George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

  The Choice of Hercules did not provide material stimulating to Handel. The book had no dramatic interest, no opportunity for characterization, nor even what usually saved the day in a pastoral or allegorical play without action—poetic language. Morell’s words were not a trellis for imagery. Handel did not give the piece much attention, though he decked it with isolated beauties. Though a wizard at transplanting music, in this instance his lack of care in the adaptation is often evident, especially when illustrative-descriptive music is applied without change to an altogether different situation. He did not even bother to write out a new score. There were instructions to the copyist on how to handle the pieces taken from Alceste, only the new music and the numbers that underwent considerable reworking being scored by Handel. But the latter, as usual, are lessons in the composer’s skill.

  The first part of The Choice of Hercules is given over to Pleasure. The music, pastoral in tone, is delightfully orchestrated, the participating flutes, bassoons, and horns giving it an outdoor tinge. Pleasure’s songs are graceful, sparkling, and warm, with a soupçon of eroticism. The aging Handel writes with remarkable simplicity, yet everything is musically telling. Virtue’s songs, equally well made, are nevertheless perceptibly different; the warmth that makes Pleasure’s music so engaging is absent. Pleasure first tries her charms—and they are considerable. “Turn the youth to joy and love” is a beguiling gavotte aria equalling the best in L‘Allegro. The chorus takes up the inviting song in “Why, ah why this fond delay?” with Pleasure in the role of precentor. Finally Hercules must say something, and his “Yet can I hear that dulcet lay” is a very fine song even if the transfer from Alceste does not quite suit the mood. But its lightly sensuous languor does convey sentiments that do not offer encouragement to Virtue. Pleasure immediately takes advantage of this hesitation in an entrancing air, “Enjoy the sweet Elysian grove.” Why she does this by proxy, through An Attendant on Pleasure (tenor), is an incomprehensible riddle, for this is perhaps the finest song in the entire score.

  Now we come to the new music, the trio, the following two pieces, and part of the finale. Here is drama, if innocent Arcadian drama, and trim and tidy dramatic continuity. The trio, one of the masterpieces in ensemble writing, is dramatic-elegiac with a transparent tone. Pleasure remains winsome and alluring, Virtue retains her cool elegance, and as they alternate in their wooing, Hercules, vacillating, constantly interjects, “Where shall I go?” Handel’s characterization—for in a way such it is—is masterly; the youth is the victim, not the master, of his fate. The dramatic continuity is ably maintained even though we know in advance that Virtue must be victorious; Handel is not satisfied to do the obvious, however nicely. Virtue now enjoins Hercules to be faithful to his “celestial birth” and “rise from earth immortal.” The chorus seconds her impetuously: “Arise, arise, mount the steps ascent and claim thy native skies.” The robust choral piece “breathes fire celestial,” and Hercules responds: “Lead, Goddess, lead the way, thy awful power supremely wise.” The large da capo aria is shapely and even a little heroic—Handel never permits compliance with destiny to be entirely unheroie—but one distinctly feels a difference in nuance hinting at a still unresolved conflict. Pleasure so clearly dominates the entire “oratorio” that one is not convinced that this was a free choice. The last chorus, “Virtue will place thee in that blest abode,” is the one number in The Choice of Hercules with the proportions and weight of the great oratorio choruses. Its almost overwhelming power and cold violence is a brilliant stroke of the imagination, but at the expense of the work as a whole. It is completely extraneous to the framework, and misplaced at the end of such a slight, bucolic composition. Perhaps the strangest thing about it is its grimness. For some inexplicable reason Handel changed the piece from the original major to minor, thereby intensifying the dark atmosphere, then crowned it with a giant double fugue. Surely the ponderously menacing theme in the ritornel, which remains in the orchestra as a quasi ostinato, growling relentlessly, does not in the least suggest the heavenly bliss promised by Virtue. Perhaps Handel was annoyed by the mandatory surrender to Virtue—he clearly favored Pleasure—and in his anger loosed some of Jehovah’s thunders of old. Magnificent as the great anthem is, it is not a suitable close. In general we might say that even though the music of Alceste and The Choice of Hercules is largely identical, the former was probably a better and more homogeneous work. Perhaps a skilful librettist could re-create the play—the legend is well known—and thus make possible the use of Handel’s original setting.

