George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

  5 John Wyche came from a distinguished family. His grandfather and father, Sir Peter Wyche, Sr. and Jr., were both ambassadors and scholars as well as privy councillors. The younger Sir Peter, a noted geographer and man of letters, preceded his son, John, in the post of English envoy in Hamburg.

  6 More recent authors could have profitably read Beekman Cannon’s excellent book, Johann Mattheson (New Haven, 1947).

  7 Octavia, in the Supplement to the Handelgesellschaft edition; Croesus and L’Inganno fedele (incomplete), in Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst, Vols. 37, 38; and Jodelet, a comic opera, in Publikationen der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, Vols. 20-22.

  8 Since Keiser came from the Weissenfels district, Handel may have heard about his spectacular career from mutual acquaintances and may actually have been in contact with him before going to Hamburg. Keiser was a friendly man, and Handel’s almost instantaneous entry into the Hamburg opera may have been at least partly due to the older composer, who was also director-manager of the theatre.

  9 Published by Chrysander in the supplementary volumes of the Händelgesellschaft edition.

  10 A few of these were composed later, in London.

  11 A recent anthology containing a number of Italian sacred cantatas is Rudolf Ewerhart’s Kantate.

  12 Many of the German students in Italy, not only Schütz, became bilingual and took home with them the Italian love of Palestrina’s art. Thus Kerll cultivated it by writing, besides his concerted pieces and operas, church music alla Palestrina, that is, a cappella. In the Germanic countries the Palestrina cult was notably observed in Vienna where the great Baroque master, Johann Joseph Fux, was its most admired guardian. His a cappella Masses are masterpieces, but Fux was also a full-blooded dramatist, wholly at home both in opera and concerted church music. Yet, a “bilingual composer,” he separated the two styles quite distinctly, whereas the Italians were able to reconcile them.

  13 See Das Erbe deutscher Musik, Schleswig-Holstein, Vols. 1, 2.

  14 In this a cappella literature Schütz’s incomparable choruses in his Passion-oratorios stand all by themselves. They may have been influenced by Venetian choral music but are unique in their truly biblical majesty and essentially Protestant tone.

  15 See his fine volume, Handel, a Documentary Biography.

  16 Only in the elaborate court theatres such as were maintained in Vienna and Dresden did the “imperial” style of the earlier Venetian opera survive.

  17 See his magnificent choruses, among them an eight-part Te Deum and a sixteen-part Crucifixus, in the Austrian Denkmäler, XIII, 1.

  18 Another great composer of whose markedly personal style there is no trace in Handel is Frescobaldi. This is the more surprising because Frescobaldi’s music was ever present and his influence affected generations of musicians.

  19 The statement needs qualification, however, for obviously it is valid only so far as Protestants were concerned. Though a great man of letters such as Dryden was not molested by the government, he lost his office and pension as laureate and historiographer royal when he became a Catholic. The great poet of the Handelian era, Pope, never enjoyed a regular education because as a Catholic the public schools and the universities were closed to him. Indeed, Catholics were discriminated against well into the 19th century, and their religious faith was not their “private affair.” But there can be no doubt that Handel’s statement refers to the situation in which he found himself in Italy.

  20 This was the second set of tableware Handel received and one wonders what a travelling bachelor could have done with such a cumbersome collection of household goods.

  21 Upon the coronation of George I, in 1714, Sir Cyril Wyche, the British Resident in Hamburg, Handel’s erstwhile pupil, reported to the Secretary of State that besides dining and wining the diplomatic corps, fifty strong, he entertained them by taking them to the opera, the work having been expressly commissioned for the occasion. This, as Beekman Cannon tells us, was a serenata by the legation secretary, Mattheson.

  22 An unsubstantiated legend has it that Bach’s study of Dieupart was the reason for calling the set of suites in which he pays this oblique homage to Dieupart, “English Sites.”

  23 All dates follow the “Old Style,” or Julian, calendar in use in England before the adoption in 1752 of the “New Style,” that is, the Gregorian calendar. This procedure seemed to us preferable to either the double listing of dates or the summary elimination of the eleven-day differential.

