Whenever an editor or conductor finds that a Baroque aria is exceedingly difficult to perform as notated in the score, he must find out for whom it was composed and for what occasion. Obviously the coloratura runs originally devised for a high soprano or castrato will not suit a tenor or bass. When discussing Baroque opera (Chapter VII) we expressed the belief that the greatest single obstacle to its revival is the role of the castrato, because the substitution of female sopranos or altos, or countertenors, only makes a bad situation worse. These roles should be transferred to men’s voices; Handel gave us ample precedent to justify the procedure. To cite one example from among many, the role of David in Saul, originally for countertenor, was subsequently variously changed to soprano, tenor, and bass. The part of Abner, in the same work, was sometimes for tenor, sometimes for bass. Moreover, Handel has also shown us how a florid aria can be simplified in such a transcription without jeopardizing the original.
[7]
WE HAVE SEEN how the timorous neo-Puritan editors of the 19th century violated Handel’s English texts, wilfully changing words and entire passages to give the oratorios a more virtuous and moral cast. In Germany, where woolly-headed and prissy editors were not behind their English colleagues, the texts were further bowdlerized by uniformly bad translations. The rendering of English verse into German is difficult enough without the necessity of regard for the music. Aside from reflecting the nuances of meaning, the problem of turning uninflected into inflected speech, short syllables into long, and so on, is very considerable, and to do all this while observing the musical values would seem an almost impossible task.154 The translations are virtually re-compositions, Nachdichtungen, a fact that of course infuses a psychological element not present in the original. We have the same difficulty with the Italian texts, for the original Italian lyrics in Handel’s operas are carefully arranged for singability. If the texts are translated and the unskilled, unpoetic, and unmusical translator fills the singers’ mouths with consonants and sibilants, we hear a sound quite different from what the composer had in mind. Translations are justified and often necessary, but they require the same skill and feeling needed for the carrying out of the ornamentation. To this day German audiences are treated to grotesque misrepresentations, for most of the oratorios are still sung in Chrysander’s and Gervinus’s often inaccurate and pedestrian translations. A few examples of these inept exercises should suffice.
In L’Allegro, “Let the merry bells ring round” is rendered with Horch wie das Tambourin erklingt; in Samson, Dalila’s “With plaintive notes and amorous moan” is turned into Verlassen weilt in Einsamkeit. In the final chorus of the Ode to St. Cecilia, where Dryden says “The trumpet shall be heard”—and it is heard, because Handel naturally sets the music for the trumpet—the German audiences following the performance with libretto must wonder why the conductor changed the orchestration. Their copy reads “The trombone [Posaune] shall be heard.” Rudolf Steglich has pointed out innumerable spots where such bad translations not only disfigure the meaning of the text but disregard the music. Many of his suggested changes are felicitous.
XXVII
Handelian biography—Chrysander and Serauky—The English Handelians: Rockstro, Streatfeild, Flower—Winton Dean—Bach and Handel, the inevitable comparison—Handel and English music—Who “crushed” music in England?—Handel and Purcell—Failure to establish English opera—Handel’s contemporaries in England
HANDELIAN BIOGRAPHY IS A DIFFICULT SUBJECT FOR THE historian, if only because it has become so conventionalized that until recent times it took a special act of the imagination to break out of the rut. Handel has been imprisoned by the Germans in a ponderous biography begun by Chrysander and finished by Serauky, from which we have not yet been able wholly to deliver him. On the English side, until recent times, Handelian musicography was not based on a scholarly and creative contemplation of the historical past; it was largely an echo of its own desires, beliefs, and musical-religious order, which it projected into the past. Neither Englishmen nor Germans were above using such documents as lent themselves to their purposes while ignoring those that did not, and what is even worse, falsifying or reconstructing others. We have seen what happened to Handel’s works in both German and English editions. Chrysander’s idea was magnificent, but the execution often faulty because of his conception of the unlimited powers of the editor. Some of his English editorial colleagues carried the same principles from arbitrariness to an insensitiveness verging on brutality. The deep humility of the scholar is allied with a profound sense of the categorical sanctity of original documents. A historical document is sacred, even to its moles and warts; it must remain intact and must on no account be changed and seldom even tidied up for publication. In the hands of the unskilled, retouching is perilous, and, it may be added, sometimes also in the hands of the skilled.
