George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

  Ever since its inception, the musical drama, whether opera or oratorio, has been more interested in historical-mythological subjects than has the spoken drama (though at times the theatre was historically oriented, especially in France and England). The esthetic significance of mythology rests on the fact that concrete stories project in concrete symbols the problems of man’s life. These stories are not so rigid as to preclude a great variety of sentiments and feelings, though the mythological subject, or history become mythology, unquestionably takes away from the dramatist some of his independence in dealing with his subjects. On the other hand, the myth is living naturalism, unfaded history, ever fresh and ever present; it offered Handel a ready-made, naive, and truly epic-dramatic synthesis that is timelessly poetic. Historical or scriptural mythology can be assumed to be unquestioningly accepted by the listener. This gives an immediate advantage to the composer, who can then do more or less what he likes, and the listener may be led unresisting, and often unaware that a composer like Handel does not intend to sacrifice his characters as individuals in their own right to the impersonal forces and tendencies they exemplify. There can be found in even the most monumental personage an irrational residue which the great artist can seize upon and can convert into memorable characterization. Librettist and composer can invent and fill in as much as they please, and few of the characters of such a remote era can be glaringly misrepresented, few facts offensively distorted. This is propitious for the dramatist, and Handel does like to concentrate on invented detail, concealing or merely alluding to the main biblical theme. The oratorios are, indeed, full of “sensible perplexity.” The historical writer and composer must resuscitate life anew, from pieces that have fallen, forever mingled with the unknowable secrets of the past, into the great pit from which they can never again be drawn out untangled. They must be seen with the aid and illumination of intuition, with the power of the force of imagination. Still, the reconstructed picture can be true and deep.

  The scribes of the Old Testament wrote as chroniclers, without the force of actual experience, whereas the creative artist can play with his pliable material; he can shape, motivate, and combine freely, having only to remember that the illusion must be perfect and artistically authentic. The biblical dramatist can select models for the individuals and peoples of the past from the raw materials of his own present, like the painter or novelist when he turns to historical subjects. In them such a procedure is almost self-evident; in a musician, composing on texts culled from the Bible, it is less easy to perceive. The musical language that Handel uses in his great biblical oratorios is replete with the echoes of great events and great men, but its spirit is individual, and it has an artistic unity wholly personal. It echoes not the language of the age it depicts but of the age of its composer; everything becomes the dramatic present.

  The Old Testament frame is often insufficient, forcing Handel into compromises. At times his protagonists, as he depicts them, have no authentic place in this biblical world, and the ideas the librettists put into their mouths are not convincing enough to permeate their character. Some of the librettists’ creations are more, some less than what their roles demand. But when Handel was secure in his bearings he could fuse his figures with any background. The old woman Nitocris in Belshazzar grows out of her surroundings with absolute naturalness. The situation into which she was born demands exactly the type of creature she is. Her tragedy touches the essential features of her being: friendship, maternal love, politics. But though the Old Testament offers attractive and musically advantageous subjects, with ever-changing scenes, to Handel it had an attraction and meaning that went far beyond the lively story, the exotic milieu, and the colorful landscape. He turned to it for two reasons. The first, as we have seen, was the special position it held in Protestant England. It furnished him with models, lessons, symbols, majestic statutes that he could apply to the nation. But, secondly, it provided him with heroic characters in action, which he could elaborate in his own fashion. The statutes are before us in utmost clarity; the men appear in their most passionate moments. The treatment of the individual characters was entirely personal, the work of the born dramatist who espies life, but the characterization of nations and institutions was English and could have come from no other source.

  Handel’s great strength rests on his ability to fuse psychological penetration with representation and then to present the combination in wondrous pictures and expressive colors. His grand tableaux sparkle with fiery life, history made human and contemporary; their message is conveyed with all the complications and contradictions of life, yet clearly and unmistakably. It was not so much the quality of the libretto that mattered as its emotional possibilities. The rhyme could be atrocious, the story flat, but if it presented dramatic situations and characters that could be fastened upon, a poetaster would do almost as well as Milton. Everywhere Handel shows a strong sympathy—even kinship—with those of his characters who, once they have thrown the dice, be they kings, prophets, heathen, or scoundrels, go towards their aim by means fair or foul and cannot be deflected from it.

  Incidentally, Handel obviously did not find anything objectionable about the heathen; in fact, he seems to have liked them and shared enthusiastically in their pantheism and nature worship. Thus the Baalites in Athalia are far from detestable; their music is most pleasant and the choral sound delectably tender. It is interesting to observe how often Handel simply overrules the librettist, refusing to follow him, by either removing or changing disparaging or contemptuous words, or setting them with a totally different sense. In Theodora the Romans, despicable in Morell’s words, are not at all unsympathetically treated in Handel’s music; they act like Romans, in the light in which Romans see the world. Streatfeild noticed this tendency in Handel, praising “the voluptuous beauty of heathendom” in Athalia, while Edward Fitzgerald thought that “Handel was a good old pagan at heart.” A pagan he was not, but a humanist always.

