George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

  As an opera director, he was a singular phenomenon. The insatiable enjoyment of creation he united with the bravado and readiness for action of a condottiere. We have seen that Handel used members of the English diplomatic service for recruiting singers abroad, and he seems to have been on excellent terms with several of them—the banker Joseph Smith in Venice was a veritable postal agent. Incidentally, it is quite possible that the various envoys procured for him new musical publications. He experienced financial difficulties, but W. C. Smith has proved that there is no evidence that he was ever close to “bankruptcy,” the favorite contretemps of romantic biographers. Hawkins estimated that the income Handel received from oratorio performances after the establishment of regular seasons was more than £2,000 a year, a very respectable sum, to which must be added the income from the published scores and his various annuities from the Crown, not to speak of the dividends from his investments. He was not really interested in money for its own sake, for his way of life did not change in his days of affluence, but he regarded it as a symbol of success and recognition. Handel’s banking operations (in which he was interested and knowledgeable) were in the care of Gael Morris, “a broker of the first eminence,” says Hawkins. Indeed, Handel was an English middle-class squire of sound business sense, living in comfortable circumstances. When he died he left an estate of some seventeen to eighteen thousand pounds. He maintained a simple household with a few servants, did not keep a coach and horses, and on the whole “he had at all times the prudence to regulate his expence by his income.” But there was always money for those who needed it, and he spent large sums on paintings.

  Towards his English colleagues he was courteous—though there were some exceptions. One notices that his name appears on many subscription lists for works, such as those of provincial organists, that could not have interested him. In turn—again with exceptions—his English colleagues treated him with respect and consideration. Several of them showed forbearance unusual in the highly competitive theatrical world. During the 1745 season, for example, Arne, who operated from the Drury Lane Theatre, announced the performances in the newspapers by stating: “This Day is fix’d on to avoid interfering with Mr. Handel.” It was another matter with the Italians in London, who either were part of the cabal or were used by his enemies in the way Piccinni was later to be used against Gluck. They received no quarter from Handel and as a rule had to return to Italy with bloodied noses. Though he was a keen observer of the international scene, what he thought of the music of other composers we do not know. During the early years his admiration for Scarlatti, Pasquini, Corelli, Steffani, and of course Zachow was genuine and warm, but in his mature years he refrained from showing any preferences or even appreciation, though Hawkins mentions an expressed admiration for Rameau. He subscribed to publications from abroad, but only towards Telemann did he show an interest that went beyond courtesy. His regard for Telemann remained constant for more than half a century. In 1735 his old friend and boon companion, Mattheson, dedicated a volume of organ fugues to Handel “as a token of singular homage.” Handel’s answer, beginning stiffly with “Monsieur” and ending with “avec une consideration parfaite,” is cold and formal. Though complimenting Mattheson, Handel makes it clear that he is too busy to pay too much attention to such things. “My continual application to this court and nobility keeps me from any other business.” This was a curious tone towards an intimate friend of his youth; however, Mattheson was anything but a chevalier sans reproche, and Handel may have had his reasons. At any rate, the dedication was omitted from future editions of the collection of fugues.

  As for Bach, although their names were linked by German writers as early as the 1730s—Scheibe in his Critische Musikus (1737) declared Bach and Handel the two greatest keyboard artists—the two never met. So far as we know, Handel knew little about his greatest contemporary and was familiar with none of his music. As we have pointed out, Bach knew some of Handel’s music and appreciated it, copying a few scores and even borrowing from them.

