Hamor opens the second act by announcing victory over the Ammonites. Since the victory was achieved with the active help of angels, the following chorus, “Cherub and Seraphim, unbodied forms,” is not martial. Light figurations in the instruments accompany a harmonically simple and transparent choral setting. The fugue that follows this prelude is another matter. While nothing like the tremendous first chorus in Act One, the imagery of “they ride on whirlwinds” was sufficient to kindle in Handel’s imagination a lusty descriptive piece. There follows Hamor’s assurance to Iphis that even during the stress of battle he thought of her. While his air is pleasant enough, Hamor does not commit himself, and the music tells little of his character. Iphis, preparing to meet her returning father, asks her companions to adorn her like a bride and “tune the soft melodious lute, pleasant harp and warbling flute.” The air has the quiet and gentle sincerity of its predecessor in the first act but a considerable gain in substance. Iphis is still a young girl, undisturbed by doubts or fears. Zebul’s aria “Freedom now once more possessing” is an entirely superfluous piece borrowed in toto from Agrippina, though as we look at the score we are amazed at the stamina of that first opera.
Now Handel must cope with Morell’s pious entr’acte, the mandatory obeisance to Jehovah, before he can continue with the drama. Jephtha praises the valor of Zebul and Hamor, “but the glory is the Lord’s.” There follows an aria, “His mighty arm with sudden blow dispers’d and quell’d the haughty foe.” Handel took care of the situation by returning to the old opera aria with a military accompaniment. This is a good piece and appropriate for the occasion, but its inordinate length makes cuts necessary. One observes with amusement the presence of galant elements in what is essentially an old-fashioned opera seria aria complete with coloratura of a decidedly dated vintage. At that, the galant element came from Habermann’s First Mass; the vocal part is Handel’s. According to the oratorio code all this must be crowned with a grand chorus, and for the first time in Jephtha Handel gives us an honest ceremonial anthem with all stops pulled out. “In glory high, in might serene” is a splendid chorus of the old Hallelujah cut, except that the stately choral part is supported by an orchestral accompaniment more mobile and imaginative than in the old days.
The charming little sinfonia that opens the third scene of Act Two is clearly a theatrical device to portray Iphis while giving her time to approach her returning father. The pastoral quality of the siciliana sets the tone for her “Welcome as the cheerful light,” a gavotte. Handel is careful to safeguard the innocence of the victim of the drama, who is still unconscious of the fate awaiting her. Every number Iphis has sung has been a graceful dance piece, and the intense perception of loveliness gives sublimity to the sweetness and radiance of mere beauty. The virgins take up the gavotte as if to prolong the calm before the storm.
When Jephtha realizes who is the first one to greet him, joy at once turns to raging grief. He cries in despair: “Begone, my child, thou hast undone thy father!” Iphis flees. The recitative is short and wild, Jephtha is in despair, but in the aria “Open thy marble jaws, O tomb, and hide me” he takes hold of himself. This magnificent dramatic piece is controlled, essentially singable and rounded, yet it conveys almost suffocatingly the father’s grief. Handel achieves this by an angular melodic line, unexpected pauses, and rhythmic and prosodic irregularities. (Chrysander, as he so often does, hurts the powerful unison ritornel by harmonizing it.) In the consternation that follows, Zebul asks his brother why he is so cruel to the daughter who came to greet him. Jephtha answers sadly by telling of his vow, ending with “alas! it was my daughter, and she dies.” “First perish, thou, and perish all the world,” cries Storgè tearing into her husband with outraged and unforgiving fury. The scene is overwhelming, as is this woman who, seeing life’s fruit turn to ashes, challenges the whole world.
The construction of her scene is remarkable. It starts as an accompanied recitative marked concitato, but every time Storgè remembers her daughter she softens (Handel marks it adagio), only to burst out anew (concitato). The orchestra seethes as the accompagnato imperceptibly turns into an aria, Storgè frenziedly demanding “let other creatures die.” Suddenly she stops (dolce), thinking of her only child, “so fair, so chaste, so good,” the words sung in little desperately touching gasps. But the frenzy returns; Handel is unsparing in such moments.
