George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

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  THE FIGURE OF Handel is so deeply imbedded in the history of his time in England, and the more so because of his own reserve, that those who would dig him out must themselves go deep into that history. There can be no doubt that there has been a greater expenditure of ink on the 18th century than on any other century in English history. Its personalities, its politics, its court, its social history, its literature, art, and religion, all receive the tribute of a constant flow of books. Alas, the magnificent scholarship of the literary men and the historians has not, until very recent times, been matched by the musicographers. British literature on music of the 18th century, with few exceptions, shows a bias and provincialism that not only equals the German but is allied to a generous lack of musical scholarship.

  It cannot often enough be emphasized that when Handel arrived in England he was in the fullness of his powers, an experienced and superbly trained composer and performer far more knowledgeable than a good German cantor twice his age. The exceptionally thorough training he received at the hands of Zachow, the experiences in Hamburg with another fine and neglected master, Keiser, who first roused the dramatic instinct in the journeyman musician, are all glossed over in English studies. And of course the complete assimilation of Italian music, with all that this implies in melody, expression, timing, and general savoir-faire, seldom rates more than a few perfunctory pages. Italy was for Handel—as it was for Goethe and Keats—more than a fascinating country, it was an idea. His Italian sojourn produced impressions of wondrously different landscapes, but the great figures of Scarlatti and Corelli, and the many other musicians studied in their native habitat, constituted the experience. None of them can be missing from the total picture; they became a part of Handel’s art, as Handel, with them, became part of the crowning of the Baroque. Moreover, Handel knew a great deal of music, German, Italian, French; and young as he was, he had already reconciled these vast territories in his own way. At twenty-five he was no longer a provincial German musician but a sophisticated European, though not a cosmopolite. This he remained all his life, and deliberately so, as can be seen from his constant, stubborn attempts to acquire the technical and expressive means of all the leading musical nations, eventually applying them to what was to become a national English style.

  Of his enormous production, British writers dealt mainly with samples. The lovely Italian cantatas they regarded as preparatory, experimental works, and they did little more than nibble at the operas. They pointed out the musico-technical elements Handel took from Purcell, which are indeed considerable. But like Mozart later in the century, Handel simply reached out and appropriated everything within his grasp, making it his undisputed property. Of far greater importance were the tone and attitude he took from Purcell, although both are more imponderable than aspects of counterpoint, false relations, or literal borrowings. The really intimate and subtle Purcellian traits appear much later, when they become part of Handel’s bloodstream. But the most disconcerting activity of the older British Handelians was the treatment of Handel’s librettos, the suppression, omission, and yes, falsification of documents, and of scores themselves in order to accommodate the textual changes. The Victorian editors wanted to reconcile the “questionable” elements in the oratorios with their own particular ideals of probity, denaturing the Handelian music drama in the process.

  In the older literature the general course of Handel’s life was, on the whole, traced in accordance with the external facts, though little light was thrown on his music. We have touched upon contemporary commentators and the great pioneer historians of the end of the 18th century sufficiently to forgo here a discussion of their role and ideas, but the 19th century needs a brief recapitulation.

  Victorian musicography suffered from several inhibitions. Having inherited the legend of Handel’s conversion to the service of religion, the Victorians not only fostered but substantially enlarged it. It was in the first third of the century that many of Handel’s obiter dicta originated, but even had they been authentic, the earnest biographer must always scrutinize his subject’s autobiographical statements. Secondly, the Victorians were, almost to a man, wary of Italian opera, uneasily dismissing it as essentially ridiculous and unworthy of attention by serious Englishmen. Until the end of the century they had a way of passing vaguely over the problems of opera, and evinced a tendency to use the subject as a peg for generalizations perhaps stimulating but not always relevant. It is doubtful whether they possessed the temperament of the scholar or the detachment of the historian; theirs was simply an apologia, more or less disguised, for the great religious composer. The moral issues were foremost in their minds, and it was then that the work of cleansing Handel’s scores of “frivolity” and “impropriety” began in earnest. While it is doubtful whether there were more cases of private vice covered by the public display of virtue in that age than in any other, there was a special temptation to overemphasize the possession of virtue. The Victorian historians, condemning with Jove-like calm all deflections from the standards of the age, were in effect lecturing the 18th century for failing to conform to 19th-century customs.

  English studies of Handel in the third quarter of the century, even after an excellent example of scholarship was given by Victor Schoelcher, add little to our knowledge of the creative mind that produced the operas, oratorios, and concertos. This we must attribute partly to a lack of scholarship but even more to Puritan esthetics—that is, to the absence of esthetics. Victor Schoelcher was a French man of letters and politician who because of his ardent republican sympathies had to spend many years in exile in England. During his stay there he did a prodigious amount of original research on Handel, placing at the disposal of his English colleagues much valuable information, especially in the field where they were most deficient, opera. Apparently his Life of Handel (1857), a pioneering work in Handelian research, remained largely unnoticed by the organists and church musicians who dabbled in musicography.

