George Frideric Handel
HERBERT F. PEYSER
[Illustration: Logo]
Written for and dedicated to
the
RADIO MEMBERS
of
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
of NEW YORK
Copyright 1951
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
of NEW YORK
113 West 57th Street
New York 19, N. Y.
[Illustration: HANDEL IN MIDDLE AGE.
From the Portrait by Kneller.]
FOREWORD
Handel’s long career resembles a gigantic tapestry, so bewilderingly
crowded with detail, so filled with turmoil and vicissitude, with vast
achievements, extremes of good and ill fortune, and unending comings and
goings that any attempt to force even a small part of it into the frame
of a tiny, unpretentious booklet of the present sort is as hopeless as
it is presumptuous. Handel is far more difficult to reduce to such
minuscule dimensions than his greatest contemporary, Bach, whose worldly
experiences were infinitely less diverse and colorful, for all the
sublimity, mystical quality and epochal influence of his myriad
creations. The supreme master of florid pomp, Handel bulked much larger
in the perspective of his own day than did, in his, the composer of the
“Passion According to St. Matthew.” In spite of an everlasting monument
like “Messiah,” the most popular choral masterpiece ever written, we
may, however, ask ourselves if the body of Handel’s music is as widely
known and as intimately studied as it deserves to be. How many today can
boast of a real acquaintance with Handel’s operas (there are more than
forty of them alone) apart from a few airs sung in concert; how many can
truly claim to know by experience any of the great oratorios apart from
“Messiah” and, possibly, “Judas Maccabaeus” and “Israel in Egypt?” Yet
outside of such monumental works, Handel was time and again a composer
of exquisitely delicate colorations, and sensuous style, not to say a
largely unsuspected master of many subtle intricacies of rhythm. The
present pamphlet, wholly without originality or novelty of approach,
may, perchance, induce the casual reader to renew his interest in
Handel’s prodigious treasury, so much of it neglected, not to say
actually undiscovered by multitudes of music lovers.
H. F. P.
George Frideric Handel
_By_
HERBERT F. PEYSER
Some wit, comparing Bach and Handel, remarked that both masters were
“born in the same year and killed by the same doctor.” Born in the same
year they unquestionably were, Handel almost an exact month before his
great contemporary. Halle, where Handel first saw the light, is a
comparatively short distance from Eisenach, where Bach was cradled. It
lies not far from the eastern boundary of that Saxon-Thuringian country
which harbored some of the imposing musical figures of Germany during
the 17th Century. Such names as those of the famous “three S’s”—Schein,
Scheidt and Schütz—of Kuhnau, Krieger, Melchior Franck, Ahle,
Rosenmüller, echo powerfully through the history of that period.
George Frideric Handel was born on Monday, February 23, 1685. That the
name has been variously spelled need not trouble us; strict consistency
in such matters lay as lightly on folks of this epoch as it did in the
age of Mozart. However, it may be pointed out that in this booklet
“Frideric” is retained in place of “Frederick” because Handel himself
repeatedly used this form and because the British authorities thus
inscribed him when he became a British citizen.
The Handel family came from Silesia, where Valentine Handel, the
composer’s grandfather, had been a coppersmith in Breslau. George
Handel, the father, had been “barber-surgeon,” attached to the service
of Saxon and Swedish armies, then to that of Duke Augustus of Saxony.
For a time he prospered and in 1665 he bought himself “Am Schlamm,” at
Halle-an-der-Saale, a palatial house, which in the course of years
barely escaped total destruction by fire. In any case, Father Handel was
to know the ups and downs of fortune; and the vicissitudes he endured
did not sweeten an always morose and surly character. He has been
described as “a strong man, a man of vast principles, bigoted, intensely
disagreeable, a man with a rather withered heart.” A portrait of him
gave Romain Rolland “the impression of one who has never smiled.” He was
twice married, the first time to the widow of a barber, a woman ten
years his senior, the second to Dorothea Taust, a pastor’s daughter,
thirty years his junior. By the first he had six children, by the second
four, of whom George Frideric was the second.
Father Handel was 63 when his great son came into the world. The future
composer of “Messiah” was born, not in the elaborate edifice which
carries his bust and is inscribed with the titles of his oratorios, but
in the house adjoining it which stands on a street corner and whose
official address is Nicolai Strasse 5. Yet even this statement must be
qualified. For this presumable “birthplace” was not built till 1800 and,
according to the researches of Newman Flower, stands on the _site_ of
the house in which Handel was born. As for the town of Halle, it had
definitely passed after the death of the Duke Augustus of Saxony, to
Brandenburg; so that, strictly speaking, Handel was born a Prussian.
