Posterity owes Handel, the artist and the man, a reappraisal. For the moment he still lives on “in the serene twilight of doubtful immortality,” and in that deceitful medium he looms vaguely as a sort of fabulous high priest of biblical religiosity. There is seldom much of the prophet or priest in the man of the theatre, and Handel would not have denied this—and in his England he did not have to deny it. When we come to regard him closely, he appears as one of the most human figures among musicians of his or any other age. Now the light of art begins to shine on his oratorios, illuminating in them not dogmatic religious messages but the warm scenes of our earthly life, which were obscured from us for two centuries.
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WE MUST NOT swing from neglect to blind eulogy; there were blemishes, too, in Handel’s character. He could be an opportunist, he could sometimes subordinate art to business interests, and he could do shoddy work. When creative fervor dropped, he was an ordinary mortal, and we should look at his lapses with sympathy, as we do with other great men whose accomplishments dwarf their shortcomings. But there is one aspect of these weaknesses that cannot be passed over lightly. Poetry and music above all other arts have the power to raise a man above himself, to make him feel the tide of infinity flowing around him. It is this exalted status that Handel betrayed with maddening regularity.
Handel shows a contrast unique among great composers. Setting a text, he would battle the librettist, examine every word, make suggestions, or himself change the text for better dramatic logic, concentrating on the task at hand with a fierce creative ardor. While working on an original new score he was conscientious as were few in his time; the artistic moment was paramount. His judgment of music, whether his own or someone else’s, was shrewd and correct. Hawkins tells the story of Handel’s asking his opinion of “See the conquering hero comes.” The historian frankly admitted that he did not consider it of any particular merit, whereupon Handel genially remarked that eventually this piece would be “more popular with the people than many other fine things.” He was critical in reading and copious in correcting what he wrote, unerringly finding a better solution when second thought disclosed flaws or suggested new possibilities in a piece or even in a few measures. Implicit in all his original scores is the craftsman’s jealous fidelity to the shape and substance of the material with which he works. But once the task was finished, he showed an incredible indifference, and more often than not simply ruined his carefully planned and lovingly composed work with senseless juggling of portions, transpositions, cuts, emendations, and interpolations of all sorts. Almost every one of his major scores became, after a few revivals, a jungle in which the traveller can hardly find his way. It is incomprehensible how this sensitive man of impeccable taste would throw together odds and ends without any regard to compatibility. The same composer, whose logic of tonal relationship was one of the most highly developed in the entire range of musical history, would shift and transpose unceremoniously until nothing remained of the original scheme. At times these rearrangements made no sense at all or resulted in comical distortion. In the revised score of Solomon (1759), a particularly botched performance, Solomon’s wife was cut out altogether; as a result the king’s invitation to love-making al fresco is addressed not to her but to his official guest, the Queen of Sheba. Since Handel failed to adjust what follows in the original score, Sheba appears to be embarrassed by her host’s indelicate proposition and, as if to change the subject, says “this music is divine, o King.” These were her original lines in praise of the formal entertainment staged in her honor. A similarly ludicrous situation was created when Handel exchanged the role of Alexander Balus for that of Cleopatra’s confidante, Aspasia. There are many instances where he did not even bother to touch the shifted or borrowed material, simply instructing the copyist what to do with it.
How can we explain the careless, even destructive, attitude of one who in his original creations proceeded with such magnificent artistic insight and integrity? Some of the arrangements or reworkings were done in self defense against piracy, which was rampant. There was a sort of copyright act instituted by Queen Anne, later superseded by a licensing act; Handel even received a personal copyright from the King in 1720, a fourteen-year “Privilege and License for the sole printing” of his music. But all these acts were so ill-defined that they were unenforceable. Expediency and self-interest were the watchwords of all society under the Hanoverians. Handel’s only recourse when an unauthorized version of one of his works was announced was quickly to rearrange and produce it himself, assuring the public that his version was new, enlarged with additional numbers, and so on, and therefore preferable to the competitor’s production. It is likely, therefore, that a number of Handel’s reworkings were done under a sort of duress to keep the would-be pirates off balance; he was a fierce competitor.130 We must also bear in mind that new singers often had to be accommodated at short notice, making hasty transpositions inevitable, and that the public’s craving for always new productions had long since sanctioned the practice of pasticcio operas. This practice is much more ancient than its modern critics realize. The transferring of portions from one play to another was already frequent in the Roman theatre of antiquity and was given by Latin authors the realistic technical term “contamination.” In sum, what Handel did was not markedly different from what was being done at the same time in Naples, or Venice, of Vienna; it was the standard practice of the age. We might add that refurbishing was freely indulged in by Bach, too, and we find the practice still liberally employed by Gluck in his most hallowed “reform” operas, the Iphigenias.131
But these are partial explanations, they do not answer the question of extreme carelessness and unconcern. The real explanation is that there were two Handels: the composer and the entrepreneur. The composer who wants to compete, who is in fact an impresario, loses the ground from under his feet, he loses the basis of his art to stand upon. He no longer acts as a creative artist but as an ordinary businessman, he no longer exercises the discipline that comes from within but arranges things to suit external circumstances. Hawkins gives the reasons for the impresario’s attitude, which are still valid after almost two hundred years: ”In all theatrical representations a part only of the audience are judges of the merit of what they see and hear, the rest are drawn together by motives in which neither taste nor judgment have any share.”
