There is a tendency in musicography to discern a Darwinian pattern in the several genres of music, seeing certain ones as resembling living organisms that have emerged from a chain of forms as the result of natural selection, while others succumb to the wear and tear of artistic life. Baroque opera is considered such a lost species, the general view being that these operas, and therewith all of Handel’s, are old-fashioned and impossible to recover. They are old-fashioned, yet perhaps they were more so yesterday than they are today. Among the most interesting facts brought to light by modern research is the disappointment Handel felt on failing as an opera composer. This was a blow to his artistic aims and to his pride, a blow that seems to have hardened his reserve and impelled him to turn to the oratorio with the same intensity that characterized his stubborn defense of opera. To narrow his horizon by dismissing the operas is the way to misunderstand him; it has from the first been the source of many misjudgments. Within the last few decades the theatre has begun to repair the neglect by critics and historians, proving that there is much life in these operas and that though they have a strangeness for us their musical language is of the finest.
But perhaps it may be said that the judgment of posterity is the correct one and not the biased evaluation of some historians. Perhaps this old Baroque dramatic art is doomed, perhaps the consensus that makes Handel into the composer of Messiah alone is an example of natural selection. When we inquire whether there has actually been any “selection” based on esthetic considerations, the answer must be a resounding “No!” These operas require a much more stringent study than anyone has yet devoted to them. It is easy enough to account for them historically, and in the process we may also find artistic justification for them, as valid today as in the 18th century. The critics who dismiss Handel’s operatic “phase” fail to consider how important that phase was in the wholly natural development of the English oratorio, made out of arias and recitatives of the opera with the addition of the chorus from the church and the theatre. The question is whether the artistic style of a given era is determined by that era’s social organization, and if so, how? Is there an element in these operas that is a valid element of the age’s mood? Was there an English public that would spontaneously respond to opera? The English stage, ever since Elizabethan times, shows how closely and immediately the dramatists reflected in their plays things great and small that agitated their times. The Commonwealth also proved that the theatre presupposes a certain freedom of political, religious, and moral life. During a severe, rigid, ideologically controlled period, that theatre cannot exist, except perhaps in some didactic or propagandistic form, as in present-day Russia.
The first thing one notes when contemplating the scene where Handel worked is that his opera was a class art, entertainment for the aristocracy. Though opera became the national theatrical art of Italy, its origins were aristocratic, and what Handel brought with him from Italy was a sophisticated entertainment for cultivated ears. Second, there was the foreign element, to which strenuous objections were raised, while the castrato created a moral issue, and the Italian librettos were found trivial. Yet none of this was altogether new to England. Evelyn, in his Diary, noted as early as 1673 that he “saw an Italian opera in music, the first that hath been in England of this kind”; the “voice of eunuchs” was known to Pepys in 1660. As to the Italian element, we may quote Dryden, who defended himself against the accusation that he “latinizes too much” by saying: “What I bring from Italy I spend in England, here it remains and here it circulates; for if the coin is good, it will pass from one hand to another.”
The coin was good in literature, architecture, and painting, but on the operatic stage it could not “pass from one hand to another” for the simple reason that there was no such stage in England. In Italy, opera was by 1700 the theatre, as an institution having supplanted the spoken theatre, whereas everywhere else it was an importation that intruded upon the old and established spoken theatre. In France, and later in Germany, opera managed to grow roots, but in England, the home of the modern theatre, the public and the literary world alike refused to accept new and strange conventions and would not yield to opera’s particular illusion. (Though we should not overlook the few enthusiastic admirers of Italian opera. Burney, who in his great history spent two hundred and fifty pages on 18th-century opera in London alone, considered it the highest form of music, “the union of every excellence in every art.”) The point they could not understand was that opera is to be valued not for the representation of life to which the highly developed theatre had accustomed them but for the music’s penetration of a reality beyond facts. To the theatrical public, individual character can be expressed only in spirited dialogue, and there is little dialogue in Baroque opera because it is not naturalistic theatre. The long musical sentences, the artificial figures of speech, the constant repetition of single words, and the kind of pathetic diction that Shakespeare called “King Cambyses’ vein” all seemed ridiculous to them.
English theatrical history is as complicated as the history of the English musical stage, and it is particularly tortuous and obscure when the two strands are knotted together. We discussed this to some extent above (p. 194ff.); suffice it to say here that, in the first place, because 17th-century England had no tragedy comparable to the French classical tragedy, the ground was not prepared for an English Lully. The English Lully, Purcell, nevertheless did arrive, but even he could not change the national taste; to compose for the lyric stage is to submit oneself, as even the playwright does not, to the chances of fashion. The social-artistic traditions are strong and inescapable, and their gradual abandonment is a very slow process. Dido and Aeneas is a genuine opera, but it is Purcell’s only one, and it was not intended for the public theatre. His incidental music to such plays as The Fairy Queen or King Arthur is not a whit below the level of that of his sole opera, but the music consists of individual pieces, unconnected “numbers.” Within this unoperatic frame Purcell time and again created superb scenes that are convincingly operatic. Thus an English operatic language was an accomplished fact; the only thing missing after 1695 was an English musician of sufficient stature to continue Purcell’s work, break through the opposition from the spoken theatre, and effect a synthesis of all preliminary trends. There were some musicians who saw the problem and moved in this direction, but their talent was modest and they were given no encouragement. With the arrival of the Italians (and as an opera composer Handel must be considered one of them) any further hope for English opera was extinguished for a long time to come.