But, as Rolland has noted, “the childhood of Handel was influenced by
two intellectual forces: the Saxon and the Prussian. Of the two the more
aristocratic, and also most powerful was the Saxon.” At all events,
after the Thirty Years’ War the city of Halle, during the Middle Ages a
center of culture and gaiety, had fallen into a drab provincialism.
[Illustration: The house at Halle where Handel was supposed to have been
born, decorated with laurels and the names of his oratorios. And—]
[Illustration: —The house next door in which he _was_ born.]
Apparently the child’s musical susceptibilities developed early and
rather like Mozart’s, even if unlike the latter, he had not the benefit
of a friendly and understanding father. Who has not seen at some time or
other the picture immortalizing the precocity of “the Infant Handel?”
The story goes that the indulgent mother had smuggled a clavichord into
the garret. In the dead of night the child crept to the attic till the
father, aroused by faint tinklings, came with a lantern to investigate.
Whether or not the clavichord was confiscated the result of the parental
raid was a stern prohibition of all sorts of music-making. Some of us
may be reminded by this apparent heartlessness of a rather similar
punishment visited on the youthful Bach, when his elder brother deprived
him of music he had painfully copied out by moonlight for his own use.
The elder Handel’s motive was, according to his own lights, perhaps
quite as defensible. He had no wish to see a son of his degraded to the
rank of a lackey or some form of vagabond, than which a musician at that
time hardly seemed any better. The barber-surgeon fully shared the
prejudice of the average “strong man” against the artist. Rolland
describes the bourgeois middle class German attitude of the 17th Century
on the subject of music: “It was for them a mere art of amusement, and
not a serious profession. Many of the masters of that time, Schütz,
Kuhnau, Rosenmüller, were lawyers or theologians, before they devoted
themselves to music.” And old George Handel is supposed to have
threatened: “If that boy ever shows any further inclination towards
music or noises disguised as such, I will kill it!” There was, indeed,
one way in which the boy could with a certain impunity satisfy his
craving for music—in church, by listening to the organ and the singing
of the choir. Such enjoyment supplanted to some extent the games and
childish pleasures of ordinary boys. He was, it appears, a somewhat
lonely child, who made few friends and whose “playground” was a dismal
courtyard opposite his home.
The father settled on the law as a fine, honest and lucrative profession
for his son. Jurisprudence was to rescue Handel from the snares of
music, just as in time it was to be the “salvation” of Schumann, as
school mastering was by paternal decree to be the destiny of Schubert,
and medicine that of Berlioz. Here, too, it was quite as ineffectual!
All the same, the youth was not to escape his share of legal study; and
by the time he reached 16 he entered the University of Halle as
“studiosus juris.”
About eight years earlier, however, fate in the paradoxical shape of
Father Handel himself took a hand in George Frideric’s future. He had
his son accompany him on a journey to nearby Weissenfels, the residence
of the Duke of Saxony. That personage asked the lad to play something on
the chapel organ and was so stirred by what he heard that he counselled
the obdurate father not to thwart the child’s ambition. From an ordinary
person the hard-boiled parent would have taken such advice in very bad
part; coming from the mouth of a prince it acquired the force of a
command. So he decided to allow his son to study music with the unspoken
reservation, however, that he must belong first and foremost to the law.
Actually, these musical studies might be said to have begun in
Weissenfels, for here young Handel had a chance to hear some of the
works of the Nürnberg master, Johann Krieger; and in this same town, a
mere stone’s throw from Halle, he had his first taste of opera, which
was to thrust deep roots in his soul.
The boy was now entrusted to the care of Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, from
Leipzig, who at an early age had become organist of the Halle
Liebfrauenkirche. Zachow appears to have been an uncommonly gifted
teacher and Handel’s devotion to him never wavered. As we read Romain
Rolland’s words we are strangely reminded of the ideals and methods of
Theodor Weinlig, Wagner’s unique master of composition: “Zachow’s first
efforts were devoted to giving the pupil a strong foundation in harmony.
Then he turned his thoughts towards the inventive side of the art; he
showed him how to give his musical ideas the most perfect form, and he
refined his taste. He possessed a remarkable library of Italian and
German music, and he explained to Handel the various methods of writing
and composing adopted by different nationalities, whilst pointing out
the good qualities and the faults of each composer and in order that his
education might be at the same time theoretical and practical, he
frequently gave him exercises to work in such and such a style.... Thus
the little Handel had, thanks to his master, a living summary of the
musical resources of Germany, old and new; and under his direction he
absorbed all the secrets of the great contrapuntal architects of the
past, together with the clear expressive and melodic beauty of the
Italian-German schools of Hanover and Hamburg.”
