George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

  But all this is of small importance. Handel undoubtedly had a strong German accent, mispronounced, even misunderstood, some words, though his crimes against correct setting of English are no more conspicuous than those committed by Bach or Beethoven against their own tongue. The often mentioned gauche prosody is, in fact, frequently due to the incongruity of the altered texts with the original music. What matters is that he understood the genius of the language, notably the rich imagery of English, and not only understood it but, as is clear from his own statements, liked it and considered it well suited for musical setting. (See above, p. 290.) No English composer, not even Purcell, could set an English text with a finer ear for its true accents and inflections than Handel in the “Nightingale Chorus.” “I know that my Redeemer liveth” affords another example of Handel’s complete assimilation of the spirit, the sound, and the meaning of English. We say “the spirit” because the declamation itself is not faultless; nevertheless, Larsen is right when he contradicts Dent’s cavalier dismissal of Handel’s “Englishness” by saying that the relationship between words and music in Handel’s English oratorios is altogether different from that in his German and Italian works. “This aria tells us something important about Handel’s indebtedness to the English spirit, and how natural it is that Handel’s music has been recognized for centuries as a true expression of that spirit.” The English language with its plethora of consonants is of course quite different from the Italian, in which the many vowels produce an effect of a clear stream flowing over stones. But when approached from its own premises it can be as successfully adapted for musical setting as the Italian. It did not take Handel long to discover this, and once he felt secure, he challenged his librettists. There are many known instances where he changed the original text not simply to obtain more singable word combinations but also to improve the verse, which he did at times with surprising skill. While many of these changes found their way into the Händelgesellschaft scores, Chrysander ignored just as many.

  What a difficult task for an artist that his most intimate thoughts should not be expressed in the language through which his entire culture was formedl But Handel was a little like the Renaissance humanists to whom Latin became a mother tongue; for him English became a source of the spirit.

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  VIRGIL HAD for a long time the reputation of being one of the great religious poets of the world. Mystery attached itself to him from the earliest times, and the ambiguity with which he hailed the coming savior of the empire allowed him the dignity of a Christian poet. Handel presents a somewhat similar case. He too had his “Fourth Eclogue”—Messiah—upon which his religious reputation was built. Hawkins, attempting a summary of Handel’s achievements, comes to the conclusion (II, 913) that “in the first and highest class of Handel’s works no competent judge of their merits would hesitate to rank his first Te Deum, and the Jubilate, his coronation and other anthems, the Dettingen Te Deum as it is called, and the chorusses of his oratorios.” It is obvious, therefore, that by 1776 a firm conviction was already held that it is the compositions “in which the praises of God are celebrated” that “the power of his harmony is beyond conception.” But, as we have seen, the anthems and Te Deums were ceremonial pieces, not true religious music, while in the oratorios Jehovah is for the most part a poetic convention. Statements of piety are from the mouths of the dramatic characters or in a context where the plot, rather than Handel’s personal belief, is the determining factor. His rare remarks on religion show a remarkably wide tolerance without any denominational specification or even reference. Ardent Handelians completely misread the composer’s basic character when, like Chrysander, they declared him to be a religious mystic. This claim has been maintained to this day, supported by apologists eager to credit Handel with abandoning the frivolous opera theatre for a labor of devotion to Christianity akin to Bach’s activity in Leipzig. Thus a firm tradition was created unchecked by objective scholarly reflection.

  Until this day the change has been ascribed to a “conversion,” a turning from the frivolity of opera to the service of religion. Just where the popular assumption of this change of heart started is difficult to ascertain, but it is so profoundly entrenched that it is almost impossible to remove the vestments that clothe the oratorios. Let us examine this “conversion.” In the first place, the change is anything but sudden and emphatic. The oratorio Athalia was a great success, but Handel returned to opera, completely ignoring for a time the new genre he had created. In the second place, it is clear from all his acts, from his stubborn fight against all odds, that he would never have abandoned Italian opera had he not realized that in the face of innate English antipathy for the genre there was no hope for its continuation. The decision had nothing to do with religion nor was it so fundamental a change as the critics of Italian opera have supposed. As a matter of fact, if the ecclesiastical authorities had not frowned on staged performance of scriptural subjects, we should have witnessed a form, a particularly English form, of “biblical opera,” a phenomenon not unknown in the history of music.

  The conversionists conveniently forget the vicissitudes of the Handelian oratorio, which for some time caused Handel troubles scarcely less wearisome than those suffered by his operas. The oratorio was condemned by those who felt grave misgivings about the propriety of uttering Holy Writ in the “play-house.” But it was banished from the church, too! Clergymen considered even Messiah a blasphemous “religious farce”; it was not admitted to a church until eighteen years after its composition, nor were any of the other oratorios until the end of the century. In 1784 a performance of Messiah in Westminster Abbey provoked clerical indignation, and even a publication of a book of sermons preached against the oratorio by the Reverend John Newton.128 It is sad to contemplate that William Cowper had a hand in this, for the unstable poet, then living with the Reverend Newton, was by that time wholly absorbed in an extreme sort of Evangelism.

