George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

Ex. 5 Rinaldo

  Ex. 6 Ode to St. Cecilia

  Ex. 7 L’Allegro ed il Penseroso

  Both Bach and Handel show a preference for the large melodic design, but achieve this in different ways. Handel tends to freer stylization, while Bach proceeds to more complicated and compound construction. Handel preserves the vocal conception; Bach leans to a conversion even of vocal melody into the instrumental. In Bach’s case this means that the music’s relationship to the text may become vague and may even disappear, whereas in Handel the vocal basis is never missing and is subtly influential even in the most idiomatic instrumental compositions. His loyalty to the cause of the drama is often evident in unexpected turns as the sailing kite of melody is suddenly jerked from below by the composer’s hand, the rhythmic flow exploded by a different accent. It is in this area that the Handelian melos differs fundamentally from the Bachian, for the “theatrical perspective” may demand a particular tone and pace. Often there is a certain urgency, a certain reckless quality in Handel’s style, which Gerald Abraham calls his “broad slapdash style.” This quality, which may be observed in Verdi and other Italian opera composers, can be very deceiving on paper; the stage is necessary for this kind of music to exert its intended effect. Opposed to this, though also rooted in drama, are the extreme condensation and plasticity of many of Handel’s germinal utterances. Such compactness in turn has a latent propulsive—even explosive—quality that demands immediate continuation and exploitation (Example 10).

  Ex. 8 Imeneo

  Ex. 9 Deidamia

  Ex. 10 Concerto Grosso, Opus 6, No. 1

  Then again, Handel, who was interested in folk music and is known to have noted down the street cries he heard in London, could compose melodies of the touching simplicity of an English folksong. The little ballad Susanna’s companion sings is one of these. It looks—and is—charming, but its dramatic impact far exceeds its charm, for it was placed in context, in the “theatrical perspective,” by the unerring instinct of the dramatist (Example 11). While the great aria melodies are usually diatonic, in fugue themes Handel sometimes likes to follow the German Baroque practice, also dear to Bach, of building on chromatic, occasionally even eccentric, subjects (Examples 12, 13).

  Ex. 11 Susanna

  Ex. 12 Belshazzar

  Ex. 13 Israel in Egypt (originally a keyboard fugue)

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  DENT, allowing his preferences to peep through the veil of sound scholarship and discretion, found Handel’s harmony “flat.” Curiously, his colleague and another Busoni apostle, Leichtentritt, comes to the exactly opposite conclusion, which we share. It seems that Handel’s not infrequent use of unaccompanied singing, his omission of the continuo as well as his fondness for unison passages, all of these serving dramatic ends, must have misled those whose harmonic taste was still anchored in the lush soil of late and post-Romanticism. This habit of renouncing the bass, and with it the entire apparatus of the basso continuo (a procedure already employed in the Italian cantatas), has puzzled those to whom “Baroque music” means a full-bodied texture supported by a relentlessly rumbling continuo. Handel was ready to accompany his singers with violins alone—or leave them altogether to their own resources. This is a matter of aural-theatrical imagination and not of flatness of harmonic sense. To indicate her loneliness Arianna, in Giustino, sings her aria “Per me dunque il ciel” without any accompaniment at all, which to ears unaccustomed to accepting even Gregorian chant without accompaniment is naked music. Chrysander often harmonized the unison passages, and editors and conductors like to add a little “body” to Handel’s harmony, which they consider thin.

  Handel’s harmony is always sound, interesting, and often bold. His frequent use of tonalities such as B-flat, E-flat, and A-flat minor is exceptional before the Romantic era. His modulations, too, can be highly adventurous. A few examples will show that Handel’s harmony is colorful even by igth-century standards (Examples 14, 15, 16). In the final analysis one realizes that the flatness or boldness of Handel’s harmony depended on the dramatic needs of the moment. At times the harmonies seem to have gone into hiding, while at others they glint in unexpected places, or fail where we expect them. In his instrumental music he is seldom adventurous; the harmony is always fresh and solid, but Handel relies mainly on his mobility, counterpoint, and fluent thematic continuity. In an accompanied recitative, however, he may advance far into the future. Furthermore, his harmony is also determined to a certain degree by the vocal concept that ruled his imagination. Mainwaring showed an early and perceptive appreciation of the nature of Handel’s harmonic scheme: “The harmony of Handel may be compared to the antique figure of Hercules, which seems to be nothing but muscle and sinew.”