  Categorical distinction among genres always seems arbitrary whenever a significant new type appears. The English oratorio as created by Handel refuses to be tabulated by any method of classification deserving to be called precise. Should it be considered to belong to the oratorio genre that preceded it, or is it something entirely new? In Handel’s time they made at least this distinction in England: a work was called an “oratorio or sacred drama” if it had a biblical theme and otherwise was variously known as a “musical drama,” “pastoral,” or “ode.” Following the Victorians, we place even the classical pastorals and English operas such as Acis and Galatea and Semele among the oratorios and, what is worse, perform them as if they were oratorios. Leichtentritt deals with all choral works other than anthems and Te Deums under the heading “oratorio,” while Handel, a Symposium, divides these works into secular and sacred categories. Thus, while the collection of essays just named is altogether modern and critical, it does maintain a classification that is basically misleading. Larsen makes the following subdivisions within two main categories: heroic-, anthem-, and narrative-oratorio within the genus “Biblical Oratorios,” and concert- or cantata-, and mythological-oratorio within the class of “Non-Biblical Oratorios.” However, as we have seen in Chapter III, while in Italy the distinction between sacred and secular cantatas, serenata and oratorio, was tenuous if it existed at all, the English oratorio represents a new category in the sense of Brunetière’s conception of the rise, predominance, and decline of genres. “Handelian oratorio” is, therefore, a term justified by the uniqueness of the species, but within this generic term we must not include works that do not belong there. The arbitrary religious interpretations play havoc with Handel’s intentions not only where they palpably fly in the face of the composer’s expressed wishes, but even where these intentions are not clear. Winton Dean was the first historian clearly to see these contradictions; his classification of Handel’s oratorios into dramatic and non-dramatic classes brings sense and order into this chaotic situation; it should give Handelian criti
cism its bearings.

  While some of its musical ingredients go back to, say, Carissimi, in concept and tone the Handelian oratorio is altogether different from either the Italian or the German type. Religion, politics, technical necessities, influences coming from sister forms, all played an important part in its formation even though it was carried by strong individual creative force. Handel united three different and seemingly irreconcilable strains in the English oratorio: Old Testament story, Shakespearean characterization, and classical form. Of his ability to create human character in music we have seen many examples in the operas. In the oratorio, the biblical milieu notwithstanding, what he wanted was simply to seize those moments when fate elicits the supreme possibilities of life. In order to arrive at these moments, his protagonists must first traverse a long road. It was this road only that presented any problem to the composer, but if his librettist made it even moderately passable, the result was a masterpiece; his music picks up what it has to say as naturally as a mother picks up her child. Handel’s musical language at times hovers between the extremes of the lyric and the epic-dramatic, thus creating the particular and individual forms that made the Handelian oratorio a most personal and inimitable vehicle. The other two strains, Old Testament and Greek drama, are much more difficult to assess even though their role is paramount and pervasive.

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  NOWHERE DID Handel acknowledge any particular indebtedness to classical antiquity, yet the conclusion is inescapable that his oratorio, with its choral action and commentary, owes a great deal to the Greek theatre. Handel’s studies in the humanistic school of Halle gave him a good foundation, but it was only in Italy that he discovered that this classic spirit does not exist in books alone, to be admired from afar as a magnificent example of the culture of an age now dead. He realized that the classical legacy is not restrictive but is an artistic force. Coming face to face with the spirit of antiquity stirred him as deeply as Mozart was stirred when he first met the spirit of living polyphony in Bach. Mozart, too, knew polyphony as it was taught in school, but here it was a living force, an ideal of beauty. Handel made the classical ideal of beauty his own, first expressing it in formal opera. Opera, the mother of all modern music, has stood from its inception to this very day under the influence of the classical spirit, at first overwhelmingly, after the 18th century in ever diminishing but still perceptible degree. Then in England Handel discovered a very particular English conception of Hellenism: the combination of the Puritan Bible with pagan poetry as exemplified in Milton.

  We have come a long way from the time when literature, music, and the arts were indivisible. Certainly, in the culture of classical Greece, literature was primus inter pares, but today it is mainly her art that still exerts a tremendous influence. For centuries upon centuries thousands and thousands of men who did not understand a word of Greek and were never interested in any other aspect of Greek civilization, endeavored to imitate or utilize Greek art.