In the second place, the court masque was banished by the Commonwealth, and after the interruption of the tradition it was difficult to return to the distinctly aristocratic theatre. Now the musical stage became a more or less realistic entertainment in the public theatres; there was a rapprochement with the regular theatre and with the tastes of the middle classes. At any rate, it would be misleading to place the literature of the English play with music, which is a mere facet of its wide culture, beside the Italian play in music, that is, opera, which represents the fullest development of the artistic aspirations of a whole people. Imported Italian opera took the place of the old aristocratic court art, and for a few decades London became one of the colonies, like Vienna or Dresden, where the specific form, language, and tone of an alien culture, the Italian, held sway. Handel, who became the supreme representative of Italian opera of the late Baroque, was the focal point in the triumphs and failures of opera in London during these decades, and though in the end he had to abandon opera altogether, we do not leave this Baroque opera with the feeling that Handel’s great gifts were wasted.
That they were, is the conventional view, but it does not stand objective investigation; these forgotten operas illuminate his whole path. Those who are puzzled by the disappearance of opera should remember that institutions that do not spring from an acknowledged social need lose their vitality, though not necessarily their artistic value. In the end, while it is unq
uestionably regrettable that Handel spent so many years doggedly promoting and fighting for something that had little hope of succeeding in England, and granting that Baroque opera had certain limitations inherent in the genre which he could not overcome, many of these scores are authentic masterpieces. That this is beginning to be understood is shown by the gradual revival of Baroque opera in Germany, Italy, and England. This is only partly the result of curiosity awakened by historical research; the law of the pendulum is asserting itself. The so-called orchestra-opera and the more recent Sprechgesang have destroyed singing; now we want to restore it, and nowhere was pure singing more exalted than in Baroque opera. However far and however long Handel’s stage works fell out of operatic fashion, their sheer musical value, apparent even to those who are unable to adjust themselves to Baroque musical dramaturgy, insured their survival.
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NEVER WAS THE style more candidly the man than with Handel. He was born for the theatre, and the Italian impressions sealed his artistic features. It is far from the mark to begin an appreciation of Handel’s style by saying that “his music—like Bach’s—is rooted in the instrumental and vocal art of the Middle German cantors” (Müller-Blattau in MGG). This sort of thing could perhaps be excused half a century ago, when German historians simply copied Chrysander, since scarcely any one on the Continent was concerned with English music. Today, and in the outstanding modern musical encyclopedia, such crass misreading of stylistic history is unpardonable. Both German and English writers, in eager haste to reach the “sacred” works, looked upon everything that preceded the oratorios as “preparatory” steps hardly worth more than a mention. The whole Italian period, consequently, was traced with indulgent superficiality, often accompanied, on the English side, by homilies on the futility of opera. The milieu from which Handel’s art took its first flight was the chamber cantata, as far removed from the Middle German cantor’s art as Vinci or Pergolesi is from Bach. The cantatas, and their particular variety known as the chamber duet, accompanied Handel throughout his life, springing up like a mountain streamlet and with the most charming spontaneity among the great sombre music dramas. Handel even composed new ones on Italian texts as late as the 1740s.
While always retaining his individuality, he remained faithful to the older Venetian-Neapolitan ideal of the musical stage, though towards the end of his operatic career he does show signs of being influenced by new currents coming from Italy.134 He did not markedly develop in his operas as he did in the oratorio, he only wrote better ones. We do not see the tremendous broadening of conception that we can follow in the oratorios. The operas do develop in finesse, in the wondrous handling of the orchestra, and in many other facets of the craft that a maturing musical genius would naturally show in whatever he does, but the convention was too strong, the genre held Handel in its grip. The technical construction was more severely regulated in the old opera than in the new oratorio. The latter, especially its lyric and epic variety, could arrange its episodes in widely varied order, while the opera composer dealt with whole sets of dramaturgical dogmas, constructional clichés, schemes, and schedules. If such rules are applied too rigidly, if a genre becomes too stereotyped, it is detroyed; this is what eventually happened to the opera seria, and this is what undoubtedly caused a number of Handel’s operas to lack viability. But in a surprisingly large number of great works Handel coped successfully with the constricting conventions, for he often departed from the strict observance of the “rules,” even from tradition. Behind the conventional librettos (as behind the well-known biblical stories) Handel reconstructed the men who appear there as legendary or historical vignettes.