  The literature of the fin de siècle and the first decade of the 20th century is still square-toed and solemn; sensitive readers will wince at these writers’ wantoning with the Muses. The most popular biography of these years was William Rockstro’s Handel (1883). Rockstro, completely taken by the prevailing literary tendency of romantic idealization, is today unreadable; one would think that he must have been nearly so in his own time. As we assess this literature, its oracular gravity, its cloudy and diffused treatment of events, we see that these writers were inclined to posture and to repeat historical commonplaces. The line between fact and fancy is not easy to draw, and the Handel who emerges from these biographies embodies contradictions that remain unresolved. It is true, of course, that writers and critics of that era who were not scholars could not be expected to know the extent to which Handel’s editors, from a pathetic sense of duty to the memory of the “sacred composer,” had disfigured his scores, erasing where they could anything that showed sympathy, in thought or language, with the “grosser” life of humanity, tempering his pantheistic joy in nature, and striving generally to lay him out in the dignity of his sacerdotal robes. Neither did they realize that the scores they did know were a mere skimming from an immense amount of music. Among the better-known writers of the next generation, scholarship was not wanting, but it was still being mixed with the old prejudices. Even Donald Tovey is guilty of some regrettable nonsense, but then to these excellent musicians the Baroque, especially Baroque dramatic music, was a musical Tibet. A particular position must be assigned to Ernest Walker, the author of A History of Music in England (1907); stand-offish, wildly unjust and unforgiving, Walker’s assertions are so sweeping and extravagant that it would be a waste of space to discuss them. To put it bluntly, he was an eccentric, continually inconsistent, and often irresponsible. Sir Jack Westrup, in his new edition (1952), toned down the worst aspects of the work, but then it is no longer Walker. Yet in the welter of this nondescript literature there appeared in 1909 a fine biography, R. A. Streatfeild’s
Handel. While today it seems gracefully inaccurate, this biography is the work of a highly literate and sensitive person, many of whose observations can still be read with profit and enjoyment.

  This brings us to our times, when Sir Newman Flower has been accepted even abroad as the outstanding Handelian authority, a sort of latter-day English Chrysander. Flower, whose general attitude reminds one of Wolsey’s practice of beginning his official documents with Et ego et rex meus, did approach his task with a modicum of scholarship, but in the end the scholarship was transmogrified. It is all the more to be regretted that though he had an evident appreciation of Handel as a person (though little of his music), he should nevertheless have written about him in a style that adds a note of caricature. If Serauky’s style is crabbed to the verge of obscurity, with a tendency to elaborate parentheses and diffuse digressions, in Flower’s Handel (1923, revised 1948) the acid of irony and the sugar of sentiment meet all too often in a common insipidity. His eternal and irrelevant harping on the moral issues all but negates the scholarship that went into the preparation of the book. He was more than a moralist; a rigorist we should call him, and a glib one at that. Repeatedly he finds the situations and episodes he has to deal with disgusting and repellent—Hamburg, or Roman, or London society suggests to him mites in the cheese and moles in the earth—but perhaps most trying is his priggish commiseration with Handel in moments of adversity. Flower’s personal bias is seldom concealed, and his account of the evils attending the “infatuation” with opera is informed with a generous indignation.

  But this biography, and all the others of its kind, were swept away by the present-day Handelian authors ably led by Winton Dean. We have mentioned and cited most of these works repeatedly, but should once more call attention to Dean, that stout assailant of the dominant tradition in Handelian biography and interpretation, because he takes cognizance of facts and inferences other than the purely documentary, though these facts and inferences are not necessarily less historical. He sometimes attains a felicity of intuition that mere learning could scarcely bring about. When reading Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (1959), one delights in the dexterity, concision, and never-flagging verve with which, in rapid succession, he exhibits and explodes erroneous facts and chaotic theories. Often a brief aside is enough. The book is rich in imagination scrupulously fed on facts, rich too in independent judgment, and it is as readable as it is precise in all its references. On the whole, such modern Handelians as Dean, W. C. Smith, Herbage, Abraham, and Lam, though all devoted admirers of their man, are far more level-headed and critical than their German colleagues. There is no breast-beating, no paternity suits, no metaphysics, no excessive hermeneutics, and a gratifying absence of the eternal analogies with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. Interestingly enough, if in rare instances there is such a comparison, it is usually a reference to Verdi; this writer wholeheartedly agrees with the kinship seen here.

