[Picture: Music score: And the government shall be upon his shoulder]
The big shoulder of the Wetterhorn seemed to fall just like the run on
“shoulder.”
“Tyrants now no more shall Dread”
The music to this chorus in _Hercules_ is written from the tyrant’s point
of view. This is plain from the jubilant defiance with which the chorus
opens, and becomes still plainer when the magnificent strain to which he
has set the words “All fear of punishment, all fear is o’er” bursts upon
us. Here he flings aside all considerations save that of the gospel of
doing whatever we please without having to pay for it. He has, however,
remembered himself and become almost puritanical over “The world’s
avenger is no more.” Here he is quite proper.
From a dramatic point of view Handel’s treatment of these words must be
condemned for reasons in respect of which Handel was very rarely at
fault. It puzzles the listener who expects the words to be treated from
the point of view of the vanquished slaves and not from that of the
tyrants. There is no pretence that these particular tyrants are not so
bad as ordinary tyrants, nor these particular vanquished slaves not so
good as ordinary vanquished slaves, and, unless this has been made clear
in some way, it is dramatically _de rigueur_ that the tyrants should come
to grief, or be about to come to grief. The hearer should know which way
his sympathies are expected to go, and here we have the music dragging us
one way and the words another.
Nevertheless, we pardon the departure from the strict rules of the game,
partly because of the welcome nature of good tidings so exultantly
announced to us about all fear of punishment being o’er, and partly
because the music is, throughout, so much stronger than the words that we
lose sight of them almost entirely. Handel probably wrote as he did from
a profound, though perhaps unconscious, perception of the fact that even
in his day there was a great deal of humanitarian nonsense talked and
that, after all, the tyrants were generally quite as good sort of people
as the vanquished slaves. Having begun on this tack, it was easy to
throw morality to the winds when he came to the words about all fear of
punishment being over.