The drama now proceeds relentlessly as Hamor offers himself for the sacrifice. He did not show much temperament in the preceding scenes, but this air, like all the others here, is full of tragic force and a naturalness that, of all qualities, is the most poignant in a tragedy. This poignancy is carried to unsurpassed heights in the quartet in which the four chief characters of the drama unite. The ensemble, rare in serious works of the mid-century, is timed with uncanny sensitiveness; it is like a cadenza that sums up the action but is inseparable from it. This is a piece in which there is not, as they say of athletes, an ounce of spare flesh, even though the subject is rich. The quartet is not only gripping in concept but is composed with singular grace and delicacy, the diction masterfully clear and true. The short ritornel, with its falling augmented fourths and grave repetitions, brings back memories of the old ostinato of grief. Handel’s, as usual, is not a true ostinato, but it creates the same feeling of fatality. “O spare your daughter,” begins Zebul, “spare my child,” begs Storgè, while Hamor, overcome, can at first only sigh, “my love.” They continue, their vocal line becoming more and more animated, while Jephtha stubbornly insists, “Recorded stands my vow in Heav’n above.” “Recall thy impious vow,” the others demand, but Jephtha angrily counters, “I’ll hear no more: her doom is fix’d as fate.” He has the last word. The music responds sensitively to the changing pulse of mood and movement, while preserving an underlying gravity of rhythm in the accompaniment, which is independent of the vocal ensemble.
Iphis returns, ready to die. Morell, with remarkable clumsiness, makes her orate: “This vital breath with content I shall resign.” Though Handel’s music is not tailored to the words, he composed an aria that is once more simple but true and good; the dance rhythms remain, but only as a reminder. Handel labored hard on this little song, he knew that a young girl could not instantly turn into a tragedienne. His efforts produced a brief tragical epigram, aperçu rather than tragedy. Such simplicity of expression can seldom be found allied with such depth of feeling. The song has a devastating effect on Jephtha. It has been said that un Inglese italiano è un diavolo incarnato. An Italianate Englishman now sums up a century and a half of Italian opera, creating an accompanied recitative—the essence of Italian dramatic music—the like of which we shall find only in Florestan’s anguished recitative at the beginning of the second act of Fidelio.113 If there ever was a “through-composed” piece, this is it. It was in Orlando that Handel first tried to depict a man bereft of his senses; then came the powerful scene in which Saul desperately struggles to retain his sanity; but now he creates a figure sunk in bottomless misery. “Deeper and deeper still, thy goodness, child, pierceth a father’s bleeding heart” By setting broken phrases, Handel achieves at the end an effect of psychological disintegration, at the same time throwing sharp intermittent gleams of light on the man Jephtha was. “Tears are for lighter grief”; we suffer, we do not weep, as when Lear is betrayed to the storm, and we live through every detail of his dreadful agony.
The composition of this scene was an exhausting experience, yet it left Handel with the strength to dive into the unfathomable blackness of life, to compose his greatest choral piece, one that is unparalleled in the entire choral literature. “How dark, O Lord, are Thy decrees,” a colossus of a score in four sections, carries us into a place of darkness and exile and shadows, a place of deadly disquiet. What Handel achieves in this passionate self-confession cannot be summed up verbally, but, paradoxically, it is with this chorus that we can perhaps explain Handel himself. An entrepreneur and maçon d’art (as Rodin called himself), who provided entertainment f
or the aristocracy and later for the wider circles of the English middle classes, who always had an eye for his audience, who in this very oratorio still composed arias that aimed to please, he now completely abandoned his public. He can see solace nowhere and comes to the shattering realization that “No solid peace we mortals know on earth below.” Formal faith, morality, and prayer no longer suffice. The great oaths and curses of the Old Testament, its verdicts and lessons he was accustomed to carry out magnificently in his music, but here the problem is more vast, for now he wonders whether man is the heir or orphan of creation. And the question must be answered by ploughing the endless unharvestable seas of a man’s soul; his own soul, because this great threnody mourns Handel himself. His enormous vitality had by now ebbed; while he was younger and robust, fate could not defeat him, but now he was old and alone, and the faithful companion, the body, was fail-ing him. It was during the composition of “How dark, O Lord, are Thy decrees” that he was forced to lay aside the score because of the onslaught of blindness. One eye’s vision was gone altogether; intermittent clearing of the other eye permitted him to resume work, but it took months to finish, and he knew that this was the end, that his remaining days would be spent in darkness. Yet now the once ardent fighter and artistic speculator, stricken, discovered in himself a humility able to range itself against all the trials of life. He now felt himself to be freed from bondage to a cruel fate, in the recognition that life is governed and ordained. This was a religious confession, arrived at after a terrible struggle. The struggle is depicted in this awesome chorus, and as we listen to it we discover that we are intruders upon passionate privacies.
