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IT IS REMARKABLE THAT the irrepressible happy world of Shakespeare and other English playwrights, the world of amorous comedy, banter, and playful humor, is rarely present in Handel’s operas. His abstention from comedy is the more surprising because the English theatre consistently refused to divorce the serious from the comic. Furthermore Handel was well acquainted with Italian opera and oratorio, both of which contained buffo elements. In denying himself this mixture he denied himself an easy way of characterization, because comedy is the merciless critique of human foibles. Contrast of the serious with the comic is in itself a form of characterization. But though Handel had a healthy sense of humor and actually wrote delightful comedy, on the whole he seldom composed parti buffe. He may have been influenced in his early youth by some dramaturgical ideas that frowned upon comedy as part of a serious work. Barthold Feind, the Hamburg dramatist, was not the simpleton poetaster some historians made him out to be. His prefaces to his plays and librettos, as well as his treatise, Gedanken von der Opera (1708), show a considerable knowledge of the literature of dramaturgy and of the nature of opera. It is quite possible that it was from him that Handel first took the idea of excluding comic scenes from his dramatic works, for Feind had very positive views on the subject, even though low comedy was extremely popular in Hamburg. The other early impression may have come from Giovanni Crescimbeni, whom Handel met at the Arcadian Academy in Rome (see above, p. 54). In his highly respected La Bellezza della volgar poesia (1700), Crescimbeni expressed the Arcadians’ conviction that the comic element has no place in a “classical” drama. A true dramatist does not make exalted persons mix with “base” people, such as buffoons. It is noteworthy that the original librettos for some of Handel’s operas contained parti buffe, but almost invariably they were removed by Haym, Rolli, and the others in the reworking of the source material. Given the number of librettists involved, the consistent changes can be attributed only to Handel’s insistence. Yet the Arcadians’ principles were not observed by the successful opera composers, and Handel himself readily subscribed to such anti-classical devices as the mandatory happy ending, which Crescimbeni expressly prohibited, but which was the stock in trade of every composer and was demanded and relished by the public. Or was it perhaps the Restoration comedy, too coarse for Handel’s taste, that discouraged him, or the earthiness of the buffa? To him passion was not to be mocked at. In almost every art there is a playful element, but Handel did not often like to play with his art. This playfulness is more natural to the Latin, whose spirit floats with liberty over artistic creation and does not easily surrender, like the German or Englishman, to sombre tragedy.
Every comedy is more or less realistic; or perhaps more precisely, no real comedy can be imagined without naturalistic elements. It calls for a different attitude, a different viewing, and a different lighting than does tragedy. One of its essential traits is the skepticism with which it views every form of heroism, behind which it wants to shine its light, seek the pose and the make-believe and the emptiness. It does not know, or refuses to acknowledge, anything in life that is perfectly secure, whose values, greatness, and beauty are above all criticism. And comedy, great comedy, always shows both sides of the coin simultaneously. Handel knew the buffa, but he did not compose comedy pure and simple, for he created characters of iron consistency, and in comic scenes a character drawn with consequence loses this very quality. On occasion he did use the buffo element very tellingly, but he was first and foremost a tragic and lyric artist.
This leaves us with the mixture, tragicomedy. Tragicomedy is a very complicated intellectual procedure, the realization that the event taking place before us admits to points of view that are mutually exclusive. This can only be the result of a subsequent intellectual act whereas spontaneous effect, the really theatrical, demands either of the two poles, the tragic or the comic. The older theatre did not know this combination; the most it admitted was the juxtaposition of tragic and comic characters, or the alternation of tragic and comic situations, in which case the two styles were separated. Nor can comedy be expressed sensuously—the situation is its chief means—and Handel’s entire imagination was sensuous. He lacked the irony that was so strong in Mozart and enabled the Viennese master to compose superb comedy while it prevented him from debasing his characters to a point of being simply comical. The witticisms, the pungent comments for which Handel was known, have no echo in his music; but of delicate and sophisticated humor there are many more examples than Serse, always cited as Handel’s only excursion into the comic vein. These range from single scenes, such as the duet of Dalinda and Lurcanio in Ariodante, to whole operas, such as Deidamia. This whimsical humor, which has little to do with the opera buffa, was lost on Handel’s contemporaries. Burney rejected even Serse, obviously more because of his knowledge of the classical theory of drama than because of a true appreciation of the work. He objected to “the mixture of tragicomedy and buffoonery, which the reformers, Zeno and Metastasio, had banished from the ‘serious opera.”’ But Serse is not a “serious opera,” nor is there any buffoonery in it, only genial love intrigue that has its engaging contretemps. Humor usually requires that things be looked at from close proximity, but Handel’s view was seldom directed nearby. This, and the fact that there is no comic feeling, only comic thought and situations, explains the dearth of the comic in Handel’s dramas. Speaking of the delicately humorous elements in Handel’s last operas, Dean makes an observation that goes to the root of the matter so far as audiences of today are concerned: “It is a quality not easy to detect in a convention whose curious aspects seem ridiculous to a modern audience.”