If Handel’s scores have been distorted, even more unfaithful is the familiar portrait of the man, the interpretation of his motives, and the exegesis of his music. Musicography is fertile in enigmas, and international music criticism is fruitful in absurdities. It might be said that with few exceptions the attitude of critics toward Handel and his oeuvre has been a long absurdity. It is not the purpose of this author to constitute himself a one-man court and jury to pass judgment on scholars who toiled for many years with skill and devotion in the Handelian garden. Nevertheless, certain conclusions and opinions are inescapable, and the reader may rightfully expect them to be enunciated. Far be it from me to belittle the great accomplishments of Handelian research in Germany. It produced the first important scholarly results in biography and stylistic criticism, such as only experienced and painstaking scholarship can provide. Chrysander’s devotion and dogged pursuit of his aims are wholly admirable. Nor do I dismiss the valuable contributions of Schering, Leichtentritt, Seiffert, Steglich, and many others. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, these fine scholars also helped in that most unscholarly reclamation project that wrested Handel from England. As an instance of this absurdity and an enigma of Handelian scholarship the case of Friedrich Chrysander is among the strangest.
Doubting Thomas may be the patron saint of historians, but he certainly was never invoked by Chrysander and his colleagues. While there is a deep sincerity and a formidable apparatus of scholarship in their presentations, the view they offer is a self-conscious exposition of German Weltanschauung. The aim was the rescuing of the German Volksgeist from the depredations of foreign influences. This Volksgeist possesses certain attributes whose maintenance and realization are mandatory for most German scholars: they are profundity (Tiefe), introspection (Vergeisti-gung ), emphasis on a definite conception of the meaning of life and on action for its own sake, as well as the concept of blood and soil. Its particular application in Handel’s case had to survive a collision with the hard fact of his nearly half-century of residence and work in England. Out of the clash of these two has developed a considerable body of literature. The Germans saw only through German spectacles, and German blood had for them a quality almost of holiness. They could have learned a lesson from Goethe, intensely interested in the accomplishments of all minds of whatever country, paying tribute to excellence wherever he saw it.
The Germans’ point of view is that Handel’s inheritance of blood, balanced against the personal experience of a protracted stay within an altogether different environment, decisively outweighed it; that he remained essentially a German in mind, temperament, and outlook, and that his work is altogether rooted, “as is Bach’s, in German Baroque music” (Schiedermair). Chrysander even explains Handel’s naturalization as merely a convenience to escape the annoyances a foreigner is subjected to. They always emphasize the atmosphere into which Handel was born, never seeing that it was an atmosphere Handel early and consistently tried to escape from. By assuming that he would remain untouched by English life even after decades of intimate contact with it, they show a disconcerting propensity to rewrite history, and they are over-vigorous in their de
ductions from facts capable of more than one interpretation. The warrant for their attitude is wholly nationalistic and should be recognized as such. The claim to justify it on “scientific” grounds is quite baseless, for this is no more than a convenient but unscholarly device for disposing of what is an awkward situation from a nationalistic point of view. It is perhaps understandable that German historians, looking back upon the long, glorious, and undisputed supremacy of German music, which was theirs until the beginning of our century, should claim the expatriate son for the Fatherland, even though he was spiritually and habitually sundered from Germany. They knew of the stagnation of music in England following Purcell’s death, and therefore they assumed that the rekindling of a national music could be ascribed only to the presence of a God-fearing German Lutheran musician who functioned in England exactly as his twin, Bach, did back at home; he just happened to have lived in England.