  However, the religious climate did change as English Pietism flourished in the wake of Methodism. The Wesleys themselves were fond of music and appreciated its role in religion, and while the more Calvinisti-cally inclined shared the Reverend Newton’s opinions far into the 19th century, Handel’s hour did come, as we see from the elaborate commemoration acts in his honor beginning in 1784. The “conversion” theory was canonized, and though there were many persons living who had known Handel and were conversant with his setbacks and difficulties, the commemoration festivities were the nation’s endorsement of the oratorios as an expression of “the fundamental truth of religion.” As early as that we get a glimpse also of the atrocious distortion of Handel’s music in performance which became characteristic of the 19th century. In 1787 over eight hundred singers and instrumentalists took part in the performances (already fortified with choirs of trombones), their number rising to 2,500 in 1857, and to 3,000 two years later, filling the Crystal Palace with the righteous bellowing we unfortunately associate with performances of Messiah, a contemplative and lyric masterpiece.

  Shortly before the first commemorative service we encounter the first literary affirmation of the “conversion.” In fact, the theory had become fairly current by the time Sir John Hawkins published his General History o Music in 1776.129 The excellent pioneer historian states that by abandoning opera and embracing oratorio “Handel gave another direction to his studies, better suited, as he himself used to declare, to the circumstances of a man in advancing years, than of adapting music to such vain and trivial poetry as the musical drama is generally made to consist of.” Needless to say, there is no record of such a statement by Handel, as there could be none, because it is so much out of character. What Handel did say, and what is entirely in character, was in 1746 when the young Gluck called on the admired master to show him the opera he had composed for London: “You have taken far too much trouble over your opera; here in England that is a waste of time. What the English like is something that hits them straight on the eardrum.” That, indeed, a grateful if m
isguided posterity accepted as the Handelian trait par excellence.

  The conversion theory was well summarized by William Edward Hartpole Lecky, historian and author of A History of England during the Eighteenth Century (1878-1890). Endeavoring to find in the immense welter of data and sources those elements “which relate to the permanent forces of the nation, or which indicate some of the more enduring features of national life,” he saw these features in Handel’s music “only when interpreting the highest religious emotions.” Indeed, Handel was one of those “whose lips the Seraphim had touched and purified with the hallowed fire from the altar.”

  Neither the preacher nor the psychoanalyst will get much satisfaction out of “Mr. Handell.” Metaphysics had no meaning for him. His considered beliefs as they are revealed in his acts and his works appear even more latitudinarian than those of his friends. Again and again he seems to wrestle with the difficulties of reconciling with the fullness of life as he understood it the moral claims of Christianity as presented by the preachers and theologians. His fundamental religious position involved unqualified acceptance of what he saw as the essential faith, but his works show that he had his own mind about the crystallization of that faith into dogma, and his attitude towards religion is very different from that of the two churches he served. He relied on inner freedom and seems to have had for the mere fulfillers of the law a fine contempt. Indeed, to Handel the positive values he was seeking were to be found in creative energy, of which he had a superhuman stock. He acted individually and solved every moral problem for himself.

  Handel was a practical man of the theatre, an expert professional speculator in the business of musical entertainment, sacred or secular. Life-loving but hard-working, shrewd in bargaining but generous, he was a man altogether untinged by religious mysticism; if anything, like a good Englishman, he mistrusted it. In the minutiae of religion he took no apparent interest. His whole cast of thinking was practical, his interest ethical-moral. We know that he was born and reared a Lutheran, but after he left Germany he gave not the slightest indication what communion he favored. Although biographers do not mention the fact, Lutheran congregations had existed in London since the 17th century. In Handel’s time, St. Mary’s Evangelical-Lutheran Church, adjoining the Savoy Palace, was available to him, yet he is never known to have frequented it. The court, too, was at least nominally Lutheran. George I brought with him two German Lutheran court chaplains and maintained a parochial school within the palace grounds. Formally Handel did not belong to the Church of England either, and his faithful attendance at St. George’s would seem to be the conventional observance of an English gentleman’s religious duties. He did not care for anything that he did not see and understand, he was natural even when describing the supernatural. One recalls Courbet’s gruff bon mot when someone asked him why he never painted the Madonna: “Monsieur, I never had the pleasure of meeting her.” Handel’s mode of artistic creation was to shape with warm feeling but with cool and calm disciplined professional knowledge. His single-minded and unspeculative acceptance of life’s hazards, his preference for a straight and undeviating course through them, is the antithesis of the mystical. He was not an unworldly preacher but an artist who happened to be endowed with exquisite sensibility in certain directions, in whom passion and emotion were intensified while they were sublimated by the severe “poetic pains” of creative genius.

  For a long time Handel was alone and the target of much cruel satire, at times gross and unpardonable. We are aware of his disappointment at the thwarting of cherished projects, but never of bitterness. By the end of his life opposition had changed into nationwide admiration and affection, but the rise in the emotional barometer was not due, as has often been assumed, to his embracing of a Christian mission. Equally farfetched and contrary to the evidence is the opinion of some writers who, deceived by appearances, have gone on record affirming that nothing in Handel’s career “warrants the assumption that he was actuated by any motive nobler than desire for monetary reward.”