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  THE PROBLEM OF Handel’s relationship with women has puzzled his biographers for the last two hundred years, producing ingenious and conflicting theories, a few of them cogent, most of them dubious, if not inept. Psychoanalysts were quick to conclude that Handel, like Brahms, had an unnaturally strong attachment to his mother, which made him incapable of passion for other women. Many of the writers seem to regard celibacy as a higher and more spiritual state than marriage, which is a rather curious attitude coming from English Protestants. Flower called Handel “sexless and safe,” while others attributed his bachelorhood to a “moral revulsion to carnal passion.” But it is clear from his dramatic works that he did not see anything prurient in sex. He did not consider erotic conflict to be of a lower order than moral conflict, and he never permitted the passions of his dramatic figures to be derided on moral grounds. We have seen what he did with such a part as Dalila’s, where the warm music contradicts the moralizing text. But on occasion he directly intervened on behalf of his heroine when the librettist was too harsh. Thus in Semele he changed the original “the curst adultress” to “cursed Semele”; a woman in love may be cursed but not besmirched.

  The solution to this mystery must be sought, I believe, in the artist rather than the man. It is evident that Handel was attracted to women in all stages of his life. The Mlle. Sbülens mentioned in a letter of the nineteen-year-old Handel, La Bombace in Florence and Venice, the shadowy Iberian princess, Donna Laura, and a number of singers and other women clearly interested Handel more than socially or professionally, although his amorous encounters with them were as carefully screened from view as were his political and religious inclinations. But all of these were peripheral affairs. One might say that he simply did not have time for serious engagement with women. Solitude for him was not loneliness, it was his deepest inspiration. He was imbued with a mixture of creative frenzy, the rapacity of a conqueror, and the enterprising zeal of a businessman, all goading him to incessant activity. He saw no place for a woman in his scheme of things. What woman would have been willing to keep pace with this driving personality who made his work a religion and expected others to treat it as that, who organized every moment of his life and every detail of his household with a hearty but thorough dictatorship? How would any woman understand the single-minded pursuit of any idea that took possession of him? Gossip is always eager to discuss the loves of artists, but in truth a poet or composer is not always created for love. Complete devotion, complete sharing of sentiments, which is what love means, are more difficult for the creative artist than for anyone else. The more profound his devotion to his art, the less can his identity be sacrificed by being dissolved in another person. Some women feel this instinctively and are wary of the poet’s love. The Muse is a symbol, and the Muse’s love is everyone’s and no one’s.

  There is a certain kinship, both in nature and in expression, between Eros and musical poetry. It is the urge, the creative urge that drives the composer to work, and the pleasure he experiences while so engaged is akin to erotic experience. The kinship is much closer than that between, let us say, music and the emotion of patriotism. This is clear even quantitatively: there are many more love songs than patriotic songs.

  Considering the extremely wide range of the characters of Handel’s heroines, and the infinite nuances in their femininity, it seems incontrovertible that he must have been a man not only of normal masculine constitution but one attracted by and sensitive to feminine charms, as is borne out by his marked predilection for the women among his friends. Furthermore, one notices that the women in his dramas, no matter what the libretto requires, respond far more readily to strong instincts than to principles or viewpoints. He was little interested in their social problems and conflicts, the more so in their femininity. The attitude is that of a man who knew women, and whenever he speaks of them his voice is sympathetic. At times he mourns their frailty but it is clear that he would not wish them otherwise.
His female figures were not created according to the conventions of the time, for he loved beauty and would have found the world bare without feminine grace.

  Love changes according to climates, but that the Puritan, straitlaced, biblical England of Cromwell or the Victorians was not the English norm is well demonstrated by the Elizabethans and by the Restoration. The ardent poem of Romeo and Juliet, the pure oxygen of love that kills, was written by the epitome of an Englishman. And that voluptuous votary of love, Semele, was portrayed in music by an Englishman with a German intonation who in staid Halle could never have heard such accents. Such a woman could never have risen from the imagination of a misogynist. Nor were Semele and Cleopatra the only ones in Handel’s enchanting gallery of women possessed by love. Solomon’s young Queen is as irresistible as her sinuous, beguiling music. We may have no positive proof of Handel’s love affairs, but how could a man unacquainted with love compose the wondrous idyll known as the “Nightingale Chorus” (Solomon), the lilting, seductive promise of an enchanting night?