The German scholars’ view of the English was clouded by a conflict within their personal attitude towards the nation and her achievements. On the one hand, they admired England as one of the Germanic nations, though remaining somewhat bewildered by its institutions; on the other, they regarded English culture with a feeling of superiority. Serauky thought that Handel’s omission of certain bold and unusual pieces in revivals of the oratorios was due to the fact that “he did not grant the English sufficient musical judgment to cope with the grandeur of his musical conceptions.” The bon mot Handel addressed to Gluck about the sensitiveness of English eardrums was accepted and interpreted literally as an authoritative value judgment (though it should be said that some English critics also like to quote it). The narrowness of outlook, the existence of appalling misconceptions, originates not so much in lack of scholarship, and certainly not in lack of industry, as in a biased attitude and a considerable ignorance of English history, music, and letters, and of the age’s religious dialectic. In particular, German music historians seem to be unable to understand the extraordinary fluidity, despite the traditional formality, of English institutions. Thus they are often baffled by the primary documents, which they either misinterpret or choose to do without. It is almost unbelievable that the man who completed Chrysander’s great biography, duplicating its vast bulk, worked almost exclusively from secondary material, from modern sources such as the studies of Schering, Heuss, Leichtentritt, and others. From English sources, Serauky quotes mostly those that have been translated into German—Mainwar—ing, Flower, Dent, and so on.155 Ignorance of English history, even of elementary topography, can be amazing. One author, whose publications form a small library, calls Frederick “the Prince of Wales, the future George III,” another refers to Lord Burlington’s residence as a “country estate in Piccadilly,” while still another cites the Strand as “a community near London.”
The work of salvaging Handel for the Fatherland as a good German and staunch Lutheran began early. We might call it the “Battle for the Umlaut,” for the modification of the “a” in Handel’s name became the symbol of this Anglo-German rivalry.156 Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803), the creator of the new German lyric poetry and himself the author of an enormously long epic poem, Messiah, wrote an ode entitled Wir und Sie (“We and They [the English]”), in which he asks, “Whom have they who like Handel can summon the highest flights of sorcery?” The answer is simple: “We are far above them.” Klopstock and his supporters tried hard to get Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to set the ode to music, but that learned and well-informed musician refused even though he was a friend of the poet and set others of his poems. Finally Gluck was persuaded to compose the silly piece.
If 18th-century poets may be forgiven for being naively patriotic, the similar attitude of well-trained and well-equipped scholars is inexcusable. In their eagerness to preserve the Umlaut in Handel’s name they advance claims that ruin their valuable contribution by swathing it in a mass of wrapping, most of which is irrelevant and indefensible. Serauky, speaking of the first chorus of the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, comes to these conclusions: “Such immersion in the symbol values and symbol possibilities of music makes it clear that Handel always remained conscious of his German being. A chorus such as this proclaims German profundity, a concept that recent psychology interprets as representing a greater wealth of spiritual potential in the creative German than in any other national.” And this is said about one of Handel’s most English, most Purcellian works! Indeed, it is even claimed that the pastoral charms of L’Allegro are due to ”the profundity and force of Handel’s feeling for nature, which remained German.” Streatfeild’s “honest English merryment” is surely the proper description of this work. While one readily acknowledges the reality of deutsche Gemiitstiefe and Innigkeit, surely this cannot be made into an exclusively German characteristic. Pepusch, another German who settled in London, did not have it simply because he was not a great creative musician; Handel had it for the same reason as did a Monteverdi or a Purcell.