  The Choice of Hercules was first performed on March 1, 1751, as “an Additional New Act” to Alexander’s Feast. We do not know the cast, but we can assume it to have consisted of Handel’s steady company: Frasi, Galli, Lowe, and perhaps Guadagni. Whether it was successful of itself or was carried to success with the always popular Alexander’s Feast is difficult to determine, but Handel had four full houses and made four worthwhile trips to the Bank of England.

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  AT THE BEGINNING OF 1750 the Earl of Shaftesbury in a letter to his cousin, James Harris, remarks that he never saw Handel “so cool and well. He is quite easy in his behaviour.” He also reports that Handel, always an enthusiastic lover and connoisseur of painting, purchased “several pictures, particularly a large Rembrandt.” This explains the withdrawal of eight thousand pounds from Handel’s account in the Bank of England, which evidently went into the acquisition of the canvases. Handel’s well-being was enhanced by his pleasure in seeing the Foundling Hospital prosper. In May he inaugurated the new, if as yet incomplete, organ he had presented to the Hospital and conducted a performance of Messiah in the institution’s chapel. The house was oversold and a large number of persons, though ticket holders, had to be turned away. A second performance was therefore given a fortnight later (there is no instance in Handel’s career when he did not honor tickets sold), and another full house doubled the Hospital’s take. The successful yearly performance of Messiah became a tradition, with Handel playing and conducting as long as his health permitted. But what the Earl of Shaftesbury saw was only external; the aging musician’s private thoughts must have been different. The year before he had lost one of his oldest comrades in arms, alongside whom he had fought many a battle: Heidegger, completely forgotten, died at the age of eighty-five. One year later Aaron Hill, Handel’s first English librettist, followed. And now a living ghost came to remind him of the passing of time. Cuzzoni, the great prima donna of his early London years, the onetime toast of the musical world, reappeared on the London scene in May 1750, a faded woman, her voice gone, eking out a miserable existence. In an advertisement she requested the public to attend a benefit concert she was undertaking. After one more pathetic appeal to the public, “which shall be the last I will ever trouble them with” (May 1751), she left England.111

  It was time to take stock of affairs. On June 1, 1750, “considering the Uncertainty of human Life,” Handel made his will. It is a straightforward document without any rhetoric. He remembered his servant, his amanuensis, and several of his cousins, the bulk of the estate going to his niece, Johanna Friderike. According to newspaper reports, late in the summer Handel made a visit, his last, to Germany. Since he no longer had professional interests, such as recruiting singers, on the Continent, the trip must have been solely for the purpose of visiting the few relatives he still had. Nothing is known, however, about this journey beyond a notice that Handel was “terribly hurt” in an accident when his coach overturned while en route in Holland; but that it took place is confirmed by a reference Handel made to it in a letter to Telemann. The composer, now sixty-five and a heavily corpulent man, still had physical reserves to throw off the effects of the accident. Returned in the fall, he soon felt the creative urge stir in him; on January 21, 1751, Handel began the composition of Jephtha.

  XX

  1751-1752

  Last oratorio, Jephtha—Handel takes leave of his artistic career—New serenity—The religious element in Je
phtha—Prototypes—Morell’s libretto—Morell’s miscalculations righted by Handel—The music—Borrowings from Habermann—Onslaught of blindness—Oratorio seasons held despite Handel’s infirmity—1752 season comes to end with death of Prince of Wales—Jephtha presented in 1752

  THE HAVE THEIR OWN CAPRIGE; RICH HARVESTS ARE sometimes followed by meagre ones. The year 1751 was seemingly meagre; yet it was in this year that Handel created what in many respects is the most poignant of all his works. Jephtha, the last of the oratorios, is an artist’s vision of the life of the mind. Though not the most dramatic of the biblical works, it is the most poetic, differing in character from all the other great ones. The mood recalls Euripides’s tragedy where Theseus and Hercules have their last talk: a tender and sometimes terrible privacy full of dark perplexities. The composer, after more than half a century spent in incessant creative work, has now arrived at his last stage. The change is momentous, wholly original, and shows a deeply searching mind, a stout soul, and a clear composure. His mind is as enchanted in its suggestibility as ever, his reaction to stimuli as swift and definite, but we now witness the unusual: a mystical experience coming to a non-mystic.