  There are other memorable women, the Nikes and Aphrodites of old Greek coins, who, stepping out of their hieratic confines, begin to live. Some are fresh and fragrant in their youth, gentle, timid, innocent, and utterly charming, some are not unaware of life’s pleasures, some are ravishing, uninhibited lovers. But Handel also knew those who are driven by demonic strength and overwhelming tragic passion. How magnificent are these regal women—Dejanira, fierce, possessive, or Nitocris, a tragic queen, torn between duty and maternal love. It is noteworthy that in the last oratorios, Susanna, Theodora, and perhaps even in Jephtha (Iphis), women are the principal figures, as they were in a number of the operas.

  These passionate women caused consternation among the doughty Victorians who could not reconcile such attitudes with the composer of Messiah. They “cleansed” even Semele of what to them seemed immoral indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh, but their real concern was with the presence of sex in the “sacred” oratorios. Though Solomon became a paragon of monogamy in the oratorio, Handel made up for the loss of the harem by the ardor of the reformed king’s love for his queen. Embarrassment at such earthy attitudes and episodes in biblical oratorios could be avoided only by changing the words of the original libretto. “Editing” of this sort was done with such thoroughness that even innocent words that only faintly referred to anything sexual were eliminated as suggesting the wicked and unseemly. This attitude is still reflected in today’s performances of the oratorios, for the figures in the love scenes are manipulated puppets; they are not considered for their own sake but are subordinated to the “sacred” theme. When Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, what he cared about was the love story, not the quarrels of the Montagues and Capulets, which remained for him a secondary piece of plot making. So with Handel. When he composed love scenes—and there are many in the oratorios—every other consideration vanished. But the Handelian music drama with a biblical subject has unfortunately been represented as being altogether composed in the spirit of religion, its sole purpose being moral edification and nothing so trivial and ephemeral as love. Neither art nor love, however, is trivial, and a love story is not a sop to distract the mind.

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  HANDEL’S LONG contact with the English imparted to him a good deal of the essence of English genius. London, he realized, was not England but the vortex into which all currents of English thought are gathered up, whirled around, and from which they emerge with a new unity and new power. But the Englishman is at heart a countryman, and Handel, too, became an intimate of Nature’s household. He was one with nature by intuitive identification; he responded to the individuality of each landscape and felt in every mood its corresponding season and time of day. Making these moods real in the listener’s mind is only a matter of association of ideas. The transition from nature to art bends back on itself. When the Elizabethans wanted to commend a flower they said it was as beautiful as a picture of it. The realists miss this profundity of abstraction and are lost in the concretization of details. The ancient Greeks praised Zeuxis, for he painted cherries with such accuracy that the birds came to peck at them. But this only proves that the birds are no connoisseurs of art. The artist superimposes on nature what he considers desirable; he makes a selection from nature of elements that suit his interests. This is what Handel did, this is what all poets do.

  To range the arts according to whether they are representational, taking their subject from “nature,” like painting, or whether they are subject-less, like music, is primitive. Art does not directly take from nature anything but physical matter—stone, or canvas, or sound. To confuse the physical with artistic matter is fatal, for artistic matter is not of natural but of human origin. A metaphor or simile drawn by music from nature or everyday life arrests the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought. The ready use of nature’s material for images is a sure sign of intimacy with it. It was Handel’s capacity to identify himself with the impalpable presence of nature, the inspiration of a rare surrender, that makes his nature scenes alive with wonder. He was a pagan in the true and original sense of the word, closely in contact with the earth, looking at it with an all-encompassing loving eye. The observer of nature is caught up in the visionary who sees detail and incident as part of a mystic whole, though not less clearly defined. Handel’s imagery is as delicately and regularly near to nature as his vision, and he continually discovers in her something new to see and ponder and express. What Dryden, in his Essay on Dramatic Poesy, said concerning Shakespeare applies equally to Handel: “All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them, not laboriously but luckily: when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too.” Yet while Handel describes a landscape or a bucolic scene with incomparable felicity, his music can assume an intensity of feeling of which the source is merely the ostensible theme.