Though the form of Handel’s opera was that of the aristocratic “court opera,” for him the essence of the drama was not the plot; he was far more interested in the human nature of his protagonists. With the exception of Riccardo I, he never composed the type of allegorical homage opera that the Italians wrote for the princes in whose service they worked abroad. Vienna especially welcomed these thinly disguised paeans to the ruling dynasty. In Handel’s case homage to King and country was reserved for the anthems and, less formally, for the oratorios. When writing for the theatre, to compose and to seize a dramatic moment were the same to him. Even the oratorios are music dramas conceived for the theatre; to place them in the church is absurd. Handel can reveal in a character dramatic possibilities that never occurred to the librettist, its creator, and his ability to conjure up a mood is well illustrated by the little ritornels that precede arias. At times, notably in the earlier works, he had some difficulty with his heroes, who tend to lengthy soliloquy and somewhat overdrawn pathos. Or on other occasions his hero simply walks through the drama toward his own scenes, making the work episodic. But when he reaches the great moments, the weak portraits are forgotten, and dramatic intensity can reach a peak that threatened the framework of Baroque opera.
While Handel was fighting his operatic wars in London, the fashions changed, and there began a vast shifting of operatic taste: the era of Scarlatti was declining as the era of Metastasio began. At first Handel seems to have been oblivious of these changes, or more probably he ignored them, for he was always well informed about musical trends. Nevertheless, a certain stirring in the operas composed for the new Academy of Music is noticeable. Handel’s Italian recruiting trips, almost two decades after his first sojourn there, must have familiarized him with the new trends in Italian opera. Surprisingly, he was very slow to reassess his aims in the light of altered circumstances, but in the last operas there is a definite change. The texture becomes much lighter, assuming a decidedly popular cast; the melodies are often real “tunes.” This has been attributed to the more modest capabilities of the singers Handel was forced to engage, the greater ones having been abducted by the competing companies. While this may have been a contributing factor—Handel was a pragmatic professional—the main reason was the rising neo-Neapolitan style of the opera buffa. The opera buffa was bound to be victorious over the seria, for the realistic and lively mimic sense of the Italians had always overcome abstraction ever since the Middle Ages; they loved a good story.
Now ensembles appear more frequently in Handel’s operas, as does a long-forgotten element, the chorus. This operatic chorus (like the ensembles) is sparingly used, but it is definitely choral in nature as opposed to the “chorus” of soloists that Handel placed at the end of his earlier operas. Was this new phase a retreat from or an advance towards a creative truth? Earlier in this volume we said that when leaving Venice Handel had certain ideas about opera that he felt could not be realized in Italy. The vicissitudes of operatic life in London forced him to spend a long time in taking his soundings, but near the end there were great strides towards what in another quarter of a century would become the reform opera. He considerably lessened the distance between secco recitative and aria by increased reliance on the accompanied recitative and the arioso as well as a blend of these, and he moved from the individual aria to the group of pieces that make up a scena. But here his Italian opera ends. He had got himself into a situation from which he could extricate himself only by a complete reorientation: the English oratorio. He did not really cease writing operas—Semele among others proves it—but now he composed English works for English audiences. The premises had changed, and though it was within his grasp to establish what Purcell and all the others had failed to do, to create English opera, unaccountably he, too, failed. This failure could not be ascribed solely to insular conservatism, for a man of the world was at work here, and many of the materials used came from the ambassadors of European music.
Every one has denounced Handel’s librettists—and some of them were very poor—but he could not have written masterpieces without at least serviceable librettos. One readily admits that the words alone may often look loose and even silly, but complete the words with the music (from which they never should be parted), and everything becomes quite different. In dramatic vocal music we can seldom consider the text ap
art from the music without injustice and stultification. If necessary, Handel did interfere with his librettist, but as a rule he did not pay too much attention to the story. It was different with the set pieces. Neither the Greek nor the classic French drama considered the novelty of the story of any importance, nor did Shakespeare. What they were interested in, and what Handel did, was to bring the figures to life; he was a creator of men. This, after all, is what makes a dramatist a dramatist. There is a good deal of accident in the story-telling as well as in the dénouement, but to the true dramatist accident is only the symbol of the accidental nature of human things. The absolute necessity, free of everything accidental, which is the dream of esthetes, does not exist in earthly life and is esthetically impossible, too; it would render human life into a mathematical formula. If during the course of composition Handel had a change of heart, or disliked what the librettist gave him, or was out of sympathy with one of the figures, he never hesitated to let the librettist know. If he could not get what he wanted he simply ignored the text and composed his music by favoring certain words, thus giving the piece the quality he wanted despite the text.
This Baroque libretto was not, however, dramaturgically primitive. Its aims were entirely different from the naturalistic, psychological drama of modern times, its main role being to create situations suitable for the introduction of arias, of lyricism. This has led to the musicological term “concert opera,” a pejorative misnomer. But if we interpret “concert opera” to mean that a concentration on the music is necessary, we come closer to the nature of Baroque opera. During the aria, action was virtually suspended and the attention of Handel’s public was riveted to the convolutions of the music. The spurious acting we usually require at this point interferes with this concentration. Our public, accustomed to the realistic theatre, will simply have to learn how to listen to this music, for it is the process that matters in this type of opera, not the action. At times Handel’s stage is narrow, but it can be intensely lit; his plot makes contact with life at few points, but the contact is ringingly made.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 78