  There are neither prophets nor saints nor villains in Jephtha, only authentic human beings whose voices echo clearly, like a fountain in a still courtyard. Thus this “sacred oratorio” is once more a human drama, the Old Testament religious background notwithstanding. Even more than Theodora, Jephtha is personal and depends little on Morell’s vanities. The elaborate background of thought on which the human drama is sustained is unfailingly impressive, never shallow or insincere, nowhere obtruded beyond the requirements of the characters and the scene. In fact, the characterization is so convincing that the background creates itself; the dramatic form is needed only because through it verities can best escape false accents. Thus Handel performed a tour de force, expressing undramatic feelings in a dramatic form. There is a certain conflict now between his cheerfully external technique and the introspective style of old age, yet the conflict was not at all to his disadvantage. Indeed, the aged composer, his eyesight failing, shows qualities we should not expect from the extrovert musician of earlier years. This great soul, much tried, seeks to find the final equilibrium, and the epic-dramatic composer becomes a pure lyricist, like Aeschylus, but one whose lyricism has a distinctly religious hue.

  Jephtha has a story, characters, incidents, and development. Handel deals with all these with his wonted skill, but gradually we become aware (as we were earlier in Theodora but now increasingly so) that almost everywhere the libretto seems the lesser part. As we become familiar with the score we begin to divine the hidden ideas that are not in the script yet fill the great choruses. It is almost as if he uses the libretto as a pretext. This is the lyricism of a man who strikes against his own fate; it is not Jephtha who struggles here but Handel. To struggle with exterior elements is not so oppressive as to struggle with oneself. What drives Handel now is a peculiar “holy egotism” that uses men and human relationships for the ennobling of his own ideas. Solitariness—not solitude, for that he had always known—the ultimate loneliness of a sensitive man, drew those laments of one left in the world alone and in increasing darkness. But even in darkness, with total blindness threatening, he won equanimity, and the muse amid silence sings loud. The loneliness betrays itself in utterances whose cadence is almost stifled, and results in music hard to parallel anywhere.

  It was in Jephtha that Handel took leave of his artistic career and created a symbol of his entire art. He did so with his old power and mental alertness and with that newly won serenity which he carried into his remaining years after the inner struggles were past. In our emotional admiration we cannot believe that a great dramatic composer could leave the arena without a farewell. It cannot be categorically denied that Handel, who hid himself so consistently both in his private life and in his works, stumbled on Jephtha as he did on some other of his oratorios, and what we perceive as intention is perhaps mere appearance created by accident. But there are some things about ]ephtha that are so unusual as to constitute an exceptional case. In this work his imagination ranges even farther afield than in Theodora, and there is a peculiar distance from which he views earthly things, as if he were no longer altogether of this world. I cannot believe that he does not identify himself with Jephtha to a considerable extent, perhaps subconsciously, trusting the incognito that the biblical dignity confers on his hero.

  “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles.” These are the first words of the Iliad—world literature opens with a song of emotion, of passion. The ancient poet of patriarchal life already saw the eternal danger and curse in human passion, the anger of men who must live in a constant life-and-death struggle with themselves and with their environment. The great Attic dramatists represented this struggle by strokes of fate, and the principal problem of a tragedy of fate came to be to what extent the situation itself ruled the drama. When we say that a man’s fate is in his character we are referring to the way he meets a fate coming from an external source. But it is necessary that fate should be something other than the person it would destroy. Only in the final moments of confrontation is there a mystic union between the two. The Greeks with their marvelous artistic sense symbolized by deity a passion that descends on a man from without. This was stylized mythology which at the same time became sensuously concrete. To Handel the hero and his fate do belong together, and once they have met they cannot be separated, but he was more fascinated by the moment that preceded their meeting. It is at those moments in Jephtha that his lyricism reaches its richest depths, the depth of a questioning mind regarding itself, wondering whether the divine is the upper side of the human or whether the human is the under side of the divine. This is the drama of doubt, perhaps Handel’s most personal drama. Here, in the great choruses, it is more than anything else the pregnancy of poetic statement, the eloquence of thought, the expressiveness of the imagery that underlie Handel’s effects.