  Ex. 14 Solomon

  Ex. 15 Imeneo

  Ex. 16 Israel in Egypt

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  HANDEL HAD an exceptionally keen sense for rhythm and for metric refinement. His musical sentences may be compared to blank verse whose rhythm is complicated by enjambements. The frequent combinations and alternations, implicit or explicit, of different metres are enchanting, as are his combinations of dance types. Asymmetric constellations are frequent and always intriguing (Examples 17, 18, 19). His fondness for the hemiola, for time values whose relationship is 3:2, is noteworthy. This has been ascribed to English influences, but the hemiola, and the change from 6/4 to 3/2 (or vice versa) was a characteristic trait of Baroque music, resurrected later by Brahms in a typically archaic North German spirit. Even in his favorite dance form, the siciliana, Handel does not always observe the traditional rhythm; the spirit of the dance is there and so is the flowing, beguiling melody, but the rhythms are new and varied. Other interesting instances of subtle rhythmic-metric construction are shown in Examples 20 and 21.

  Ex. 17 Concerto Grosso, Opus 6, No. 9

  Ex. 18 Trio Sonata, Opus 2, No. 1

  Ex. 19 Susanna

  Ex. 20 Agrippina

  Ex. 21 Il Moderato

  Perhaps the most engaging and most consistently intriguing quality in Handel’s music is the combination of this preference for asymmetric design with the urge for improvisation. This great improviser at the keyboard was also a great improviser as a composer; in fact, this is an essential quality of his genius. The sudden capricious turns, unexpected internal repetitions, the brusque tangential departures, are all the result of the inspiration of the moment. It is fascinating to watch how Handel, having presented the antecedent, will delay the consequent, continuing to develop his thought by introducing new antecedents or questions, then answer them summarily, or in a series of consequents. These “irregularities” may seem to be separate portions, but are not really clauses, nor are they parenthetical; in spite of the improvisation there is a condition of dependence, a syntactical relationship arrived at by inductive musical logic (Example 22).

  Ex. 22 Theodora

  Opposed to this, though not unrelated to Handel’s improvisatory-combinatory gifts, is his ever-growing penchant for thematic work that may assume genuinely symphonic proportions. This is notably present in the accompaniments to arias and choruses (Example 23). The often consistently thrusting and propulsive conduct of such thematically woven passages clearly testifies to the birth of the symphony from the spirit of opera. Finally, we should mention Handel’s love of the ostinato basses of the Venetians. His use of the ostinato differs from that of the Germans and English, because it almost never offers a strict observance of the principle; it is only the effect that interests Handel.

