While the Enlightenment was changing the entire world around him, Bach remained steadfastly within the bounds of orthodox Lutheranism. Handel did not deny religion; rather, like a good Englishman, he settled with it. But unlike Bach he was a dramatist, who firmly subscribed to the motto, Totus mundus agit histrionem. Bach’s sacred music calls for a church and “dim religious light”; Handel exhibits a delight in splendor coupled with a recognition of its religious pretensions; he demands a large, bright, festive hall and the out-of-doors.
Bach is the prototype of the solid and honorable German middle-class citizen. Surrounded by a wife and a host of children, he lived an industrious life, creating in quiet, profound security and spiritual conviction one work after another, never venturing forth from his native country. Handel was a man of the world, much travelled, a gentleman, and a public figure, keenly concerned with political, social, and business issues. The events of his own crowded, adventurous life were neither accidents irrelevant to his composing nor hindrances to his self-expression. The strange but harmonious combination of sentiment with hard business acumen, of international savoir-faire with intense national feeling, realism with imagination, modernity with tradition, stand in sharp contrast to Bach’s single-minded devotion to duty and métier. But circumstances obliged Handel to waste himself in skirmishing and scavenging, and his life work therefore seems fragmentary beside the great unified façade of Bach. This unfavorable contrast is remarkable, especially when we realize that Handel’s rise to the summit of creative power began about the time when Bach’s immense productivity ceased. In the last decade of his life Bach concentrated on a few extraordinary works that had nothing to do with his duties.158
Handel’s character drove him in his early youth away from the narrow circle of orderly petit-bourgeois existence, towards active participation in life on the “outside.” He avoided the traditional career of the German Lutheran musician by physically leaving the seat of that tradition and engaging in a different profession in a different country, as far removed from the traditional as possible: the theatre. He propelled himself into the glare of public life, into its calamities and intrigues, which he found congenial, playing his self-selected role to the hilt. Bach remained within the cantors’ tradition and was firmly rooted in German middle-class life, except that as he turned more and more inward he put between himself and the surrounding world a distance the extent of which his contemporaries could not understand, not even his inquisitive and knowledgeable son, Emanuel. Nevertheless we can say that it was his vocation that made Bach; Handel made the vocation. Handel chose not to remain untouched by the world, its aims and tendencies; Bach saw in the world only various detours over which man always comes back to himself. His life work was not without considerable internal and artistic struggle, but in the end his serene discipline was usually victorious. Bach the man and the artist could not be subdued, except by himself.
Bach, who set to music the joys of Pentecost and the triumphs of Easter, sings remarkably often of death. In this longing for death, which is a characteristic trait of Bach’s cantata music, there is none of the romantic dreamer’s sentimentality, for it is entirely saturated with biblical sobriety. In serene reliance he sings, “Man, thou must die,” for the invisible world of the hereafter offers peace—death brings Redemption; the Lutheran gains certain salvation by Christ’s death. Christianity conceives life as a way station to death, it is eternally immersed in the riddle of suffering and death, in faithful contemplation of their relationship to the death of the Saviour. In Handel’s music such contemplation had no place. To him, who absorbed a great deal of the hereditary paganism of the Mediterranean, everything was an affirmation of this life; the only duty to him was creativity; daily he girded himself for new battles, for new conquests. Thus he became the greatest antipode of his fellow Saxon. And who would claim that this esthetic ideal, though entirely of this world, is not elevated, majestic, and entirely worthy of the position assigned to Handel by posterity on mistaken premises?
Bach, like the older German Protestant masters, wanted to find the content of life in a Christian godliness, submitting himself to this conception. In this confident submission, this freely imposed self-discipline, there is a good deal of the spirit of the Middle Ages, of its highest pathos, the turning away from the external world. Handel’s creative force drives him to cling with all his might to the realities of earthly life; the circle of human sentiments is given a new radius from work to work. He avoids anachronisms and he avoids metaphysics, he is always simple and direct in everything, having learned from the Italians the beauty and poetry of simplicity. The brush strokes with which he paints his characters, his soaring imagination, his dramatic violence, are never obscured by a complicated musical fabric, not even in the tremendous eight-part choruses. Handel relies on the intuition of the artist, not the theories of the theologian; he speaks only of what he really experiences, what he has seen. The dramatis personae in Bach are, in a way, more middle-class than heroic. What we see there is infinite sorrow, not the tragedy that dominates Handel’s heroic milieu of the Old Testament. There is, then, a considerable difference in expressive climate between the two masters.
Both composers’ knowledge of music, German and foreign, was extensive, but while Handel’s sole interest was practical, Bach studied theoretical and pedagogical problems with thoroughness. The absorption and assimilation of this music by each of the two was as different as were their personalities. “Whatever Bach learned from Italian and French masters—and he certainly learned a great deal from the Italians—he remained through and through a German composer writing German music” (Abraham). Handel simply inhaled Italian, French, and English music, and with each breath the new material, like oxygen, passed into his bloodstream. There was little scrutiny, and there was no conflict with tradition because he relied largely on his musical instinct. Impulse in Handel was far more immediate and organic than in Bach; to miss an artistic or business opportunity simply irritated him.
