and the lightly floating recorders creating a bit of Arcadia straight from Sicily. But “Hush, ye pretty warbling choir” is English pastoral in excelsis. Acis’s love songs are also affectingly lyrical. In the closing scene the spectators, again the Greek chorus, are seized with grief, blurting their lines between long pauses as if they cannot collect themselves. The trio “The flocks shall leave the mountains” admirably sums up the dramatic situation. It is a genuine ensemble, remarkably varied in the comb
ination of expression, sound, rhythm, and dynamics, in which each figure retains its individuality, though as a character portrayal Polyphemus towers over the others.
The dying Acis’s “Help, Galatea” was likened by Hugo Leichtentritt to Adam Krieger’s Venus and Adonis, though he ruefully wonders whether Handel actually knew that song. It is clear beyond a doubt that it was not Venus and Adonis but Dido and Aeneas that haunted Handel; the Purcellian flavor, though subtle and anything but literal, is unmistakable throughout this work, which relies on very few borrowings. The latter are more in the nature of incipits from earlier Italian cantatas. The arias are, all but one, da capo. This has been cited as constituting a relic from the opera, but significantly, the most conspicuous feature of the seria, the castrato, is missing. It is much more likely that, considering the rather formal grace of the pastoral, Handel did not see any reason for abandoning the da capo. A close examination of the score will immediately disclose that he was aware of the freedom from the conventions of the seria offered by this unusual libretto, for he ignored the mandatory sequence of recitative and aria, proceeding with a musical line forming a wreath of idyllic fancies in an almost unbroken chain. This is what eventually made the oratorio such a different and gratifying medium for him, and it is incomprehensible why, once having tasted this freedom and having so clearly recognized the dramatic and musical possibilities, Handel failed to draw the necessary conclusion.
The story of this score, which was an immediate success with the public and continued to be so throughout Handel’s life, is a sad one: after its initial performance at Cannons it was never again heard in its pristine form until our day. But even now a truly faithful performance with the original orchestration is a rarity. There were many editions of it, and among the many truncated and pirated ones is the 1743 full score by Walsh, Jr., which is one of the two full scores of a choral work published in the composer’s lifetime. (The other was Alexander’s Feast.) Since almost the entire original version is extant and most of the additions and emendations are known, an able editor should be in a position to present us with a good score.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 37