George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

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  THE SUBJECT OF Jephtha was familiar, and the several musical settings of the biblical story were not unknown to Handel and Morell. But with one exception, the prototypes—if we may call them that—should not detain us. The only exception, Carissimi’s Jephte, was certainly well known to Handel because he earlier borrowed from it for Samson. We Carissimi, but the attraction lay more in the new means of expression offered by the Italian composer than in the genre he so significantly advanced. Even when Handel quoted from Carissimi he seldom tampered with the essence of the music, using it rather as an insertion suitable for a certain occasion. Significantly, his Jephtha shows no borrowing from have seen (p. 81 ff.) that Handel was impressed by and indebted to Jephte. Morell, who studied not only Judges, where Jephtha’s story is told, but the several librettos fashioned therefrom, proved to be quite independent of all of them. As a matter of fact, while he retained the essence of the biblical story, all his characters except Jephtha himself are his own invention. In the Bible, Jephtha (or Jephthah) was expelled from Gilead because he was the illegitimate son of a harlot. His half-brothers, born in wedlock, resented his questionable status and drove him away from their common home. Jephtha grew up in a friendly region, where he made a name for himself as a God-fearing man and a born leader. During his absence from Gilead the country was invaded by the Ammonites and held in subjection for eighteen years. Sorely tried and without hope, the elders of Gilead, among them Jephtha’s brothers, appealed to their erstwhile victim to “come and be our captain.” Jephtha acceded and while girding for battle made a vow that if he were victorious, “whatever cometh forth of the door of my home to meet me when I return ... I will offer it for a burnt offering.” There followed “a very great slaughter” of the Ammonites; and on Jephtha’s return, the first person emerging from the house to greet him was his daughter, unnamed in the Bible. Though deeply shaken, Jephtha felt obliged to keep his sworn word, so he “did with her according to his vow.” So far the Bible. The tragic ending of Jephtha’s story is not only parallel but palpably identical with that of Agamemnon’s in which his daughter, Iphigenia, was similarly selected by fate as an innocent victim. There are other variants of the legend, all of which, whether from Greek or Hebrew antiquity, obviously go back to a much older common source; folklore migrates and is very tenacious. Morell, who was also a classical scholar, undoubtedly knew the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides; the name he gave to Jephtha’s daughter, Iphis, appears to be derived from Iphigenia. Perhaps he even knew Racine’s great tragedy, for he conscientiously explored the relevant literature and utilized the librettos made from the biblical story. Among the latter was an oratorio composed by Handel’s erstwhile friend and subsequent bête noire Maurice Greene.

  Morell went about his task with fair skill, even mustering here and there a language that is vivid and colorful and which, of course, was of considerable help to Handel. Though admittedly even poor versifiers can exhibit sudden flashes of poetry, Morell’s were not due to such rare inspiration. He resorted to the old literary trick of plucking suitable lines and words from the best available poets, including Milton and Pope. In Morell’s time this was an accepted procedure in letters as well as in music, and Morell did not disguise his sources. The characters he invented are Zebul, a soldier and half-brother of Jephtha, who is instrumental in obtaining the command of the Jewish army for Jephtha; Storgè, Jephtha’s wife; and Hamor, suitor of Iphis. The roles as well as the continuity are well developed, all the threads converging neatly enough in the great choral scene where the priests, loath to carry out the sacrifice, plead: “Hear our prayer in this distress.”

  Now suddenly Morell proceeds to scatter the lines apart again. The great wall of tragedy frightened him, and he was looking for a flower in that crannied wall. To elaborate the stories of the Bible is always tempting and always dangerous. While the original story presented the librettist with a fundamentally simple and logical dramatic situation (as of course did Euripides), Morell sentimentalized it, but sentimentality was anathema to Handel. The cleansing effect of tragedy rests on a peculiar mood which shakes and tears before it elevates; this Morell was unable to face. The motives underlying the radical change he gave the drama are obscure. Morell was in a double dilemma, which he did try to solve in a Christian spirit—and he failed dismally. With Euripides everything is in the struggle of passions, and the knot can be untied only by divine intervention. But Christian faith rejected human sacrifice, it could only tolerate it symbolically. Thus Morell wanted to avoid dealing with death with the customary ease—or brutality—of the Old Testament. In addition there was the reluctance of the age to see a tragic ending, all of which drove Morell to a compromise for which he invoked an angelus ex machina. There was of course the obvious scriptural precedent in the story of Abraham and Isaac. The Angel comes and, accepting the sacrifice symbolically, promises eternal bliss to everyone. The recitative must be quoted in its entirety to show its incongruity.