  Ex. 23 Saul

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  IF SOME HAVE questioned Handel’s harmony, his counterpoint has baffled many more. While his homophonic block-chord writing (which overwhelmed Beethoven) is a typical characteristic of Handel’s choral style, his counterpoint is a sovereign art. A few pages back we likened the true polyphonist to a chess player who always sees the entire board; perhaps we should now add that the figures on this board are not dumb bits of ivory but have their own sense, supporting one another concentrically.
The born contrapuntist’s chessmen always find themselves on the right spot for action, second one another in imitations and similar procedures, sometimes without the composer’s conscious awareness of the exact nature of the operation. Whether the theme was original was of no particular importance—as we cannot often enough remind the reader—but it had to fit into a musical organization and there occupy a central position. To a good composer a fugue subject immediately suggests many of the possible combinations the minute he sees it. The experienced polyphonist knows at once whether a subject “will do,” divining its possibilities; he feels the latent counterpoint simply because he feels in terms of counterpoint. Only those reared on the music of the extreme individualism of the Romantic era find in counterpoint something cold and cerebral. To the average musician—let alone the layman—understanding for dense counterpoint does not come easily; the texture is too rich and manifold. One can go through Bach’s more elaborate chorale preludes time and again, know them and understand them, and then still hit upon some that baffle. That Handel seems definitely “easier” is to be ascribed neither to relative poverty of imagination nor to lack of technique. So far as contrapuntal technique is concerned, Handel knew everything his contemporaries knew. Yet wherever we look in the literature on the Baroque era, even the authors most sympathetic to Handel often use such expressions as “loose fugue,” or “wayward part-writing,” with implications of inferiority. The fact is that Handel’s conception of polyphony was different from that of his contemporaries and was entirely personal. Loose as the counterpoint may be it is always thematic, only in the choral fugues are there exceptions to this for dramatic purposes. Perhaps the most characteristic difference between Handel’s contrapuntal writing and that of the composers from whom he borrowed materials is that his intentions are seldom clear and he is always full of surprises, whereas even the inventive Gottlieb Muffat stays within the accepted fugal procedures of the Kuhnau tradition.

  The relationship of the horizontal with the vertical in Handel’s music was not clear to its critics because they were seeking parallels with Bach. They could find little the two composers had in common. First of all, the chorale, so prominent in Bach’s music, is not at all characteristic of Handel’s. He used it very sparingly and then usually only incipits of the traditional German hymns. The chorale as a genuine cantus firmus was alien to Handel’s conception of polyphony and, as we have remarked on p. 208 ff., usually appears when Handel recalls the experiences of his youth or when he wants to be solemn in a somewhat archaic way. When he does so, he will use a species of cantus-firmus work, but even such textures generally serve dramatic purposes. Indeed, his writing is more the weaving of a free texture than actual cantus-firmus work over a given subject, as is often claimed.

  What really upset the purists was Handel’s fugal writing which, to say the least, is handsomely unorthodox. The fugue was for the Baroque composer what the sonata form was to the composers of the Classic era: the highest type of musical construction. But there were weighty differences in its practice. Bach, who wrote many great choral fugues, approached the genre in an instrumental spirit, whereas Handel’s whole conception was vocal. While Handel composed some very fine fugues according to the book, the majority of his choral fugues are free, unpredictable, and gloriously unregulated. These agreeable levities cover the full range of Handel’s highly imaginative fugal procedure; he was not bound by any rules of the strenger Satz of the German composers, because even the fugue served dramatic purposes.137 The entrances can be orderly but also quite capricious, the parts entering whenever they feel like joining in. Here the texture is imitative, canonic, there almost entirely homophonic; here the voices enter the traditional way, there after a couple of entries the remaining parts will drop portions of the theme to speed up the process, or entries will be delayed to create tension. At times the thematic substance is abandoned for the sake of a free flow, returning either imperceptibly or with a sudden jolt. The answer can be tonal or real—or neither. 138 The interruption of the polyphonic flow by homophonic passages, sometimes only a few measures long, only serves to emphasize the effect when the tumbling part-writing is resumed, sometimes reaching tremendous dramatic force, especially when a general pause is inserted. In some of his most magnificent fugues Handel does not pay much attention to the original theme; instead of developing it in the “correct” manner, he proceeds freely with snippets of thematic material, almost in a symphonic vein. If a motif strikes his fancy he will belabor it with gusto. What is decisive for him is the dramatic possibility, which overrules every other consideration. Also, if the vocal register is not advantageous, he is always ready to split up the theme or drop it and continue with free counterpoint. He will not permit his choral euphony to suffer from being forced into a weak register except when a deliberate symbolism is intended. We do find of course many fugues that open wide the door to the high art of “strict” fugal writing, if we may use that meaningless adjective so dear to theorists. “Oh God, who in Thy heavenly hand,” an unusually beautiful chorus in Joseph and his Brethren, is a fugue a tre soggetti that even the most critical pedagogues would accept as a masterpiece. But as a rule the choral fugue with the regulation strettos, inversions, episodes, pedal point, and so on is infrequent. Nor is there any set order in the expositions, since Handel is not at all averse to disregarding the proper relationship between dux and comes.