  24 Alfred Loewenberg, in his Annals of Opera, proves that The Loves of Ergasto (Gli amori piacevole d‘Ergasto) by a certain Greber, presented at the inauguration of the Haymarket Theatre five years before, was the first opera sung wholly in Italian. This obscure composer is identifiable as Johann Jakob Greber (d. c. 1723), a German who went to London with the singer Margherita L’Épine, Pepusch’s future wife. Ergasto, which had two performances in London, was later produced in Vienna.

  25 The leading spirit in France among those disputing the raison d’être of opera was Saint-Évremond, one of the earliest critical essayists. A political refugee for over forty years in London, where he died in 1703, he lies buried in Westminster Abbey. Saint-Évremond was in particular favor with Charles II and his two immediate successors, and was well acquainted with Dryden and other literary figures even though he never learned even the rudiments of the English language. That too-little-appreciated lover of wine, women, and Montaigne had considerable influence on operatic criticism. I have seen a number of his sentences—even whole paragraphs—quoted (without acknowledgment) in the works of Italian critics such as Algarotti, but some are present in Addison’s writings; John Lockman still quotes him in 1740, as does Henry Home in his Elements of Criticism (1762). Though not complete, a three-volume edition of his works, entitled Oeuvres meslées, was published in London in 1705, and translated in 1714. Perhaps someone will address himself to the not unrewarding task of tracing the French satirist’s influence on his English colleagues.

  26 Hawkins tells a reconciliation story according to which the great Italian violinist Geminiani, when invited to play his sonatas for the King, insisted that the accompaniment be entrusted to Handel, who thereby gained readmittance to the court.

  27 It is interesting to note that there are some superscriptions in the score that amount to stage directions.

  28 That Handel the dramatist had a certain fascination for Bach has been pointed out by Percy Robinson in his Handel and His Orbit. He calls attention to Bach’s strange fondness for Handel’s first and rather primitive operatic essay, Almira, which haunted Bach all the way to the St. Matthew Passion.

  29 Upon the death of the Duke, who fell into serious financial straits after the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, the little Versailles at Cannons came to an ignominious end: it was sold for the marble, stone, and iron it contained.

  30 If we examine the career of the titular music director at Cannons it becomes clear that even he was not tied to the place and had plenty of time to pursue his many other activities in London. While administering the Duke of Chandos’s musical establishment, Pepusch was concurrently director of the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, for which he composed and arranged many masques and pasticcios, attended with close interest to the business of his favorite antiquarian institution, the Academy of Ancient Music, spent a great deal of time on research for which the London and Oxford libraries were indispensable (he was England’s first musicologist), and had numerous pupils.

  31 The Theatre, edited by Sir Richard Steele, made a practice of “quoting” the Royal Academy of Music stocks, usually distorting names and titles with sarcastic wit, though in such a manner that they remained identifiable. On March 8, 1720, the notice took this form: “At the Rehearsal on Friday last, Signior Nihilini Beneditti [Nicolini] rose half a Note above his Pitch formerly known. Opera stock from 83 and a half, when he began; at go when he ended.”

  32 There is an unconfirmed story that upon hearing of Handel’s arrival, Bach, then residi
ng in Cöthen, set out for nearby Halle to meet his famous erstwhile compatriot and fellow musician, but missed him by a day. Though the only witnesses to the story are Forkel and Chrysander, it is plausible enough. The two greatest musical figures of the waning Baroque were destined never to meet.

  33 Handel knew this vanished old Venetian type of opera and even used it on occasion. Medea’s part in his Teseo is clearly modelled after Medea in Cavalli’s Giasone (1649).

  34 In 1881, at the Concerts Colonne, the Liebestod was performed as an “air,’ with Isolde’s part played on a cornet!

  35 The custom of entrance and exit arias, carefully designed to accommodate applause, is clearly followed in grand opera, including the verismo of the beginning of our century.

  36 Harold Powers, in The Musical Quarterly, January 1962. Though his findings are restricted to Handel, they are equally valid for most of the great Baroque opera composers.