  Rise, Jephtha. And ye reverend priests, withhold the slaught’rous hand. No vow can disannul the law of God; nor such was its intent, when rightly scann’d; yet still shall be fulfilled. Thy daughter, Jephtha, thou must dedicate to God, in pure and virgin state for ever, as not an object meet for sacrifice, else had she fall’n a holocaust to God. The Holy Spirit, that dictated thy vow, bade thus explain it, and approves thy faith.

  This comes close to negating the drama, as well as introducing an extraneous New Testament note. The Angel and the Holy Spirit are new elements not even remotely connected with the original plot. Worst of all, it now appears that the stirring drama, Jephtha’s agonized suffering, was all sham: the sacrifice was never intended to be carried out; Jephtha just failed to scan the script “rightly.” The changes could have wrecked the whole work, but Handel once more was able to bypass Morell. As in Theodora, he largely disregarded the new meaning and sentiments arbitrarily imposed upon the story. The beauty of the music does not depend on the text or even on the theme. Reality evaporates into a sort of fluid dream in which images are formed. The tragic, perplexity-ridden Jephtha does not simply turn into a happy paterfamilias whose only daughter became a nun; his suffering is transfigured into joy, while the neat and tender fadeout of Iphis makes an impression of moving comeliness that remains in the listener’s mind. This could not be kept up, however, beyond a point. The great chorus “Theme sublime of endless praise” gives plausibility to this unexpected dénouement; anything that follows is clearly an excrescence. Indeed, it appears that this chorus was originally intended to close the oratorio; it should in modern performances be adopted as the finale. Only a quintet, added in 1753, should be salvaged from what follows; it could easily be inserted before the finale.

  Jephtha, more than most other characters created by Handel, grows steadily from beginning to end. There is something simple but eloquently powerful in him, disdaining every flower of rhetoric; he wants to affect with one quality only, but with that tremendously. Like Colleoni he sits on a magnificent horse, but no matter how splendid his mount it does not detract attention from its rider. It is Jephtha who sustains the large fabric of this tale upon his shoulders. Iphis, that young woman led by fate into identifying herself with a cause of which she has little understanding, is an admirable figure, and the episodes in which her personal fate is involved are spirited and moving. Though related to Theodora, she is of this world. She does rise to transcendence, but her road is a longer one than Theodora’s; she has to renounce life, which Theodora does not even cherish. Handel breathed a rare spirit into Storgè, one of the great, forceful, and passionately unresigned matriarchs of Nitocris’s breed. She remains moving and memorable in spite of Morell’s attempt in the finale to make a sentimental provincial matron out of her. Zebul and Hamor are accessories, but Hamor especially is used to advantage in propelling the drama.

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  THE SOLO NUMBERS IN Jephtha are all music in a modern language, but the choruses, as in the Greek drama, retain their Doric lan
guage, which gives them a particular solemn elevation. They are not exercises in rhetoric, in grandiloquence; pectus est quod disertum facit. All the emotional overtones and undertones that ordinarily hover upon the very borders of consciousness are given powerful and moving expression; we see the visionary’s native skies.

