George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

  “As the social changes in the 18th century gave a new influence to the middle classes and then to the democracy, the aristocratic class, which represented the culture at the opening stage, is gradually pushed aside; its methods become antiquated, and its conventions cease to represent the ideals of the most vigorous part of the population.”92 The domestic tragedy of Lillo and Moore and the rising novel show this convincingly, moving from the heroic-classical to the everyday. Significantly, the date of Pamela, of the new morality, is practically the date of Messiah. In 1740, when Handel made his great “decision,” there was no English tragedy, no English opera, no masque, only good comedy turning towards burlesque. Distaste for and moral revulsion from the theatre were by no means restricted to militant Puritans; a large segment of the population shared these attitudes before and after the Commonwealth. There was a great deal in the theatre of the age that seemed to Handel (as it does to us) indecorous and coarse, but he was equally repelled by the sentimental comedy that was the expression of the playwrights’ repentance. We have no record of his attending any of these plays, but many of them were performed in the theatres with which he was associated, and it is highly improbable that he was not aware of them. At any rate, we do know that he read the newspapers and pamphlets, which were full of theatre criticism and controversy, and he had many acquaintances in the literary world.

  The moment was crucial for him; opera was a total failure, yet he could not compose a “modern” drama because he was altogether wedded to mythology, and contemporary life had no mythology, it could not fuse the timelessly poetic with the excitingly actual. To him the bourgeois drama was too close and hence trivial, its heroes were painted with exclusively local colors; their pathos therefore lacked drama and the natural poetic resonance of ancient tradition. The great parallel of the old drama, that of ethics and esthetics, was missing. Style galant and Rococo tried to reconcile classical antiquity with “progress,” but could not muster enough strength for either tragedy or epic poetry. It excised the essence of Calderón and Racine, substituting bombast and elegantly effective emptiness, while Dryden and Fénelon diluted epic poetry. Under these circumstances, the Handelian music drama, the oratorio, was not, like the bourgeois drama, the satisfaction of an organic necessity but the isolated creation of a man of genius responsive to the cultural currents of his adopted country. It has been misunderstood because its resonances were mistuned, but once the components of those complicated chords are recognized and brought into concord, we can understand and follow the astonishing and unique development of the English oratorio.

  One of these components was, as we have said, classical Greek drama. Greek drama was in intimate connection with the national religion, and like Aeschylus, Handel was imbued with the lofty moral and political convictions of his society. For, like the Greeks, he was seeking the great necessities, the inexorable logic of events, the fatefulness, the eternal validity of conflicts not restricted by time and place. But between the world of ancient Greece and Handel’s was a great gulf. In order to bridge it, to endow his drama with the feeling of immediacy and national consciousness, Handel had to transfer the spirit of the Panhellenic nationalism of Greek drama to English nationalism. The English Bible was the providential means at hand. Without taking into consideration the national significance of the English Old Testament it would not be possible to account for the Handelian oratorio. Nevertheless, that not only its specifically English middle-class attitude but also its magnificent artistic quality and integrity were turned into an “adventitious sanctity” was a perversion of Handel’s intentions, a grievous calamity that will be very difficult to undo unless we return his oratorio to its rightful place, the theatre. And that theatre was the theatre of the Greeks.

  Sophocles dealt with religious myths, national, political, and ethical ideas, but everything, including the ever-recurring idea of destiny, was treated from the dramatic angle, as an instrument of human characterization. Aristotle had already defined “mythus” as an element in tragedy, where it stands very nearly for what we call the “plot.” All these human beings of the Sophoclean drama are alive, because what dominates them is emotion. Similarly, the subject of Handel’s drama is man, with the words and gestures of particular states of mind; religious abstraction is thereby excluded, as well as the complicated intrigues and counter-intrigues of the Venetian-Neapolitan opera. The Bible, serving as mythus, gave him a deep and colorful background from which man in the foreground rises with tremendous power. But Handel also liked epic enlargements, idyllic scenes, ever-affecting pastoral and love scenes; the lyricism often brings him closer to Aeschylus than to Sophocles. These episodes at times suspend the action, as in opera, and dilute that concentration which is so typical of the Sophoclean tragedy, but then such lyricism is precisely what distinguishes the music drama from the spoken variety. It is an essential element, and its mixture with the epic and the dramatic is what makes for the unique genre that is Handelian music drama. The lyric, the dramatic, and the choral now coalesce in a way unknown in opera or in any other species of drama since antiquity.