  37 As early as 1715, when Handel’s Amadigi obtained a tremendous success, the management of the King’s Theatre prohibited the repetition of arias, which the public clamored to hear over and over.

  38 The bass was early associated with kings, tyrants, high priests, and fathers, but never with principal heroes. The baritone was a newcomer, especially favored by Mozart, to whom even the tenor was not manly enough for a principal character. He used the tenor mainly for youthful lovers (Belmonte, Tamino ) or for characters somewhat lacking in forcefulness (Don Ottavio).

  39 While his scores are not easily available, a pair of very fine arias from Griselda and Erminia were published by Landshoff in Alte Meister des Bel Canto.

  40 Much has been made by certain writers of Haym’s “silence” concerning the sources of his librettos, but this was not owing to any nefarious practices; in the 18th century everyone looked at the finished product without bothering about its provenance. Haym was an able man of the theatre and when he borrowed a plot or an entire libretto which he—like all other librettists—had to adapt to the requirements of a particular theatre, he usually performed his task acceptably.

  41 Among the subscribers for Handel’s opera scores in the mid-twenties (more precisely, “vocal scores,” because full scores were seldom published, to avoid piracy), one notices old Sigismund Kusser, who at that time lived in Dublin, and a “Mr. Cook of New York,” probably the first American Handelian. Both Newburgh Hamilton and Charles Jennens, Handel’s future oratorio librettists, were faithful subscribers.

  42 Rolli’s delightfully entertaining, malicious, and informative correspondence with Riva, the Modenese diplomat who secured Senesino’s services for the Academy, can be found in excellent selections in Otto Erich Deutsch’s Handel, a Documentary Biography.

  43 L’Europe vivant, Paris, 1707, reprint 1876.

  44 William J. Lawrence, in The Musical Quarterly, January 1917.

  45 Sur les operas, in Oeuvres, IV, Paris, 1753.

  46 It is interesting to note that there is a remarkable similarity between Lully and Purcell in that each succeeded in paralleling the Italian recitative with one that admirably reflects the genius of his own language. No one to this day has surpassed either of them in the faithful musical declamation of the French or English language. The recitative, which Saint-Évremond called un méchant usage du chant et de la parole, was one of the chief stumbling blocks to opera beyond the Alps, and the most consistently attacked.

  47 Goldoni, in the preface to his Statira, 1756: “When I write for music the last person I think of is myself.”

  48 Sir Isaac Newton is quoted by the Reverend William Stukely as having said that “he never was at more than one Opera. The first Act he heard with pleasure, the second stretch’d his patience, at the third he ran away.”

  49 Such terms as “democracy” and “democratization” must not be taken in our sense, for the main qualifications, universal suffrage and a free party system, were still missing. The electorate was small, uneven, manipulated, even if with much freedom and often for the nation’s good, by an oligarchy.

  50 In 1720 we find Handel’s name among the subscribers for John Gay’s Poems on several occasions. Throughout his life in England he stayed abreast of literary events.

  51 Reger still uses the chorale in such an unlikely surrounding as his Piano Concerto.

  52 In some quarters there was even a belief that the English were representatives of the Ten Tribes, which did not return from the captivity to assist in the building of the Second Temple, and ingenious arguments can be found in popular theological literature that point out that the Lion and Unicorn that support the Royal Arms can be regarded as the Lion of Judah and the Unicorn of Ephraim.

  53 There is evidence of the teaching of Hebrew in leading grammar schools, at least up to the Restoration.

  54 Pepys, who met Humphrey shortly after the latter’s return from France, called him “an absolute Monsieur.”

  55 The A major Te Deum in turn reworks the B-flat, and though it has some fine music, the compound reworking cancelled many of the qualities of the original.

  56 There is a curiously archaic a cappella number in the B-flat Te Deum, “When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death,” for treble, two tenors, and bass. It was exceptional for Handel to write unaccompanied part-music and whenever he did so, as in this particular case, the connections to Elizabethan music are unmistakable.