Around 1696 George Frideric is supposed to have gone to Berlin, though
about this and possibly a subsequent trip a short time afterwards the
chronicles give no clear account. Father Handel was seriously ill and,
as it is unlikely that the 11-year-old student went to the Court of the
Elector of Brandenburg alone, the assumption is that he made the journey
in Zachow’s company. Be this as it may, the artistic enthusiasm of the
Electress, Sophia Charlotte, stimulated musical activities at the
electoral court and attracted thither outstanding Italian composers,
instrumentalists and singers. And it may well have been here that the
youth was first brought into contact with the music of the South. He
played on the clavecin before a princely audience and stirred it to such
enthusiasm that the Elector wished to take him into service or at least
finance a trip to Italy, to complete his studies. But if we are to
believe Mainwaring, Father Handel did not wish his son “tied too soon to
a prince.” Furthermore, the old man’s health failed so alarmingly that
he knew his days were numbered and wished to see the boy once more
before he died.
Hardly was George Frideric back in Halle when the barber-surgeon went to
his account. The youth wrote a memorial poem which was published in a
pamphlet and proved to be the first time his name ever appeared in
print. After settling her husband’s affairs Dorothea Handel went about
carrying out his wishes regarding her son’s legal studies. In a spirit
of duty he continued them a while; but soon after his completion of his
college classes and his entrance for the Faculty of Law at the Halle
University music gained the upper hand completely. He was religious
without sentimentality but as little as the youthful Bach did he have
any sympathy with Pietism (of which the Faculty of Theology was a
hot-bed at the time) and was violently opposed to the Pietist antagonism
to music. And when the post of organist at the Cathedral “by the
Moritzburg” fell vacant by reason of the dissolute habits of a
roystering individual named Leporin, Handel was made his successor,
though the church was Calvinist and the young newcomer a staunch
Lutheran.
There was now an end to all thoughts of jurisprudence. Music claimed him
solely. Handel was only 17 but seems already to have exercised a strong
musical authority in Halle. He assembled a capital choir and orchestra
from among his most gifted pupils and let them be heard on Sundays in
various churches of the town. Like Bach and other masters of that
astonishing period, he composed an incredible number of cantatas,
motets, psalms, chorales and devotional miscellany, which had to be new
every week. It must not be imagined that he allowed them to wilt or
evaporate. Handel’s mind was a storehouse, whence nothing ever escaped
and in which was always stocked away and held in reserve for future use.
In the summer of 1703 he left his native city; not, indeed, forever, but
only for occasional visits to relatives and friends, when professional
business allowed him time. From Halle he turned his steps toward
Hamburg, which had suffered little from the wars of the 17th Century,
and grown rich, gay and artistic in consequence of enviable business
prosperity. Commercial benefits were, of course, reflected in a musical
expansion which raised the Hanseatic port above the level even of Berlin
and made it the operatic city of the North. In Hamburg, notes Rolland,
“they spoke all languages and especially the French tongue; it was in
continual relationship with both England and Italy, and particularly
with Venice, which constituted for it a model for emulation. It was by
way of Hamburg that the English ideas were circulated in Germany.... In
the time of Handel, Hamburg shared with Leipzig the intellectual
prestige of Germany. There was no other place in Germany where music was
held in such high esteem. The artists there hobnobbed with the rich
merchants.”
The Hamburg opera catered to various factions which did not invariably
see eye to eye. One of these factions consisted of persons who sought in
operatic entertainment out and out amusement; the other, of individuals
with a religious bent, who regarded the average fantastic and
extravagant opera as an invention of hell—_opera diabolica_. When Handel
arrived the lyric theatre was making history guided by the composer,
Reinhard Keiser. Under Keiser’s management Hamburg became a home of
opera in the German tradition. Some of these “German” operas were coarse
and in atrocious taste. Hugo Leichtentritt tells, for instance, of a
work called “Störtebeker und Gödge Michaelis” (music by Keiser), a story
about piracy on the high seas, with executions and massacres, in which
bladders filled with sow blood and concealed beneath the costumes of the
actors would be perforated in such a manner that the appalled spectators
were spattered with a gory shower, often resulting in a stampede.