Nothing is more characteristic of Bach than his desire for synthesis and unification: Clavierübung, The Well-Tempered Clavier, The Musical Offering, and so forth. But he can also give us the living experience and the poetic idea in chains of involved numerological or other symbolism. The religious-moral symbolism can be bizarrely profuse, but at other times he separates everything extraneous from the strictly musical, as if to purify himself. The embodiment of purified musical thought is then conveyed in such great summae as The Art of Fugue. There was no composer in the history of music who could match Bach’s ability to coerce his material with an iron determination and discipline into the exact shape he wanted. The constant turning inward occasionally makes for obscurity, a momentary failure to achieve communication between his vision and our more common ears, but we never feel that we are wilfully bemused.
Handel was a dramatist who knew that the analysis of a human soul demands lyric expression. His music always remains within the realm of the earthly and sensuous, never approaching Bach’s metaphysics. What for Bach was a clarification of his spirit, for Handel turned into dramatic action. Far from being abstract and complicated, Handel’s music is infused with a caressing sense of nearness to things human and natural, which grow and fade and are ever renewed. He likes the direct musical statement, trusting to its distinctiveness to save it from flatness. He is a composer light of hand and quick of eye, but he can also stab his meaning into the listener.
Finally, let us compare the “twins” in the field where superficial agreement is most pronounced, in the German Passion and the English oratorio, though in reality not only the conceptions but also the idiom and form are diametrically opposed. The two types, German Passion and English oratorio, are quite different on another score: one rested on long-standing tradition, the other was Handel’s personal achievement. Bach seems to stand at the church door, like a holy beggar, offering his mind and heart to the wonders of faith, and at times he appears to have met God, his great fellow poet. He
did not seek in Christ the glory of transfiguration but the thought of Redemption which brings succor, and Christ to him was not the Pantocrator of the Byzantines clad in purple stole. To the German Lutheran the Passion of the Lord is the most majestic and forceful subject for musical representation. But this Passion is artistically conceived not as visible or historical; it is contemplative and invisible because the drama is inward. The Handelian oratorio is a broad historical drama that takes place in the visible world; it is not the religious significance of the Old Testament that is glorified here, but human ideals, warm, plausible, and comprehensible. Handel avoided Christ as a subject, he was not a “singer of Christ,” for he found Him unrepresentable; in the only Christian devotional work of his maturity, Messiah, he avoided any dramatization. Bach did not find the musical representation of Christ a limiting factor, but neither did he find dramatic-psychological characterization necessary in such a representation, as Handel did in the case of the great and conflict-torn human figures of the Old Testament. Handel was aware of the limitations of the German Passion; he knew that the form was religious story-telling rather than dramatic composition. He had learned this early, when as a young man he had tried his hand at composing a traditional German Passion. His attempt was not successful, he realized it, and he gave it up; “objective lyricism” was incomprehensible to him. His oratorio was pure music drama unencumbered by any theological or churchly or liturgical considerations. What he wanted was to find musical accents capable of characterizing a man or a whole people. He is pagan and yet Christian, sensuous and yet spiritual, his men, though mythical heroes, are entirely human, and his women are both his lovers and his sisters. He is receptive as wax and yet clean and hard as marble, and among Baroque composers he is the most virile and yet also the most capricious. He matched his narrative with that of the Bible.
Bach and Handel and their works represent and express two fundamentally different worlds. They can neither be compared nor joined nor opposed; they complement each other and only thus give the Baroque its “twin peaks.”
While most of our German friends have held fast to their conception of their two indivisible “singers of Christ,” and while in the English-speaking world Messiah has been made the epitome of sacred music, there are also not a few voices who refuse Handel equality with Bach because they see him wrongly as a religious composer, then dismiss him for being not religious enough. Especially the old-line Bach worshippers are unwilling to grant Handel citizenship in their world, for to them Handel is forever saddled with his “frivolous” operatic past. They object to the clear sensuousness of his melodies, to his “lack of problems” (whatever that may mean), to his unwillingness to indulge in profound abstractions, and, ironically enough, to his “lack of religious sincerity.” There is nothing in Bach to disturb the picture of the religiously dedicated man; Spitta, whose great Bach biography set the standards for modern times, goes so far as to declare gravely that even Bach’s secular cantatas are “not genuinely secular because his only vein was the sacred.” Against such views the “Italian” Handel of Rodelinda, Giulio Cesare, Orlando, but also the “English” Handel of Acis and Galatea, L’Allegro, Semele, Susanna, and all the other vibrant human dramas and amorous pastorals cannot measure up. But such attitudes recall the story of the distinguished German divine who was saddened by Goethe who could have become the St. Augustine of modern times had he not “elected to take the Greeks for his teachers instead of the Apostles.” Handel’s character and his music would perhaps appear less puzzling if those who see him through the window of St. Thomas’s in Leipzig would instead look into the Haymarket Theatre and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. If Handel is Bach’s complement, it is by way of antithesis.