  As can be seen, Handel used the natural ingredients of the theatre of classical antiquity, but he could not write Greek drama with Greek themes, or rather, whenever he did, the reward was stony incomprehension. He was thwarted by what had become the basis of Christian philosophy: the moral difference between antiquity and the Christian world, the “Heathen or Christian?” asked by the young Nietzsche. It is obvious that so long as orthodox Christianity supplied the universal background of belief, tragedy in the classical sense was impossible. Moreover, classical mythology no longer fell naturally on the ears of the English public, it could not be used as a matter of course, as can be seen from the unpopularity of the opera librettos, and even of the classical “oratorios” such as Hercules. But the Old Testament was a living mythology to this public. We have seen that the tragédie bourgeoise was absolutely foreign to Handel, but so too was the “universally human,” for that was a fiction invented by bourgeois humanism. He was a draughtsman of character; and what the Romantics so fondly call reinmenschlich in man, freedom from all special traits, an unbroken, unlimited being, was therefore also foreign to him. Handel could not be tempted by an unspecific man, his man had to have feelings, loves and hates, jealousies and ambitions, virtues and sins, all of these contributing to his fate. Indeed, we may confidently apply to Handel what Matthew Arnold said about Sophocles: “He does not produce the sentiment of repose, of acquiescence, by inculcating it, by avoiding agitating circumstances; he produces it by exhibiting to us the most agitated manner under conditions of the severest form.”

  Handel’s problem was to attain the monumentality of the Greek drama without jeopardizing human values, to safeguard the great symbolic content within the ever-changing richness of life. Here the music drama is at a considerable advantage over the spoken theatre, for it can greatly modify the effect of severely stylized language and sharply formulated thought by means of musical lyricism which allows within the drama pictures that are not exclusively determined by the words. Even the eruption of a great passion can find perfect expression in a lyric aria. The aim—and the greatest problem—was to give through this stylization a comprehensive yet sensuous symbolism—that is, theatricality. In Handel’s case this theatricality was inborn. Though proceeding from the French classical drama, he largely escaped—because of his music—the rhetorical reflections of Corneille and Racine. Unbiased study will disclose that the truly dramatic moments in the great oratorios are theatrical-operatic, and these moments, we cannot repeat often enough, call for the theatre in order to exert their full impact. Even when there is no stage, the oratorio is a music drama, a form of opera.

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  THE ENGLISH ORATORIO grew out of the circumstances of Handel’s life, and could not have so grown anywhere but in England. The unique combination of Greek drama and the Old Testament developed from personal experience, from a social order, and from a historical consciousness
that were not indebted, as were some of the musical elements, to Italian oratorio or German cantata. The old mystery and miracle play was more didactic than religious, and the didactic quality is likewise present in the sacra rappresentazione and the early oratorio in Italy. Such an art cannot, except in the hands of a few rare creative artists, rise above local, educational, and ethical effect. Thus, even though all these elements, especially the Italian oratorio, are usually listed among the ancestors of the Handelian oratorio, we may safely disregard them. The idea that Handel’s concept is indebted to Greek drama is so clear that one wonders why it was not examined long ago. Rolland perceived it more than half a century ago, but little attention was paid to his hints until Winton Dean took up the question. “It was as though the spirit of Handel had been led unconsciously towards the Hellenic ideal,” says Rolland; yet one wonders whether the process was so passive.

  The crucial point for Handel was Racine’s reintroduction of the classic chorus which, significantly, took place in the French dramatist’s last, biblical dramas. This the literary historians consider no more than a “scholastic experiment appropriate to a conventual atmosphere,” 93 but then why does this reactivated chorus rapidly gain the Italian spoken theatre, opera, and then the English oratorio? In the ancient drama the chorus gradually changed from a lyrical to a dramatic role, only to disappear altogether in the new comedy. When it returned, many centuries later, it was a conscious revival and imitation that went far beyond scholastic experiment. The literary historians neglected to examine the proper place of opera in the development of Baroque drama, for in spite of the essential misunderstanding by the Florentine antiquarians, opera did, in effect, cause a rapprochement with the drama of the ancients. Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina (1664-1718), Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750), Scipione Maffei (1675-1755), and Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782) were the principal representatives of this new classicism that was closely allied with music, as indeed the music drama was the most congenial medium for it. They exerted themselves for the improvement of dramatic art in Italy and all of them did so by deliberately falling back on the “ancients.”

  This second Camerata, as it were, was no less learned, but far more musical than the original Florentine group.94 Zeno, the first great reformer of opera, attenuated the crudities of the Venetian opera libretto by accepting and introducing into opera elements of the French classical drama. His successor, both in literary tendencies and in the office of Imperial Court Poet in Vienna, Metastasio, created the new art of poesia per musica. He may have been reviled by the Gluckists, and dismissed by most modern estheticians of opera, who seldom took the trouble to read these books as literature or to consider them from the point of view of Metastasio’s time, but a great poet he was. (His detractors, it may be said, might have been misled by the fact that he outlived his style and his time by forty years.) Many of Metastasio’s librettos are remarkable literary works in their own right, despite the conventionality of the plots. He was the true late Baroque classicist of the theatre, who in his time spoke from the very soul of musicians and public. His versification is sheer perfection and his love lyrics are tender and suave, but his particular strength—as often in Racine and Handel—was in the characterization of women. Metastasio adhered to Aristotle’s dramaturgical principles, and his dramatic figures speak the language of the Greek Olympus even in his biblical oratorios. At that, he was not really a tragic poet; the secret of his immense success and reputation rests on a certain sympathetic lightness of touch, which made for a musical verse. He was a poet of love, even if that love was the amour raffiné that in his time was no less fashionable in life than on the stage. Voltaire still considered Metastasio’s best writings worthy of Corneille and Racine.