  This uncertainty in the final estimate of Handel’s position proceeds from a doubt about the line of tradition in which he should be set. The influence of any nation, as a creative force in art, can be exerted either directly, through an already formed art, or indirectly, by lending elements impregnated with its colors and moods to an artist of another nation to shape and adapt and to pass on with his own stamp to the world of art. It was so with Lully, with El Greco, with Baron Grimm, and it was pronouncedly so with Handel. What appears to be the spontaneous art of an individual may acquire an entirely different significance when seen from the angle of the situation that prompted it—in a word, the milieu. Long before modern psychologists, Robert Owen already believed that human conduct is wholly the result of the action of the cultural and psychological environment upon the individual. It is the milieu that places man in the scheme of things, but the milieu is the fabric of hundreds of threads woven together. The two inspirations that biographers, especially Handel’s German biographers, like to discuss separately, religion and the adopted nation’s institutions, were not opposed to each other. The Church in England was an integral part of that collective spirit whose pressure on individual musical genius constituted a large part of English musical history.

  What gave the Englishman’s civilization its power and glory was his proud consciousness of a steadily forward-pressing humanity, reliance on his own powers, confidence in himself. Not only did he believe, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, that man is the measure of all things, but there was an element in his belief akin to the concept of the ancient Greeks, to whom the gods were only a higher form of the human. In Christian dogma man, though created in God’s image, possesses a nature so weakened by sin that he cannot by his own powers rise to participation in the divine life. By virtue of this conception the measure of all things is God, not man, and man is no longer the most powerful but the weakest of creatures. But such a dogma was in reality foreign to the English mind and character, and wherever we look in English history we find a conflict between Jupiter, Jehovah, and Christ. Handel, though originally a German Lutheran, found this English temper congenial. He had a confirmed faith in the ultimate integrity, one might almost say divinity, of the individual human being whom he extolled in his English music dramas. Indeed, the presence of any specifically Christian ideas in his works (always excepting Messiah) is difficult to prove even though it is generally taken for granted. When at the end of his career he changed Morell’s lines in Jephtha from “What God ordains is right” to Pope’s “Whatever is, is right,” he revealed that his religion was less that of a denomination, or hardly even of a “way,” than an attitude of mind and heart. Yet, though the stern purposefulness of his life did not depend on stated articles of faith, Handel lived in a happy security of the conviction that there is an order in the world decided from above.

  There are two different orders of reality, one human, the other superhuman, and the point of junction between them is Jesus Christ. When all is said and done, Jesus himself is the essential fact in Christianity. He is both the Revealer and the Revealed. We have seen that after the few compositions of his youth in Germany and Italy Handel no longer set to music the symbols of Christianity. In the Old Testament, Handel’s most frequently used source for oratorios, God is revealed in the moral law, in human relationships and experiences. In Theodora the characters live and act in a Christian background, but even that background is historical rather than religious. That leaves us nothing but Messiah, altogether an exception in Handel’s oeuvre, a commissioned work destined for charity purposes. But all this is intelligible, and even warrantable, if we conclude that Handel’s religion was a form of Deism. Leichtentritt, who sensed the problem, calls Handel “freethinking.” If the term seems more a careless adjective than a seriously meant designation, we may recall that in 18th-century Germany, as in England, it had no hostile or pejorative connotation. Pope’s Essay on Man, from which Handel’s quotation in Je
phtha was taken, was generally interpreted as an apology for the “freethinkers.” Though a Catholic, Pope was not immune to the “natural religion” that so attracted his contemporaries.

  The new philosophy and the new science had done away with many old beliefs more energetically in England than anywhere else in the world. Deism was a characteristically English way of looking at things; as Crane Brinton has said, “A respectable Deism was the ordinary position of the English mind.” A natural religion based on reason alone, without the aid of any supernatural revelation, Deism posited belief in a personal God, both Creator and Judge, but not accessible to man in the Judaic or Christian sense. Its English form characteristically embraced a rather wide range of latitudinarian Christianity. Though it did not last very long, the movement left indelible marks on modern legal, political, and moral philosophy. It had many adherents, especially among the upper middle classes, and including many of the literary men with whom Handel was acquainted. It was in this part of the century that the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Woolston, John Toland, Bolingbroke, Thomas Chubb, and a number of other Deists exerted considerable influence, eliciting from Joseph Butler the great protest that was The Analogy of Religion (1736). Like most of the Deists, Handel did not find it contradictory to accept the established outward forms of faith, and the ceremonial-theatrical quality in the services of the Church of England suited his music. Upright, honest, charitable, and kind, Handel, who seldom missed Sunday service, was, in the highest sense, an English gentleman, following his own dictates, and running his affairs by strictly minding his own business. We can now see the real meaning of the statement he once made to Hawkins when the latter asked him what he particularly appreciated in England: “He would often speak of it as one of the great felicities of his life that he was settled in a country where no man suffers any molestation or inconvenience on account of his religious principles.” All his life, and from his early youth, Handel’s acts showed a firm belief in a man’s privilege to make what he can and will of his interior existence.