Theologians have doubted whether divine transcendence can really be conceived by the human mind on the plane of esthetic genius. God can be addressed but not expressed. But can we accept the thesis that spiritual man as artist always reflects and never creates? This proud and noble man, who has been declared to be with Bach the “singer of Christ,” “the musician in ordinary to the Protestant religion,” did write music that outwardly meets standards set by posterity on the basis of Messiah, but essentially he was always an entertainer, a glorious man of the theatre. With very few exceptions, he never wrote music that could be called devotional. It was music filled with a shrewd and kindly humanity, dramatic force, and incomparable musical inventiveness. If after Theodora and Jephtha we look back at the masques and pastorals and the great biblical dramas, we see that their religious exterior is but a garment draped by a sculptor on his marble effigy. But with these two works it was really a question of his personal faith, to represent Christianity, but without reference to its customary symbols. He remembered the sentimental-sensuous conception of Brockes, whose Passion he once set to music, in which “the believing soul” sings, and he remembered such songs as Ein Lammlein geht und trägt die Schuld. But Pietism and facile Evangelism, as we have seen, had never appealed to him, and after a few youthful essays he had abandoned them. Neither, now, did the secular pomp and circumstance of the English Church, for which he used to compose grand and stately anthems and Te Deums. Nor could he return to the visions and ecstasies of the medieval German mystics, or to the spiritual love songs of the Latins. He wanted to submit to a higher order, but he could do so only apart from traditional religion, reaching an understanding and salvation by himself, as a person, as a feeling, thinking human being.
The struggle was titanic but he found the answer. In the first chorus of this tetralogy, with its implacable iambic rhythm steadily pounding in the orchestra while the voices grope questioningly in darkness, we feel that Handel is so steeped in despair, so entangled in doubts, that he will not be able to reach any affirmation. But at the end he cannot tear himself away from the one sentence that shows him the light. Morell ended the fourth and final section of the chorus with “What God ordains is right.” Handel set the words but then changed them to “Whatever is, is right.” The quotation from Pope is in his handwriting. Now the text read: “Yet on this maxim still obey, whatever is, is right.” At first we feel that this idea is put as a quasi question. Handel separates the last line: “Whatever is,” sung by the soprano, stands apart, then the full chorus nails down the answer with a clipped “is right.” At this point Handel quotes from Theodora’s farewell to the world; the eloquent sentence fits miraculously into this situation, both musically and spiritually. Then in the final measures certainty supplants the remaining doubts: the chorus is united, solemnly proclaiming “Whatever is, is right”
The third act opens with Jephtha ready to carry out the sacrifice. He has regained his composure and now laments in more coherent tones: “a father off’ring up his only child in vow’d return for victory and peace.” But he is still agitated, the sombre arioso-recitative has lost little of the poignancy of the earlier pieces. Jephtha’s next air is somewhat puzzling. It is an exceedingly beautiful song about which opinions may nevertheless differ, though most critics acclaim it enthusiastically. Jephtha seems to have undergone a sudden spiritual change. Calling on the angels, “Waft her, angels, through the skies,” he sings in galant style an aria that contrives to entrap these pages in a tender charm. Jephtha finds solace in the thought that after her death Iphis will be carried “far above yon azure plain” to eternal bliss. But the fine song anticipates; the angelus ex machina is given away, and the sudden-risen piety has the appearance of a mask. The aria is a well-constructed piece, though it might be considered just a little too well rounded off. Some may find that this is sorrow drawn to an exquisite point of pain, while to others, and we are among them, the elegant coloraturas are a little too fluent and incongruous in the mouth of this deeply stirred man. The piece, with its almost cloying richness of texture, fills us with pity and perhaps wrings a few tears, but the great perspective of the tragic, the peculiar mixture of shock and elation, is missing. Equally masterly in composition but far more felicitous in expression is Iphis’s farewell song, “Farewell ye limpid streams.” The flush of life that so irresistibly coursed in her previous songs is recalled by the suavely gliding siciliana, but this melody is enfolded in silence. Her open innocence is still here; nevertheless one is aware of disturbing potentialities beneath it—this song is also a poem of the lure of death. The solemnly pacing basses of the second, E major, section and the polyphonic accompaniment lend the melody an almost hymnic quality, as if Handel, who never wrote one, now celebrates her apotheosis in a chorale paraphrase or prelude.