  Handel already had had a taste of genre scenes and nature painting in Hamburg; Keiser was a master of them. This was long before nature as a whole had any deep significance for other German musicians or even poets. The Lutherans, preoccupied with the hereafter, did not understand nature and regarded it with anxiety; or, as in the case of Bach, were unconcerned with it. They looked upon the phenomena of the outside world with a medieval distrust of the inscrutable powers that it harbored. (Their warm espousal of the poetry of nature is of a considerably later date.) The humanistically oriented concept of nature Handel acquired in England was otherwise new. True, Dryden’s and Pope’s Nature still largely reflected the urban mind noting with superiority the oddities of the rustic. Yet they liked “nature to advantage dressed,” and there was no feeling of disharmony between pagan and Christian ideals. Nature was no longer a strange domain in which man gropes, distrusting it, or subjugating it in the spirit of the Enlightenment or the New Science. It was not mysticism nor yet romanticism. The real mystics, such as Angelus Silesius, closed their eyes to the most magnificent landscape; it was they who coined the terrible saying mundus pulcherrimum nihil. To Handel and his Englishmen the colors of the earthly do not fade in the presence of God. To them nature was a pervading mood, and in art more a style than a form, its essential trait being the intimate. Nevertheless, the seemingly narrow little world that is the idyllic can be as serious as the widest and, in the case of England, it can represent the spirit of a people. Susanna’s flavor is unmistakably that of the English country, and L’Allegro breathes the spirit of rural England.

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  WE MENTIONED a few pages back Dr. Quinn’s letter to Burney in which the Dublin doctor praised Handel as a raconteur who liberally mixed four languages. Though undoubtedly true, the remark certainly does not indicate that Handel’s “English” consisted of just such a panache; any storyteller might well resort to this device. German authors, who seldom fail to pounce on any evidence to emphasize Handel’s “uncertain knowledge of English,” use this story to bolster
their claim that Handel remained a true and pure German even after forty-seven years of residence in England. If they would take a look at much 18th-century German writing, they would find a similar mixture, though more objectionable because foreign words are often inflected according to German grammar. It stands to reason that a man who already knew four or five languages would be able to acquire better than passable English, yet it is still the joy of the popular (and not so popular) biographies and histories to relate the many stories about Handel’s difficulties with the English language. 127

  Many of the anecdotes do not bear close examination. There is, for instance, the famous story related by Burney and frequently quoted that when Carestini remonstrated with Handel about an aria, Handel was supposed to have lit into the haughty and pampered castrato with: “you toe! don’t I know petter as your seluf, vaat is pest for you to sing?” The only flaw—and it has already been noticed by Chrysander—is that Handel would not have addressed an Italian singer in English. Carestini could not speak English and Handel’s Italian was excellent. Actually his faux pas and his exploits in pidgin English are largely fabrications and are due mainly to his German accent. Such sneers are bound to arise in the case of a foreigner; even Lully’s impeccable French settings were derided. D’Alembert found that the French recitative was created by a “foreigner,” going so far as to accuse Lully of “deformed prosody,” an absurd charge.

  Hawkins, speaking from personal knowledge, says that Handel “was well acquainted with the Latin and Italian languages; the latter he had rendered so familiar to him that few natives seemed to understand it better.” The historian acknowledges that Handel “pronounced the English as the Germans do,” but his estimate of Handel’s proficiency in English differs markedly from that implied in anecdotes. “Of the English also he had such a degree of knowledge, as to be susceptible of the beauties of our best poets; so that in the multiplicity of his compositions to English words, he very seldom stood in need of assistance.” True, Handel did use a pasticcio language when annotating his scores. When a work was finished he would write ausgefüllt, and the title would also contain angefangen, followed by words in English. He composed on German, Latin, Italian, and French texts, corresponded in French, and spoke fluent Italian, but essentially there were only two languages that closely concern his music: Italian and English. In the end, English became for him the principal language. It is noteworthy that by 1730 he used his mother tongue with a certain hesitation, as can be seen from a letter in German to his brother-in-law.