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HANDEL’S overwhelming presence on the English scene gave rise to divergent judgments. While one faction proclaimed Handel a direct descendant of Purcell and thus a genuine English composer, another insisted that this German immigrant, as he became an unchallengeable national institution, threatened to extinguish English musical culture, because his enormous prestige made it impossible for anyone else to become an authentic spokesman for English national music. The airing of such opinions, as anyone reading musical history will realize, soon led the foreigner to see nothing else but the towering figure of the Saxon. European opinion, abetted by some Englishmen, completely devalued English music, could not see anything “English” in Handel, and made English musicians into pitiful artistic beggars. It was this blotting out of the view behind Handel’s broad back that caused the Germans to call England “the land without music”; they retained Handel as their own by simply extending German musical history across the sea. Perhaps one can understand the Continental point of view; not only Germans but all Europeans had a distorted perspective and never really understood the ways of that peculiar little island, but for Englishmen to regard Handel as the cause of the blight of their music is self-mutilation. The dangers of such an attitude are manifest, and throughout the 19th century Britain suffered from it. Nations with an insignificant musical past entered the scene gathering glory, while Britons in their eagerness to enthrone Mendelssohn as the successor of Handel and Haydn dismissed their own music.159 Some of the pronouncements of English historians parallel the theory of Louis Reynaud, that French Romanticism was an Anglo-Germanic pollution of the pure national literary tradition. Ernest Walker did not mince words when dealing with this subject, and there were others who branded Handel with the unforgivable sin of “completely extinguishing native talent in England.” Curiously enough, these authors at the same time dispute Handel’s “Englishness,” Dent even declaring him “the classical type of an in-ternational eclectic.“160 It is amusing to observe that the very Englishmen who prostrated themselves before the Bayreuth magician, or who saw the Star of Bethlehem shining on Busoni, disavowed Handel as an English composer. A glance into Fielding will show how popular this disputed Englishness had become. Sophia, so middle-class and so unintellectual, plays Handel on the harpsichord for Tom Jones, taking it for granted, not showing off. Others display for English music of the period an undiscerning contempt that still passes for historical knowledge. But the conditions of English music cannot be explained by too zealous denigration of all of Handel’s contemporaries and predecessors. If we consider the expanse between Morley and Purcell, we shall find, perhaps to our surprise, that the consensus voiced by Rolland, that when Handel arrived in England “national art was dead,” is incorrect.
Neither Burney nor Dent is convincing when he maintains that Handel was contemptuous of the music he found in England. In the first place it was not in character. It is true that he was a composer of Italian opera, and there was little in that line to be found by an English composer. But Handel’s was an inquisitive mind, and he examined everything that came within his purview, without, however, expressing opinions about the music so examined. In the second place, it is simply inconceivable that he could have found the English tone so unerringly in the Birthday Ode for Queen Anne and the Utrecht Te Deum, his very first “English” compositions, without an already respectable familiarity with English music. We are undoubtedly dealing in the early 18th century with an England musically impoverished to a degree, but the views of French, German—and English—writers that Handel arrived in a musical desert are untenable. English musicians for the most part lived and worked with little heed to the world beyond their bailiwick, shielded from the mainstream of contemporary art. Among them, however, were conspicuous exceptions whose history is part of the history of England.
The truth is that “golden ages” are usually followed by gray periods; the spirit is intermittent, and national genius runs on a barter economy. Every national art has periods when it sags and then with the aid of stimulants, sometimes ancient and national, sometimes modern and foreign, it recuperates. Such stimulants can cause marvelous recovery by bringing out latent energies and creating a new savoir-faire, as has been well demonstrated by Vaughan Williams and the other En
glish composers of the immediate past. They threw off lethargy by discovering their folksong and their great Elizabethan ancestors. Did not English literature begin with importation? Yet no one would doubt Chaucer’s Englishness. English music was admittedly stagnating when Handel tried to foist Italian opera upon it. Had he remained a purveyor of Italian opera perhaps he would have been just another Alessandro Scarlatti with a foreign accent, for pitted against certain trends in culture even the most powerful individual is weak. But with his oratorio, ceremonial, and instrumental music he not only created a new flowering, he found connections with a thoroughly English musicality which he made entirely his own. This new music once more established ties with the community, it once more became timely, representative of national cultural aspirations, and was able to become a continuation of English musical culture. If this is unacknowledged by those who still see a “deplorable accident” in the advent of the Italianized Saxon to England, it should nonetheless be evident to them that the results of his presence are anything but accidental.
It was not Handel who crushed music in England, but the moral-religious institution his adopted countrymen mistakenly made of his grand and human music. It was that which killed imagination in the British musical mind, because after the mammoth commemoration concerts every British composer found it obligatory to write pious oratorios and anthems in what they conceived to be a Handelian style, later fortified with Mendelssohn. The entire atmosphere was absolutely alien to Handel; he composed for the theatre and set to music human beings, not plaster statues. A good deal of this sanctimonious nonsense has departed, and English music is once more a modern and independent art, but Handel is not yet rehabilitated. As for the “Handelian style,” if one examines the musical supplements in the venerable London Musical Times, one is aware of its enduring presence even though the comatose “sacred music” is flanked by excellent and enlightened musicography.
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