  The musical world was somewhat shaken when it was discovered that most of these choruses were based on borrowed material, that, indeed, Jephtha is heavily indebted to a Bohemian composer, as well as to a number of Handel’s instrumental and vocal works, among them Agrippina, Ariodante, Lotario, and Acis and Galatea. The new investor who lent musical funds to Handel was a German-Bohemian by the name of Habermann (1706-1783), called Franz Wenzel or František Václav, according to which part of the hyphenated heritage is considered dominant. He was one of the large fraternity of German musicians who under the long Habsburg rule found a congenial home in that musical country, Bohemia. Well-regarded in his time and occupying good positions both at home and abroad, Habermann as a composer shows little more than the natural musicality and excellent craftsmanship of his clan. He would have shared the obscurity of the many solid fellow choirmasters active in his time, all competent and devoted to their calling, had he not supplied ideas to Handel. Upon discovery of his exalted role, he was promptly invested with the title “the Bohemian Handel,” which is a curious case of immortality acquired by inverted history.112 Philomela pia seu Missae 6 a 4 vocibus ... was printed in 1747. How and when the score got into Handel’s hands is unknown. Dent believes that Mattheson was the intermediary, but this is not documented. The matter is unimportant; Handel always kept a weather eye on new publications, subscribing to many, and it is quite possible that he asked his correspondents to supply him with copies. The charge that his failing health and waning inspiration compelled him to resort to more borrowings than in many other dramatic works is falsely true. Such music did stimulate him, and perhaps at this stage of his life he preferred to choose a star to navigate by, but he was never enveloped in its light, his identity was never in danger, and he was never confined by the materials used. We shall discuss the whole complicated question of the borrowings in Chapter XXIV; suffice it to say at present that whether the borrowings can be justified is not the point at issue. What concerns us is that Handel has justified his material. The thematic material borrowed from Habermann acted as a musical fertilizer, providing the stimulus for a variety of ideas, but the final shaping of these ideas seldom depended on the original mould.

  The overture to Jephtha, an excellent piece, was borrowed from Alceste. Handel composed a new minuet for the third part, leading directly to a recitative that presents Zebul without any preliminaries in the midst of an agitated situation. Habermann appears in the first aria, Zebul’s “Pour forth no more unheeded pray’rs,” and in the following chorus, “No more to Ammon’s god and king, fierce Moloch shall our cymbals ring.” The aria is routine, and those who detect fatigue in Handel’s procedure could point to the sinfonia, which was taken over from Habermann’s Mass without significant alteration, thus affecting the entire accompaniment to an undistinguished vocal part. But perhaps Handel was simply not interested in Zebul, for in the chorus he bestirs himself, and although the material still comes from Habermann, its development is out of all proportion to the original idea. This chorus did descend from the Kyrie of Habermann’s First Mass, but while the background is by no means left in obscurity, the foreground is taken by heartier and lustier sounds: Handel is writing “pagan music.” The fugue “Chemosh no more will we adore,” with its stubborn insistence on the same tone, conjures up the old zestful Handel.

  Jephtha enters, greeted by Zebul. “Virtue my soul shall embrace, goodness shall make me great” is one of those arias that some critics find “a little too conventionally pleasing.” Perhaps the galant tone is to blame; the aria is in the modern style of the neo-Neapolitans. But this piece, and most of the others, despite an occasional glibness in the drawing, are perfect of their kind, achieving frequent and sensitive if evasive beauty. Handel did not care for Morell’s platitudinous words and simply proceeded to compose an eloquent stream of music rather than a concentrated movement. His dramatic instinct warned him that Jephtha was not as yet a compelling figure, and since no conflict threatened, there was no need for a higher emotional temperature. The melody is exquisite, the setting delectable. Handel’s musical sensitivity evokes admiration in the very first measures, as the angular intervals of the ritornel are smoothed into a gliding melody the minute the voice enters. Storgè, at her first appearance, is the loving wife bemoaning “a painful separation” from her husband, who is about to take the field. Her brief secco recitative shows the particular care Handel took with the secco in this work. The adjacent aria, “In gentle murmurs will I mourn, as mourns the mate-forsaken dove,” with its light melancholy recalls the many fine “dove” songs of the past, but this engaging piece has a symphonic insistence in the accompaniment coupled with harmonic boldness that is characteristic of Handel’s late style. Very attractive are the frequent unaccompanied entries of voice and solo flute, which are then balanced by long-held notes either in the bass or in the voice.