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OPERA COULD NOT SUIT the social-cultural traditions in England. The spoken theatre, well known and well liked by the middle classes, rejected the etiquette and the classical props and puppets. The castratos—reprehensible to the British mind—the preening and jealously quarreling singers, added a moral touch to the distaste. When in 1737 the Covent Garden company collapsed, as did the rival establishment of the Opera of the Nobility, there was no opera left in England, and no one seems to have missed it even though by that time Handel had presented to Londoners over thirty operas. Somehow this mistrust and moral indignation gained in intensity, and by the time we reach the 19th century Handel’s biographers were ready to rewrite history: the conversion theory appears as an explanation of his motives for turning to the oratorio. They honored the consensus that posited a sharp break between opera and oratorio. Not only scholarship but even ordinary common sense was lacking when they failed to see that only the locale, the scene of action, had changed, not the theatre itself. The means are the same except for the very important new element, the chorus. Handel experienced everything dramatically, instantly so, therefore even his epic-contemplative works eventually take a dramatic turn. Neither accident, nor compulsion, nor conversion is responsible for the change to oratorio; it was the result of a clear appraisal of the practical situation. Handel wanted a musical genre in which he could deploy his powers and which at the same time would appeal to all strata of the English public.
Two of the period’s outstanding trends appear in his solution: the secularization of church music and the victory of the Italian musical Baroque. Therefore this art, while English to the core, is also of universal validity. It is unconfined by sectarian boundaries, and in an unsettled time it offered the most elevated spirit of community within a universal and popular style. There is no question that, aside from other compelling reasons, the change to oratorio was the result of a deep artistic insight. Handel saw the great line it made possible, and he also saw how to escape the restrictions of the opera seria. Nor is there any question that in his fidelity to this insight there was an act of renunciation, which few of his admirers are prepared to see and admit. Yet it is manifest in every one of his moves, as he went from crisis to crisis, facing the failures and humiliations with courage and determination. But to the reverent eyes of those who see in Ha
ndel the composer of Messiah only, and who have done little more than nibble at his operas, this determined and heroic fight was incomprehensible and ridiculous. They could not see here the struggle of a musician who was intimately concerned with the drama of human life and the texture of human emotions, for which opera, ever since Monteverdi, has always been the most congenial vehicle of expression.
Musically, Handel’s progress from the “shallows” of opera to the “deeps” of oratorio follows such a delicate plan of gradation that the break between the two appears less as a plunge into deeper waters than a modification of form appropriate to a more intensely felt personal approach. He was still composing theatre music, even adding stage directions to those supplied by the librettists. It was Princess Anne, Handel’s great friend and pupil, and a more perceptive Handelian than many a musician or historian of famous memory, who immediately saw the theatrical qualities in Esther and wished to have it staged and acted like an opera. While until recent times the aprioristic attitude towards the oratorio frowned upon any hint of the “theatre,” some discerning and dissenting voices were heard even in Chrysander’s time, though only in regard to the so-called secular oratorios. August Reimann in his G. F. Händel (1882) flatly declared Semele, and Hercules valid only if staged.
Though oratorio was closely related to opera, there were some profound differences in the social and literary aspects of the new genre. The English music drama called oratorio reflected bourgeois thought and ethics, whereas opera was aristocratic. The bourgeoisie could see no reality in Italian opera, but the great conflicts of State versus rebellion, the defense of Jewish faith and institutions from the pagans had a social significance for them that accorded with their own aspirations. The Old Testament figures appeared to them as dramatic individuals of far greater dignity than the figures of classical legend and history, and the Old Testament also gave Handel a poetically fabulous distance: major e longinquo reverentia. The minute he returned to his favorite classical subjects, in Semele or Hercules, this reverentia disappeared and the English public rejected them as operas, which in fact they were. The behavior of Handel’s characters had to conform to the expectations of his audience. That is to say, he was able, at the same time as he refrained from pointing a moral in his work, to rely on the uniform moral sense of his audience. For this reason the effect was far more powerful and moving than an express and positive appeal such as that in the sentimental family novel.135 The other essential change was due to the complete reorientation of the phonetic structure upon which the melody was based, since Italian phonetics had to be replaced by English.
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CATEGORICAL DIVISION OF genres always becomes arbitrary as soon as a new and significant composer appears on the scene. To deal with Handel’s Resurrezione and the two German Passions as stages in the development of the English oratorio is inadmissible. Even the term “oratorio” is actually a misnomer when applied to Handel’s English works, for they have little in common with either the Italian or the German prototypes. The oratorio flourished on the Continent during the Handelian era. Almost every composer of opera also wrote oratorios, and though today forgotten, there are many remarkable masterpieces among them. But these, including the works of such Germans as Fux or Hasse, were Ital-ian oratorios—that is, subterfuge operas. Even such an outstanding work as Leo’s Abel’s Death is pure Italian music drama, altogether different from Handel’s English music drama. The fact is that there was nothing like the English oratorio before Handel. Hawkins proves that oratorio of any sort was practically unknown in his country.136 He was aware of “the Concerto Spirituale, so frequent in the Romish countries, and which by the name of Oratorio is nearly of as great antiquity as opera itself,” but he did not minimize its newness in England. “As to the risk that an entertainment so little known in this country as the Oratorio would be disrelished, of that too [Handel] was able to form some judgment.” On the other hand, Handel’s oratorios were unknown on the Continent, even though he was famous as a composer of operas, a number of which were performed in Germany and Italy. It is surprising that German scholars (and many of the English) avoided asking themselves the question that stared them in their face, namely whether Handel’s oratorio was not an entirely personal form of English dramatic music. On the contrary, the tendency is to see in the Handelian oratorio a direct descendant of the German cantata and Passion, with some of its blood coming from Italy. Critics saw in the oratorio not passages from history, freely and imaginatively treated as dramas of persons, but symbols of religious and philosophical issues, and scholars made strenuous efforts to prove the presence of such issues in the most unlikely places.