While this interpretation may solve this baffling problem, it is still hard to accept the fact that so overwhelming a genius could subordinate his art to such a degree for whatever reason. Art is not business, and the difference, for example, between the original Solomon and the reworked one is that between day and night. It was unfortunate that Handel did not realize that artists who betray their standards for any reason betray themselves. Happily, these scores can be restored. By starting with the original manuscript and carefully scanning the later additions and variants, accepting only those that bear the stamp of creative fervor, removing the bowdlerized or shifted numbers, a knowledgeable editor can produce a critically correct edition. But such an editor must steel himself and remember Spenser’s lines:
That which is firme doth flit and fall away,
And that is flitting, doth abide and stay.
Handel the impresario often discarded some of the finest numbers, replacing them with inferior pieces that have nevertheless acquired popular sanction through the years.
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AFTER THIS JOLT to our memories, we must turn to the interbreeding of ideas which under the heading of “borrowing” created for 19th-century scholars an almost insurmountable “moral dilemma.” The moral issue was raised early in the 19th century. Thomas Busby, in his A General History of Music from the Earliest Times to the Present (1819), defended Handel on the grounds that he improved the material borrowed. This was angrily disputed in the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review (1822) by an author who signs himself F.W.H.: “This is the first time I have ever heard of a theft being deemed less culpable by the improvement
which the robber has afterwards made in the article stolen.” Righteous consciences were just as alarmed eighty years later. Franklin Peterson, in an article entitled Quotations in Music (in Monthly Musical Record, 1900), considers Handel’s borrowings “flagrant,” and any justification based on his artistic use of them to be “a puerile begging of the question.” But we can advance into the second half of our own century and still find the same attitude. “Many of Handel’s compositions,” writes Henry Raynor in the Monthly Musical Record (1956), “are no more than plagiarism, showing no particular assimilation of other people’s work, certainly not demonstrating that he has found in it significance which escaped the attention of its original composer.” We are dealing, of course, with a romantic concept still widely shared by laymen: the composer creates in an intoxicated daze, at “white heat,” and if he uses material of earlier creation, he is a plagiarist, a swindler, and a thief. One wonders why the other romantic conception of the artist as an irresponsible individual who must not be measured by the standards of bourgeois ethics is not applied in this instance.
Let us say at the outset that to represent Handel’s borrowings as a weakness is not merely to pervert the simple evidence of the facts but to introduce an entirely discordant element into the total picture of a great artist who was also a man of magnificent moral courage. Many Handelians are embarrassed by their hero’s interest in ideas proceeding either from contemporaries or older composers, an interest he had acquired early, when Zachow made him build up a library of models by copying interesting works by a wide variety of composers, and which continued to engage his piercing and delicate scrutiny to the end of his life. This propensity was altogether different from the haphazard shifting of material from one work to another (although actually most of Handel’s borrowings were from himself); it was a time-honored device of composition used by the greatest masters well into the second half of the 18th century; no opprobrium was attached to it. Only those who do not understand the process of musical composition, who cannot see and feel the subtlety of transfiguration that can be created by a changed melody, even a single note, rhythm, or accent, have made a moral issue of something that is a purely esthetic matter. Have they ever considered the miracle that Beethoven made of a little torn rag of a waltz by Diabelli?—Brussels lace made of a piece of gunny sack. Far from condemning Handel, we should return to unrepentant appreciation and quote Romain Rolland’s beautiful phrase: “Handel evoked from the very depths of the [borrowed] musical phrases their secret soul of which the first creators had not even a presentiment.” There is an anecdote quoting Handel who was supposed to have answered the question of why he used material composed by Bononcini thus: “Well, it’s much too good for him, he did not know what to do with it.” While the authenticity of this is very doubtful, the attitude is typical for the times—and for Handel.
Handel was an assiduous student of music, a good reader. The good reader understands the other man’s world and instantly recognizes its essential features. Bach, too, was an indefatigable student, and he, too, borrowed a good deal, but his approach was entirely different. With his analytical mind he carefully sought out what he wanted; once satisfied that a certain type of music would benefit him, he unhesitatingly adopted it for his own purposes. Handel did not search for his materials, rather he relied on his extraordinary memory. He could recall the smallest musical detail, a measure or a motif, forty years later. His powers of association and assimilation were unusual, and when he saw something he liked, something that was akin to his own style or could be converted to it, he instantly accepted and used it, whether it was a theme or an entire movement. He had an uncanny feeling for what was right for the occasion. The list of composers from whom we know he borrowed ideas is long: Graun, Kerll, Muffat, Telemann, Keiser, Kuhnau, Habermann, Carissimi, Urio, Erba, Stradella, Porta, Lotti, Legrenzi, Astorga, Steffani, Bononcini, Clari—even Cavalli; and it undoubtedly will be longer, because all of his borrowings have not yet been discovered. Certain types of music served him as a reservoir of ideas. Thus the collection of his own keyboard pieces was a favorite preserve for obtaining choral fugue material. Another favorite source was Italian vocal duets, mainly his own, but also Steffani’s and Clari’s. His cantatas composed during the Italian journey formed a faithful retinue in attendance throughout his life.