  The English spirit annexed that of the classical era with alacrity. The Augustan Age, like its Renaissance forebear, still looked upon an idealized vision of classical antiquity, a life where beauty and freedom met in a perfect union never again attained. To the English men of letters, especially the poets, Greece was the gateway to Paradise, and this in spite of the fact that the Greek language itself was always something of a luxury in English culture. It was, Dr. Johnson said, like lace—“every man gets as much of it as he can.” In the heyday of English classicism it was rather the Latin poets who were the common possession of all educated people; the heroic age of verse translation, Pope notwithstanding, was a Latin age. This was a matter of natural affinity: Latin is woven into the very texture of literary, and in particular rhetorical, English. For the same reason it is in rhetorical passages, that is, in the speeches of tragedy and sometimes of epic poetry, that the line connecting Greek with English letters is most direct and unbroken, though the spirit of Greece was conveyed through Latin translations. The Puritans’ deep-seated aversion to the many classical elements in Latin Catholicism, to the statuary and pictures, to the veneration of the great pagan, Aristotle, as a quasi saint, should not mislead us; it could not efface the memory of Greek poetry, the spirit of Pindar, which remained living. This heritage must have been responsible for the fact that it was the English who first gave the modern world a deep and wide-ranging poetry.

  It is no accident that the drama, the most immediate representation of reality, has such an ancient and distinguished history in England. The theatre lost its religious connotations sooner in England than anywhere else and was no longer the dilettante undertaking of guilds and clerks as in the time of the mystery plays; professional actors appeared and the theatre grew as opera did in Italy. These actors were either servants or protégés of court and aristocracy, those quarters from which the wind of the Renaissance was blowing. As we look around we can see that these English poets and playwrights knew and practiced everything in vogue in Europe. Spenser imitates Petrarch, Ronsard, Virgil, as well as Tasso, who was his contemporary. The Fairy Queen, that magnificent, decorative, Ariosto-like epic, one would be tempted to call un-English were it not for the luxuriant flood of English verse. But where decoration is for the Italian convention or substitution, for the Englishman it is the continuation of reality. It was the English poets who gave the world the engaging and modern charm that appears in Spenser, the construction of a fairy world from pictures, similes, rhymes, old and unusual words, alliteration, and assonance. Thus the Englishman, who always wanted reality, made real what is beyond reality.

  Chapman translated Homer and Hesiod; Marlowe delved into Musaeus, the last great poet of declining Greek lyricism, the incomparable storyteller of love and death, of “the waves of the sea and of love,” sweet, warm eroticism; Hero and Leander became the period’s favorite piece of literature. Milton—like Racine—was convinced that he constructed his works on classical principles and so were the Augustans who followed him and who once more translated Homer. But all these men also knew the Bible, and of course several of Handel’s librettists knew it ex officio, staying pretty close to the original wording even when dramatizing Scripture. Though clergymen, they also knew the classics and dramaturgy. Even that graceless pedant, the Reverend Thomas Morell, D.D., was the author of a lexicon of Greek prosody and wrote such classical plays as Prometheus Bound. In the universities, where at the opening of the 18th century instruction and religious controversy were preferred to original and critical scholarship, there were nevertheless men of great learning, and gradually the English school of Hellenic studies became an inspiration to the great Continental scholars.91

  The classical dramatic tradition reached England in the 16th century through the translations of Seneca, and that influence remained strong. Soon, however, the English dramatists evinced a predilection for native subjects taken from English history. This national-historical drama reached its summit—and its virtual end—in Shakespeare. Neither the religious drama nor the classical drama as represented by the academic plays proved to be congenial and fruitful in the 17th century; it was in the masque, the pastoral, and the comedy that this period produced its best. Then in the latter part of the century, under the influence of the French classical theatre, English drama returned to rhyme in the “heroick play.” The best of the playwrights, such as Otway, though indebted to the Elizabethans, leaned heavily on the French. By the time of Pope, English tragedy was completely hamstrung by the French model, and as late as the 1750s, Hume the philosopher advised his kin, Hume the playwright, “to read Shakespeare, but to get Racine by heart.” The old plays, as Evelyn, referring to Hamlet, pointed out half a century earlier, had “begun to disgust the refined age.” Yet, the luminosity and the lucidity of the great Augustan literary men notwithstanding, French classical drama was essentially alien to the English mind, which, through all changes and vicissitudes, was moored to Elizabethan taste. Even under the Restoration there had never been any real Gallicizing of the English the
atre. But Shakespearean productions during the 18th century attempted to profit, if in a naive way, by the precept and example of the French. Aaron Hill, Cibber, and others were trying to make use of French drama for the English stage, but theirs was a crude imitation. The two nations were able to learn from each other, no doubt, but even in the use which each makes of its acquisitions they reveal the impassable gulf between them. Soon definite attempts were made at reconciling the classical spirit with the tastes and preferences of the nation. These tastes and preferences were naturally influenced by the conditions and restrictions of the period as well as by the social composition of the theatrical audiences—and the odds against the reconciliation were high on all counts.