  57 There is, however, no evidence whatever to support the story that while he was in Rome his old patron, Cardinal Colonna, attempted to arrange a meeting between Handel and the Old Pretender, then staying in the city. Rome was a center of Jacobite intrigue, but Vatican politicians were more realistic than to tempt a Protestant musician of German extraction on excellent terms with the Hanoverian dynasty. Moreover, Handel was altogether bent on business, and there is no indication that he renewed his acquaintanceships.

  58 As was related above (see p. 136), it was during this journey that Handel may have once more visited Hamburg.

  59 Gay and Pepusch, by publishing Polly in book form, reaped a financial harvest equal to a successful run in the theatre.

  60 Rocchetti may have been of Italian descent but appears to have been regarded as an English singer.

  61 The Dragon of Wantley, a ballad opera devoted to this purpose and produced at Covent Garden itself, was far from annoying to Handel; he is said to have found it very amusing.

  62 Journal of the American Musicological Society, 1948, p. 4.

  63 Purcell, whose influence on Handel was of such momentous importance, we shall more conveniently discuss in the chapter on Handel’s relationship to English music.

  64 Eccles was a man of the theatre, a good composer and a fine melodist, whose high reputation won him the coveted post of Master of the King’s Musick. Yet, like Rossini, he retired from the arena at the height of his fame, spending the rest of his life in the placid art of angling, as Rossini busied himself with the culinary arts. There are kindred riddles in the lives of these two men, but we may note that the sudden withdrawal of each came at a time when the fortunes of opera were changing. The libretto Congreve wrote for Eccles’s Semele was later used by Handel for his own work by that title.

  65 Unfortunately, very little music is available, and no complete score of any masque from the first half of the 17th century has survived, though single pieces of music were preserved in anthologies.

  66 We must add, though, that descriptive poems were only too often a framework for sententious drawing of “some moral truth from ev’ry scene”—and they could be atrocious.

  67 I am not referring to Mozart’s reorchestration—Acis and Galatea was the first of Mozart’s Handelian Bearbeitungen. Such a completely reworked edition could come only from someone in whose time neither scholarship nor a historical sense was developed. The young Viennese master loved Handel’s score, but like his less naive and much less skilful colleagues Hiller, Starzer, and van Swieten (as well as the later Victorians), considered it a sketch that should be completed. The vocal and string parts were respe
cted, in fact they were written into the new score by a copyist, unchanged; only where Handel relied on the continuo to fill out the harmony did Mozart tamper with the texture. Even the concertante wind parts were left alone, but elsewhere Mozart added the full complement of the Classic orchestra. Thus the physiognomy of the original score was completely altered. We shall discuss this procedure later; suffice it to say at this point that although Mozart professed respect for the original, the creative instinct of a great composer could not remain dormant; when “realizing” Handel’s figuration, the younger master picked up thematic bits and went to work with them, making obbligato parts and inventing new counterpoints. Today we look at this as a curiosity, the pardonable fervor of an age that wanted everything modern and up-to-date, but we no longer play the Mozartean transcriptions.

  68 Schoelcher describes one of these scores as “a scandalous dish of mixed vegetables.”

  69 It was he who in collaboration with Carey produced the hilarious burlesque, The Dragon of Wantley (1737), which, as we have seen, Handel is said to have enjoyed even though it lampooned his own Giustino.

  70 Published as a musical supplement to Oeuvres de J. Racine, Paris, 1873; also sizable fragments were edited by Charles Bordes in the Schola Cantorum series.

  71 Esther, it should be added, was not only supposed to edify Madame de Maintenon’s wards, but was also to serve as an object of literary studies, the famous French explication de texte, a quality uncongenial to Handel which he must have felt even through the botched libretto.

  72 The complete letter in Deutsch, p. 299.

  73 Chrysander did not even bother with the original manuscript—this was not a “sacred” work—but worked from the printed edition. The new Halle edition (Bären-reiter), still ignoring the fact that “The praises of Bacchus” was originally written for bass, gives it to the tenor, though in the following “Bacchus ever fair” the bass takes over.