  Though making giant strides, present-day British musicology must be censored for an unforgivable lack of enterprise. It is nothing short of a British national disgrace that with so many competent editors available, the critical edition of Handel’s works begun in 1955 should have been surrendered to Halle. I do not wish for one moment to question the abilities of my German colleagues, nor are they in any need of defense, for their record in publishing the collected works of the great of music is unexampled and unchallengeable. But Handel is a composer whose life work is inextricably entwined with English history and culture, which, until after the wars, was the musical and cultural territory least known to Germans. Italian and French music has always been the preserve of German scholars, who knew a great deal more about it than their French or Italian confrères, but English music was dismissed, and rather contemptuously at times. As a result few German musicologists, however able, have an adequate knowledge of English thought and institutions—that is, of the environment without which Handel’s music is unthinkable. They cannot possibly understand all the ramifications, and they must work with materials almost wholly preserved in England. To edit Handel’s works in Halle is very much like preparing an edition of Lully’s works in Florence. It should have been the rightful privilege and duty of British musicology to prepare the new, modern critical edition of the works of their national composer.

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  MARC PINCHERLE, in his fine study of Vivaldi, remarks that “the habit is firmly formed in historians never to deal with Bach without immediately invoking the name of Handel.” We might add that the reverse of this is equally true, as indeed the two composers are taken for as natural a pair as Wordsworth and Coleridge. The categorical establishment of this dual German-Baroque monarchy is perhaps the most astounding miscarriage of justice that must be laid at the door of German musicology. To lump together Bach and Handel is to depend on external similarities, and even these are limited to little more than their common Saxon origin. “Bach and Handel; the singers of Christ, neither without the other and neither against the other.” This is the doctrine, and Müller-Blattau announces it in the very first sentence of his Händel (1933): “Handel and Bach! Both together they constitute the totality of German Baroque music.” Scarcely an essay, or history of music, fails to endorse the doctrine of the “twin German peaks of the Baroque,” the two Lutheran heroes of Christian music. How is this possible in the face of every known document, when even a simple perusal of Handel’s works will disclose that he did not sing of Christ but of men, that he saw in the Old Testament a historical-heroic world that he wanted to resurrect, not for the church, nor even for himself, but for the English public?

  One cannot view Bach and Handel with the same eyes; men whose experiences are so different, whose rapport with art, religion, love, and the business of life is so different, cannot be hyphenated and treated as one. For what characterizes the creative artist but his experience? Surely Bach expressed the essence of the land that remained his from birth to death, just as surely as Handel became completely absorbed in the spirit of the land of his adoption and expressed its particular genius; for Handel his England was an idea, for Bach Saxony was simply a fact of existence. Handel united his English consciousness with a very particular biblical flavor drawn from the Old Testament, while Bach concerned himself with the New Testament, which, unlike the Old in Handel’s conception, was entirely separated from the secular world. Both Bach and Handel saw perspectives that were tremendous, and both expressed their subjective selves to an extent bordering on the limits of creativity; the great difference between them was basic in content and consequently in form. Bach’s subject, the mystery of Christianity, was beyond question and measure; for Handel the subject was man and his predicament, that is, a world full of questions demanding answers.

  Ever since Schweitzer’s popular book, Bach has been for us the great solitary mystic. Handel, on the other hand, has never appeared as an unworldly contemplative; he fought his battles with all available weapons, subtle or blunt, and he was always ready to take off his gloves. He was practical, an impresario, a businessman, who loathed worldly failures and so always played for big stakes and never followed the sheltered way. Bach, too, was a good businessman who kept his home and office in excellent order, or—as Terry puts it—“Bach’s business mind was as orderly as his counterpoint.” But Handel was an investor and a speculator who welcomed any odds and played them with zest. Bach supplied models “for young people anxious to learn,” in the shape of various Buchlein and other didactic collections, which was something that could never have entered Handel’s mind; he wanted a paying public of adults. Handel created his music always before a large audience, marshalling all of Europe’s musical forces as a spokesman for a single nation. Bach is the German bourgeois musician of the provincial city, unconcerned with a public, composing for the church and for intimate music-making in the home or in the collegium musicum. He is the summit of Lutheran art, the repository of all the riches quietly and diligently gathered by generations of Lutheran cantors. It was he, the h
ighest expression of German musical genius, who established the kingdom of German music that was to reign for centuries to come. Handel represents a deliberate and tyrannically imposed cult of himself. He created his own order, he could wait until luck or a shrewd move brought along what he needed, and coolly reject what he did not want. He could fight doggedly but he could also compromise, he faced every danger and trampled upon it, suffered loneliness and made arrangements to remain forever alone. Every resonance that reached him from without was a fortuitous gain, a happy, usable accident, but his own life was a merciless, triumphal, and logical necessity.