The priests, distraught by the role assigned to them, beseech Jephtha to abandon his vow. With this aching chorus Handel returns to the shadows. The pronounced chromaticism interprets the priests’ troubled uncertainty and their abhorrence of taking the child’s life. There is no ritornel, the stifling atmosphere of the earlier “personal” choruses is back. And so is something else that we seldom encounter in Handel: echoes of the old chromatic motet of the German cantors, the kind they composed when they beheld with awe the Venetians’ new, modern, and expressive art. The mighty double fugue is far beyond the reach of these cantors (always, of course, excepting Bach), but this music does reflect their world as in a glass that is colored but not distorted.
To prepare for the happy ending, Handel called upon the last movement of his early Violin Sonata in D to furnish the sinfonia, a sort of Engelskonzert. It is a pretty piece and wears well after all those years. The Angel appears and, after proclaiming the message of deliverance, sings, “Happy, Iphis, shalt thou live.” This is a very good song, rhythmically piquant and with a spirited accompaniment, but it is also a long one.114 Much shorter and much more admirable is Jephtha’s “Forever blessed be thy holy name.” Though only a few measures long, it movingly translates the mind of a man who has found comfort and peace.115 Handel now proceeds to a chorus that has all the earmarks of a dignified yet warm and unostentatious finale. “Theme sublime of endless praise” is an attractive and engaging piece, closer to the anthem than to the other dark choruses. It does start with the great choral gesture, but what follows is a warm a
nd peaceful choral song, the many suspensions preventing hardening of the texture. The vocal writing is superbly euphonious, the orchestra simply tagging along. There are neither trumpets nor drums; Handel wanted the choral sound to dominate—there was no need for brilliance. Impressive are the passages where long-held notes over a pedal point proclaim “[thy mercies still] endure.”
Unfortunately, what Morell did at this juncture really plays havoc with atmosphere and dramatic meaning. Perhaps he remembered the public’s apathy toward the tragic ending of Theodora; at any rate, he was determined to make everyone happy, on stage and in the audience. As Dean remarks, “the finale is characteristic of that mixture of Puritanism and sentimentality that permeated so much religious thought in the England of 1750.” First comes a happy family reunion. “Let me congratulate this happy turn, my honour’d brother,” begins Zebul, after which he sings an aria. Storgè’s recitative, “O let me fold thee in a mother’s arms,” is similarly followed by an aria; and Hamor also has his turn. Finally, the reprieved heroine joins the family circle in the role of a good bourgeois marriage counselor. “My faithful Hamor,” she advises, “may that Providence which gently claims, or forces our submission, direct thee to some happier choice.” And of course she too sings an air. What we have here is the old operatic recipe: every protagonist must get an exit aria no matter what the dramatic situation may be. This must have been trying to Handel, who had long since given up the practice; it is surprising that three of the four airs are quite acceptable pieces. But Storgè’s is poor; its tripping little coloraturas are more suitable for a soubrette than for this woman of iron. They make her vivaciously wrongheaded.
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