These visits of Handel to the caves of memory deeply worried his posthumous admirers and were seized upon by his detractors. Some advanced the senseless theory that he could not have proceeded to compose without first borrowing ideas. But Flower, the stern guardian of morals, who was keenly disturbed by the possibility that larceny might taint the memory of a man regarded as the artistic emissary of God, refutes this canard energetically, though not very accurately. “That Handel, more gifted with originality than most of the composers the world has known, should prowl about looking for the indifferent work of lesser and unknown people is a foolish charge.” He immediately endorsed Percy Robinson, who in Handel and his Orbit declared Urio and Erba nonexistent, their names referring to certain places in Italy where Handel had stayed rather than to any composers. Robinson further insisted that Stradella’s serenata Qual prodigio, incorporated in Israel in Egypt, was a youthful composition of Handel himself. These unproved flights of fancy may have helped to assuage moral scruples, but there is no place named Muffat or Habermann. Nevertheless, Sir Newman happily announced that Handel “was not a plagiarist—except on himself.” Other commentators have thought that Handel resorted to quotations only when unsure of himself, because of mental fatigue or because of the aftermath of an illness. To connect Handel’s borrowings solely with his illnesses is to admit to an ignorance of musical history, to an unfamiliarity with the creative process in music—and to a superficial knowledge of Handel’s works. In the first place, Handel’s habit of borrowing was well known in his lifetime and was not a discovery of posterity. Scheibe (Critische Musikus, 1745) says that though Handel often developed “not his own thoughts but those of others,” he was nevertheless a man of “great understanding and of refined and delicate taste.” Hawkins, like other musicians and historians of his time, also knew about the borrowings and mentions—with admiration—that in Alexander’s Feast Handel “introduced a trio which he had set formerly to the words ‘Quel fior che al alba ride,’ which he adapted so well that most men took it for an original composition.” He also gives a fairly accurate list of the choruses based on Handel’s harpsichord pieces.
The pasticcio was of course an accepted form of entertainment and few listeners cared who actually wrote a particular piece or bit of music so long as it fitted the situation.
Chrysander himself was acutely aware of the problem and of its implications to his contemporaries; good scholar that he was, he decided to attack it in the open. In 1888, when the first of the six supplemental volumes of the great Händelgesellschaft edition, containing the original scores of Erba, Urio, Stradella, Clari, Muffat, and Keiser appeared, it required considerable intellectual courage to take an objective stand in the face of the ethical misgivings of the Victorians. Sedley Taylor followed in 1906 with a most interesting publication, The Indebtedness of Handel to Works by Other Composers, the first close examination of this problem. Taylor immediately reached its core when in the preface he remarked that Handel “also treated in precisely the same manner older works of his own.” The theme is vaster than would have been thought possible in the days of Chrysander and Taylor, for “invention” and “imagination” represent one concept in the Baroque era and another in our own. But we are beginning to realize that like Nicias, who did not find it beneath his dignity to adorn with his brush sculptures made by other artists, great composers did not disdain to adorn with their notes the music of their fellows. Far more than in the sister arts, in music the rewoven tapestry becomes an entirely new creation.
Nothing is more difficult than to estimate the precise degree of consciousness in a creative artist of the distant past. Handel was one of those who are not so
entirely submerged in their gift that they cannot watch and to a considerable extent guide it, even when they are possessed by it. Does the composer know what he wants? And if so, does this consciousness hurt his art? We can assume that at times it is the composer who is in command, at others the mood that envelops him; here it is consciousness that dictates, there instinct. But with the great composers, consciousness is always present even though it may not be the absolute master. This consciousness often wears a mask, follows the fashions, or defies them. Musi-cographers are very much interested in this question, which is one of their chief sources of material. The more ambitious—and less informed—of them have an exact way of dealing with it. They equate the “originality” of the composer with the remainder they obtain by subtracting the sum total of “influences” from the sum total of a composer’s oeuvre. Since such research extends into the smallest details, this remainder often is pitifully small, for influences go through a composer’s heart, lungs, and brains; they can tie him into a knot, intimidate him, if they do not make him ridiculous like more than one ponderous post-Wagnerian or perfumed post-Impressionist. However, it was this very same “influence research” that opened our eyes to the greatness of the past, that made us realize that the old maxim, “there is nothing new under the sun,” is equally valid in music. The world is the same and the human ear is the same as before, and it is the same human heart that in its desires creates aims and directions and supplies propulsive force.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 76