This eternal search for Weltanschauung is misplaced in the study of a composer whose natural bent was towards representation of human passions, and not towards abstract theological problems. It is in the storms and ravages of the soul, its triumphs and tragedies, that his creative pleasure finds its most convincing tones, but he is also capable of the most intimate and refined accents, as well as warm—even searing—erotic transports. It is unfortunate that views on the oratorio are generally as blurred by excited religious acclamations as those on opera are distorted by sentimental prejudices.To most people Handel comes to life only when he raises his voice, that tremendous voice which could match Jehovah’s, yet he can be like the giant who plays with a little child. Only the very great and strong can be so gentle and amiable. To Iphis he advances on tiptoes, but Belshazzar he strikes with a club. Nowhere in his dealings with his librettists does he allude to any doctrinal or philosophical questions; it is always the dramatic craftsman’s imagination that speaks from his letters. “Your most excellent Oratorio has given me great Delight,” he writes to Jennens, acknowledging receipt of the libretto of Belshazzar. “It is indeed a Noble Piece, very grand and uncommon; it has furnished me with Expressions, and has given me Opportunity to some very particular Ideas, besides so many great Choruses.”
This little paragraph accurately describes Handel’s attitude as a dramatic composer; his way ad lucem was not, as the apologists maintain, per crucem, but per theatrem. The world has heard a great deal of Handel as the pillar of Christianity but little of him as an artist who, like a glass maker, shapes his material with blower and furnace into works of exquisite limpidity. His sense of beauty is a quality our misguided tradition is often tempted to overlook in the supposition that he cared only for grandeur. It did not produce the sort of beauty that those accustomed to the great German Protestant sacred music are most ready to look for and most likely to enjoy. It will be more readily appreciated when his dramatic works, both opera and oratorio, are staged and acted with all their delicacy of characterization, avoiding the impression of repressed passions and diverted instincts. The first requirement is a new edition of Handel’s works. It is hoped that with the new critical edition now in progress the old religious and nationalistic bias will be forgotten in the interest of true art and scholarship, so that this great music will once more sound in all its glory.
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LIKE HIS OPERA LIBRETTISTS, the men who furnished texts for Handel’s oratorios were no poets to speak of. Still, they could put together a usable dramatic vehicle that suited Handel’s genius. Unlike the Italians, however, the pusillanimous English men of letters such as Humphreys, when arranging a powerful drama for an oratorio libretto, would remove its heart and make the rest into something comfortably bourgeois. Fortunately, if they kept a reasonable continuity and did not cut out all the conflicts, Handel was able to make a work of art out of the poor dramatic poetry. He was a good judge of librettos; his sense for the proper textual vehicle for his music is shown by his correspondence with Jennens on the inordinate length of Belshazzar and the unilateral cuts he made in it. But when he was given a really wretched libretto, such as Joseph and His Brethren, he was helpless to overcome its deficiencies and was reduced to grasping at the little fragments of meaningful drama. At such moments, even in his least successful works, his music immediately l
ights up, but elsewhere the drama is inorganic. He aims at a unity that is absent in the libretto and that can be difficult to extract from the sometimes rather inhuman figures of the Old Testament. As in any inorganic art, every virtue is at odds with some other virtue. The unifying monumentality of his language at times weakens the life of some of his figures, making them a little generalized, but he almost always compensates with his lyric intensity in the spiritual reflection of tragedy, with the conjuring up of the moods in which tragedy is conceived.
Good unity and continuity are usually destroyed in performance, as is not infrequently sense, too, by what might be called the “oratorio pause” between the individual numbers. The soprano finishes her aria, retiring with dignified reserve to her place on the conductor’s right, and, when she is seated, the maestro beckons to the tenor who, with equal gravity and decorum, advances and gets set, the harpsichord sounds its warning chord, and the recitative begins. But these two are dramatic adversaries locked in a flaming contest; the recitative should follow immediately upon the last cadence of the aria, for this is drama, theatre, and not a pseudo-divine service. We are presented with tableaux seemingly unconnected. This, in addition to the lack of staging, gives the false impression that the dramatis personae are passive, symbolic figures. The operatic element survived in the oratorio and was if anything enhanced. At times one has the distinct feeling that Handel is more concerned with the dramatic and communicative powers of his English singers than with the quality of their voices. Such a “star” as Mrs. Cibber was not even a singer by trade but an excellent actress.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 79