  But, as we have said, the historians failed to realize the significance of these developments; the opera libretto appeared to them as something outside the realm of literature proper, though the example of Philippe Quinault, Lully’s librettist, should have warned them. Quinault’s librettos were regarded by French literary critics as forming an integral part of the French classical theatre—hence the title tragédie lyrique rather than opera. Metastasio never apologized for being a “mere” librettist, nor was he so regarded; the title his contemporaries gave him, Il Sofocle italiano, was thoroughly deserved, for his drama was the Italian drama of the High Baroque. Parenthetically we may add that it was not only in Italy and France that the classical tradition was acknowledged to have been propagated by opera, but even on occasion in England. Dryden, in the preface to Albion and Albanius (1685), speculates about the relationship between Italian opera and Greek drama. In his Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, &c., of Poetry and Music (1763), John Brown saw an unbroken tradition from the drama of antiquity to Baroque opera.

  In France, as in Italy, the classical theatre was naturalized. In the mid-16th century Sophocles and Euripides were translated into French verse by Ronsard, and soon we observe a short-lived vogue of biblical tragedies under Calvinist influence but also cast in the Greek mould. The chorus was employed and the Alexandrine soon ruled the language. Subsequently Spanish and Italian influences criss-cross this French theatre, and by the time the great tragedists, Corneille and Racine, arrive on the scene, the chorus had disappeared, a loss that was paralleled in opera. The reasons for this were largely economic, for ever since public, “commercial” opera began in Venice, the managements had had to cut corners to make the inordinately costly opera production profitable. They settled on a few principals, reduced the orchestra, and dispensed with the chorus. Metastasio, who understood the artistic and dramaturgical advantages of the chorus, made tentative efforts for its restoration, but it was only in the second half of the 18th century that it gradually returned to Italian opera.

  Not so in French opera. Racine, summoned from retirement by Madame de Maintenon, reinstated the chorus, and it became the starting point of a new flowering in French opera and subsequently in the Italian theatre and opera. Padre Martini still praised the superiority of the French in operatic choruses. Handel faithfully followed the Italian custom of solo opera; it is only in his later operas, already under the influence of the oratorio, that the chorus appears. But in the English music dramas, the oratorios, he made the chorus paramount, and for the same reason that the French made it so: the chorus was an integral part of the Greek drama. “One must admit,” said Voltaire, a sworn enemy of opera, “that the opera-tragedy recalls in many ways the tragedy of classical Greece,” and Du Roullet, the librettist of Gluck’s Iphigénie, still was convinced that “by following Racine with scrupulous attention” the true music drama along classical lines could be achieved. This French tragedy, especially Racine’s plays, was considered in the 18th century the embodiment of le naturel, la raison, and le bon sens, qualities that were seen as flowing from Greek drama.

  Thus the men of the Enlightenment. They were right, except that these qualities, very French qualities, were attributed to the wrong source. Racine’s drama did descend from the Greeks, but it was the expression of a particular national culture, that of Louis XIVs France. The parallel with Handel is startling. With him, we see once more a dramatic conception based on that of the Greeks, but by choosing to make the Old Testament his theatre, Handel represents English national culture. He departed considerably from the classical exterior, at the same time giving his music dramas a Grecian strength the English spoken theatre of his day did not possess. The literary men of the Augustan era may have acquired Racine’s elegance, but not his power; Handel displays this elegance in the application of the métier, the art of composition, and his power not only equals Racine’s but exceeds it. The elegance that is so attractive in the love songs and pastorals is superseded by stark dramatic directness and economy when in the accompanied recitatives, the ariosos, and the choruses he goes to the core of a situation.

  The more or less strict schematicism of the French classical drama was nevertheless the source of great beauties. If its rigidity, solemnity, rhetorical effusion see
m to exclude real action, Racine (like Handel), in compensation, at the decisive moments comes much nearer to final values than the free drama, for his rhetorical pathos could drive even abstractions to the most profound dramatic explosions. This French classical drama, which exerted so great an influence on the Handelian oratorio, was addressed to an aristocratic minority, whereas Handel sought to address the much wider middle classes, and with them the nation as a whole. The reconciliation of this fundamental difference is very difficult, and we can approach it only with the critique of the historical point of view. We must realize that the whole development leading up to the oratorio was a series of efforts to find the right relation between Handel’s sensations and his creative power—which is really the case with every great artist. Neither the record of sensations nor the constructive expedient can, however, be considered apart; the misunderstandings that arose around Handel have been due to precisely this mistaken separation.

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  IT IS SAID THAT before writing his Iphigenie, Goethe spent days drawing Greek statues to immerse himself in the spirit of Hellenism. Greek drama was in his day considered to be most effective when its figures came closest to the statuesque. Stravinsky still condenses the action in his Oedipus Rex into a few deliberate, marmoreal scenes. The pictorial —that is, the active participation of the milieu—was believed to weaken the plasticity of the drama. What did Greek drama mean to Handel; how did he prepare himself for the task of dealing with it; how was he to utilize what undoubtedly attracted him to the classical drama, its ability to form great symbols, its stylization of great destinies?