When we read the works of the great Romantic biographers, such as Spitta or Jahn, we may smile at their almost poetic effusiveness, but, though in these old-fashioned biographies there is naivete and special pleading, there is also dignity and cohesion. Their hero may be obscured by clouds of misinformation, but he was not misrepresented or torn apart in the interests of a nationalistic thesis. It is too serious for smiling when Alfred Heuss or Hans Joachim Moser see German characteristics in Handel’s heroes, and conversely un-German qualities in the less sympathetic figures. But when an outstanding scholar of Hermann Abert’s accomplishments not only shares such views but confidently adds that few if any Englishmen could ever understand the finer points of these disguised German heroes, one is at a loss. Indeed, Abert saw in the victory paean that is Judas Maccabaeus a “subtle criticism of the British character.”157 Even the physically impossible is no obstacle: Hans Engel in his otherwise excellent discussion of the instrumental concerto calmly places Handel’s concertos composed in London under the heading “The Baroque concerto in Germany.” The frantic search for the most tenuous evidence of the presence of Lutheran chorale tunes, of similarities to Schütz and Bach, as well as to the entire gallery of 18th- and 19th-century German composers really becomes comical. When discussing Theodora, Leichtentritt detects the simultaneous presence of the medieval hocket and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. A comparison here and there can be apt and enlightening, but persistent likening of even completely episodic little things to this and that composer, and often in a paternalistic way (wäre eines Gluck durchaus würdig), is a painful form of local patriotism.
Serauky reads like a schoolboy’s accurate translation of Catullus: everything is there except understanding. The fantastic length of his primitive and commonplace analyses, the aridity of style, the daunting provincialism, and the profusion of quotations of little if any relevance will chill the boldest heart and tire the strongest mind. It is another matter with Chrysander, a man of genuine erudition, whose part of the great biography was written by a scholar. Carrying out his work unflinchingly under the most trying conditions in a workshop in Bergdorf near Hamburg he spent his life and every penny he earned in the pursuit of the great undertaking that was the Händelgesellschaft edition. (For some years the distinguished Heidelberg literary scholar Gottfried Gervinus [1805-1871] was his loyal helper.) The devoted Chrysander quarrels even with those who praise Handel because they do not praise him highly enough, and if he finds a somewhat conventional piece he excuses it on the ground that it hides particularly edifying religious feelings. Chrysander is impatient and cavalier with his English colleagues who dare to set foot in his private enclosure. This extreme jealousy for his hero is a fault of which no generous-minded reader will complain, and Chrysander’s immense work entitles him to respectful recognition. But he was a scholar who deliberately took upon himself the role of patriot-preacher; he is largely responsible for the aberrations in the German Handel literature. His precept was followed for a hundred years by all German writers in patient submission and withou
t criticism (only recently, in some of the entries in MGG, do we see doubts expressed concerning the accuracy of some of his findings). This is the more surprising because Chrysander mercilessly denigrated the fine German musicians around Handel (not to speak of the Italians), for he did not tolerate the slightest competition with his idol. Still, it is impossible not to admire his courage in tight places, as well as his earnest advocacy of Baroque performance practices in the face of the widespread belief in “modernization.”
Happily, this German Handelian literature has been slowly changing. While Serauky only a few years ago still advanced wild claims for Handel’s undiluted German nature, Hans Mersmann quietly stated that “the English rightfully place Handel in their own musical history.” We have mentioned Friedrich Blume’s warning about misconstruing the significance of Handel’s music, made at a time when Chrysander’s opinions were accepted as final (see p. 359). Blume was quite explicit in stating that Handel’s “sacred” music reflects with much eloquence not only a remarkably rich responsiveness to the splendors of life but also the dynastic-national consciousness of his second homeland. Robert Haas also went against the current in declaring that “Handel’s church music shows his profound immersion in the particular spirit of his models, especially Purcell.” There are some instances of this recognition even earlier: Leichtentritt writes concerning L’Allegro’s Purcellian arias, “The orientation of this music is neither German nor French; its bright clarity, its light charm, its racy rhythms are English growths.” German musicologists of more recent times, not less erudite, not less penetrating, seem at the same time to be more judicious than their predecessors, and are content to treat musical history as musical history, without imposing preconceived meanings on the documents. Bruno Flögel, the author of a good study of Handel’s aria technique, “deplores” the fact that the “strong ties that bind Handel to the musical life of England, a musical life that rests on an ancient culture, have as yet been so little investigated.” This we would naturally expect from the English Handelians, who were on home grounds, for only an English mind can apprehend with ease such a synthesis of apparent opposites as was involved in Handel’s work, which sought to combine loyalty to the national Establishment with fidelity to the requirements of an ideal theatre.
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