  Handel was unmistakably attracted to the polyphonic practices of the Italians, far freer than those of the Germans. The type of polyphony Legrenzi, Bassani, Vitali, and others practiced towards the end of the 17th century was light, fluent, unforced, vocal in origin and spirit even when idiomatically instrumental. And of course the wonderfully balanced, smooth, and flexible counterpoint of Corelli never faded from his memory. If we do not find in Handel’s fugues the traditional elements at the traditional places assigned to them, they are nonetheless present. He is fond of the stretto but does not save it for the pièce de résistance, which usually comes toward the end of the fugue; often he uses it right at the beginning, even before the exposition is under way (Example 24). Double fugues can take any shape or course, though he likes to develop both subjects together from the very beginning. Perhaps the most interesting and unorthodox procedure followed by Handel is the insertion of a fugue into a different, larger structure, a practice that at times creates a most interesting and original quasi rondo form. The sections of the fugue will alternate with the recurring music of the number into which it is inserted and with which it has no thematic or any other connections. A choral fugue may be “accompanied”—that is, the instrumental portion is not colla parte but different from the vocal parts to the point where the instrumental bass is different from the vocal bass. It is clear, then, that we are dealing with a wholly individual conception of counterpoint that cannot be judged by textbook standards.

  Ex. 24 Berenice: Overture

  Writers on the fugue usually give Handel a wide berth. The Harvard Dictionary of Music does not even mention him in its article “Fugue,” making a neat jump from Bach to Beethoven, while Percy Young avers that the writing of fugues was not one of Handel’s strong points. Müller-Blattau, in his history of the fugue, glosses over Handel’s fugues with a few general remarks, though among the older authors Chrysander and Seiffert valiantly tried to do justice to this unorthodox composer. There can be no question that this dearth of investigation is deliberate and not accidental. Bach’s fugues have been studied and analyzed inside out, and since Handel is usually bracketed with Bach the various authors, especially in Germany, would have naturally sought out parallels, as they did when discussing cantata and oratorio. Moreover, no historian could have missed Mattheson’s lavish praise of Handel’s fugal writing. More amusing are the detailed analyses one reads in the biographies of Leichtentritt, Müller-Blattau, Serauky, and others, for they often cannot agree among themselves whether a fugue is double or triple, where the exposition ends, which are the episodes, and so on, or indeed whether a
particular choral movement is a fugue at all. How little the nature of choral counterpoint was understood by the very persons who edited Handel’s works for performance is illustrated in Prout’s Fugal Analysis (1892), where the vocal fugues are printed without their texts, “for the sake of clearness.” Nevertheless, Prout, who considered a good deal in Handel’s fugues “irregular,” bravely defended him against those who called his fugues “faulty and improperly treated.” Surprisingly, Heinrich Bellermann, the staunch and archaic defender of the Palestrinian choral idiom, to whom Mozart was practically an avant-gardist, considered Handel “closer to the great masters of a cappella art than his famous contemporary Bach” (Der Contrapunkt , 1861). If the reader will return to the pages dealing with Handel’s Italian studies, he will understand Bellermann’s reasons, but the Italians’ and Bellermann’s views were shared by Englishmen too. Burney, in his volume on the commemoration concerts, remarks about “And with his stripes we are healed”:

  It is written upon a fine subject, with such clearness and regularity as was never surpassed by the greatest Choral composers of the Sixteenth Century. This fugue, which is purely vocal, and à Capella, as the instruments have no other business assigned them than that of doubling and enforcing the voice-parts, may fairly be compared with movements of the same kind in Palestrina, Tallis, and Bird.