  Hamor, espying Iphis, welcomes “the sight of thee, my love,” changing from the recitative to a perfectly proportioned aria, “Dull delay, in piercing anguish bids thy faithful lover languish while he pants for bliss in vain.” Once more Handel was confronted by a text supposedly the expression of ardor, but more nearly expressing self-pity and even the posturing a man assumes before a mirror. Ignoring the words—and pretty nearly Hamor himself—Handel wrote a warm love song of natural and impetuous bent. Iphis’s reaction to this is a little cautious; her aria, as she reminds Hamor of his military duties, sounds like temporizing: “Take the heart you fondly gave, lodg’d in your breast with mine ... Thus with double ardour brave, sure conquest will be thine.” Nor is the music particularly impressive, though pretty enough with its capricious rhythms. The two lovers now unite in a duet, “These labours past, how happy we,” which offers much more attractive music. Handel here leaves behind everything he used to cherish in this genre, forgetting Steffani and Baroque opera, for what we hear could just as well have come from an opera by John Christian Bach or the young Mozart.

  Jephtha, ready for battle, now utters his vow. At this point we should expect him to sing his words with an apocalyptic ring, like Jove making his vow in Semele; strangely, all that Handel could or would muster is a pallid echo of the old Venetian giuramento recitative. Even more surprisingly, he never later changed this short recitative, although he must have felt its inadequacy. But then the indifference is suddenly shaken off, and the clean edge of thought, the heated thrust of feeling of a solitary spirit teeming with uncomfortable questions, burst upon us. “O God, behold our sore distress” is the first of this oratorio’s great choruses in which Handel infuses into his music the strange emotional tension of a dream, the first of the personal confessions that make Jephtha unique among the oratorios. The largeness of the design and the solemn opening recall the anthem choruses of old, but this is not a paean praising the king or Jehovah, the scene is lit by a darkened sun. The material comes from Habermann’s Fifth Mass, in which the Qui tollis begins with a double fugue, now serving the same function in Handel’s chorus. But he instantly whittles away any excess musical verbiage, the substance becomes compact and expressive, it no longer owes allegiance to anyone but Handel.

  The charged emotional climate churned up by this great chorus is not permitted to soften, though Storgè’s following scene offers sombre and powerful music without the fearfully contorted chromaticism of the choral piece. “Some dire event hangs o’er our heads,” she warns in the introductory recitative, but the aria already deals with “scenes of horror.” This is violent music, but what is envisaged is the carnage of war; the impending family tragedy is not yet suspected. Handel borrows a little figure from the fourth movement of his A minor Concerto Grosso (Opus 6, No. 4), a wild and romantic piece, whic
h he uses with telling effect in the accompaniment. The composer’s superscription calls for con spirito; this is not a lament but a protest, and he resorts to magnificent pictorial illustrations, racing unisons, to bring out with visual clarity the dark forebodings.

  Presently Handel relents as Iphis tries to dispel her mother’s “black illusions of the night.” Her air, “The smiling dawn of happy days,” reveals at its best Handel’s capacity for combining feeling and formal elegance, and the sun suddenly shines in the grimly sheltered place. The air is a dance piece, a bourrée, and somehow one feels that in its misty loveliness there is a poignancy of recollections of days and ways informed with the piety of Handel’s remote childhood. In the act-ending chorus, one of the greatest “tone paintings” ever achieved in song, the earth is no longer pained by man; he is scarcely noticed through the whirling dust cloud kicked up by this tremendous musical poem, full of action and massive in detail and imagination. Here is a picture in which there are no subdued tones; it is as if Handel himself were powerless to curb the surging feeling that he is still bound to this world, he will not listen to the voice which bids him loose his ties. This is a renewal of faith in life, a reawakening to the strength of nature, which stands constant in the march of doom; the nature worshipper of earlier days is back at his altar, as compelling as ever. Then, with the line “They now contract their boist’rous pride and lash with idle rage the laughing strand,” the supposedly weary old composer indeed lashes out with a vigor that few young men could summon. Chorus and orchestra, the latter reinforced with horns, forget all discipline and, flushed with elation, burst into rejoicing, the roaring, shaking peals of joyous laughter filling page after page with dancing black notes. This revel, incidentally, is a fuguel The idea also came from one of Habermann’s Masses, but Handel struck it with his majestic stride, after which the “Bohemian Handel” had to relinquish all claims to his title.