  But to what extent is man the generator of his acts? The relationship between the doer of an act and the act itself is the central problem of such a drama; every stylization, every arrangement depends on where these two are separated and where they are one, how one determines the other. Handel saw the tragic in Jephtha not so much in the situation created by fate as in the inner experience of suffering. To him there was no large gulf between suffering and action; suffering was action turned inward, the words of the libretto notwithstanding. The greater the compulsion of the external action in Jephtha the more deeply inward does the centre of the tragic struggle move. Handel wanted to dissolve in music the sharply formulated words that he found unequal to cope with the moments where a man reveals himself. Where Morell merely gives the rhetorical reflexes of impending catastrophe, Handel burrows downward, into the depths where the moral dilemmas dwell. Morell could see only an exterior problem created by fate and the suffering it brought with it; Handel saw an inner purification. This inevitably led him, however, away from the purely dramatic to the lyric, to the sombre choric lyricism of the Greeks; he no longer needed realistic bas-reliefs around the statues of the heroes. Thus he reached the perfection of antique form, of the great Greek dramatists, at the same time embracing the supreme individual experience of a Christian. The Greek drama in Hebrew vestments is only a theme and background; it merely goes to show how independent of actualities is true poetry. The characters no longer expose themselves through action but through meditation. Jephtha is no longer facing fate, he has become the symbol of a deep and universal human relationship. His feelings are revelations of transcendent purity, for they have ceased to be merely individual manifestations.

  Theodora and Jephtha show how different the musical setting can be from the libretto that called it into existence. This ability of Handel’s to refine a mediocre libretto through his music, to endow it with a core and with psychological penetration, is most admirably carried out in Jephtha. And perhaps the difference is strongest whe
re the external happenings are seemingly faithfully followed. Handel’s failing eyes see far into the distance with prophetic clarity, yet he no longer sees the reality around him. He revels in the world he created—the music shows it if the words do not—and at the same time he sees his own tragic situation: there is little time left in life. At sixty-six he was past the ordinary 18th-century life span, his life work was finished—and much of it even forgotten. The choruses in Jephtha seem to tell us that they are visions that, though long in gestation, have little to do with those which preceded Theodora. Handel does not descend to Hell as did Dante before starting his ascent to Paradise; the great Olympian composer descends from Olympus to discover from mortals what is Olympian. The religion that is expressed in Jephtha is not the religion of an epoch but that of a soul, and the hereafter toward which the choruses lead is not the fantasy of an imagination detached from life. This religion is life itself, enhanced, condensed, deepened and fulfilled, still strongly reflecting life’s trials but also its warmth, its sounds, its pictures. This was something so personal and so profoundly human that Handel repeatedly removed Morell’s references to the Almighty; his religious sentiments must be expressed through human suffering. The human spirit appears in Jephtha as a profound solvent; not that of the Enlightenment, but indeed that of Christianity. This is the triumph of the new synthesis which recaptures the almost forgotten spiritual discipline of centuries.

  Jephtha is striking in its mingled strength and delicacy. There are few slack passages, the writing is throughout firm and controlled. If it is not the tight drama that it sets out to be, the composition’s exceptional qualities do not in any case rest on dramatic-theatrical consistency. The construction, except for the core of the piece, is perhaps a little loose, especially in the first act, though the masterful concentration, power, and boldness of expression combined with admirable technical efficiency make us forget this. Yet towards the end of the work, as the dénouement approaches, there are scenes that are nearly fatal to the oratorio.