Keiser, though a person of unstable character and extreme
presumptuousness, had indisputable genius. He was not yet 30 when Handel
came to Hamburg and under him that city experienced its golden age of
opera. To be sure, the weakest feature of the Hamburg Opera was the
singing. For a long time the institution had no _professional_ singers.
The roles were taken by students, shoemakers, tailors, fruiterers “and
girls of little talent and less virtue,” while ordinarily artisans
“found it more convenient to take female parts.” A gifted Kapellmeister
named Cousser, who had been a pupil of Lully in Paris, introduced
important reforms and when Handel in 1703 arrived the moment was, in
truth, a psychological one. “He was rich in power and strong in will,”
wrote the 22-year-old Johann Mattheson, the first acquaintance he was to
make in Hamburg. Rolland pictures Handel as having “an ample forehead, a
vigorous mouth, a full chin and a head covered with a biretta” (rather
after the manner of Wagner, of whom throughout his life Handel reminds
one in some amazing traits of character and genius).
Under Keiser the adventurous newcomer soon found employment as a second
violin in the opera orchestra. His particular intimate was Mattheson, a
musician of many gifts and uncommon versatility, who united in himself
literary talents, a critical flair and a highly volatile temperament. It
was he who helped Handel find pupils and who guided him into the town’s
important musical circles. So that before long Handel had access to the
organ lofts of Hamburg’s churches and opportunities to compose works for
ecclesiastical purposes. Mattheson, incidentally, was a linguist and
spoke perfect English; and it was through him that Handel was to enter
for the first time into negotiations with what was to become his second
country.
It was not very long, however, before the temperaments and
idiosyncrasies of the two brought them into collision. Mattheson
criticised the music of his friend, perhaps not entirely without reason,
complained that Handel was not the most perfect of melodists and that he
often wrote at too great length. If these opinions may have nettled the
younger man they were not wholly lost on him, as time was to show. In
the early months of their friendship Handel and Mattheson went to Lübeck
to listen to the playing of the renowned Danish organist, Dietrich
Buxtehude, whose celebrated Abendmusiken at the Marienkirche were
likewise a magnet which drew Bach away from his duties in Arnstadt. The
young men were deeply stirred by the music of the venerable master and
Handel stored away in his incredibly retentive memory ideas which were
to fertilize his imagination in later years. The two youths actually
competed for the post of organist and might, like Bach, have won it but
for the provision that whoever succeeded a retiring organist in Lübeck
had to marry the daughter—or widow—of his predecessor. In this case the
daughter seems to have been more than usually undesirable and, like
their famous contemporary, the excursionists from Hamburg turned their
backs on Lübeck.
Presently the friendship was imperiled once more, this time with what
might have been disastrous results. In October, 1704, an opera,
“Cleopatra” which Mattheson had composed to a text by a certain
Friederick Feustkling, was produced with the composer in the part of
Mark Antony and Handel at the harpsichord. The piece won a success, but
on a later occasion Mattheson (Antony being “dead”) hastened into the
orchestra and tried to push Handel from the instrument. A quarrel flared
up immediately, which seems to have broken up the performance and have
lasted half an hour. In the end the throng repaired to the Gänsemarkt,
outside the theatre, the pair drew swords and set upon one another.
Almost at once the combat came to an end, Mattheson’s blade splintering
against a metal button on Handel’s coat. “The duel might have ended very
badly for us both, if by God’s mercy my sword had not broken,” the young
firebrand was to write later. The reconciliation was not immediate but
when it did come about the two dined together, then betook themselves to
the theatre to a rehearsal of Handel’s first opera, “Almira.” The
representation, on January 8, 1705, was an instant triumph for its
composer. The Hamburgers were completely captivated by the freshness and
manifest genius which the score exhibited. Mattheson had sung the tenor
part but does not seem to have been overjoyed by his friend’s
spectacular success.
Handel was spurred by his fortunate operatic debut to embark on a second
work. The fact that “Almira” had been sung partly in Italian, partly in
German, did not keep it from obtaining twenty performances at the
outset. Handel made the mistake of interrupting its run because he
believed that in his next opera, “Nero, or Love Obtained Through Blood
and Murder,” he had written something better. Mattheson sang the part of
Nero; but the opera died after only three hearings. To aggravate matters
the Keiser regime, now largely discredited, gave promise of putting an
end to the Hamburg Opera; and Handel began to see himself enmeshed in
the catastrophe of the wreck, a victim of elaborate jealousies and
intrigues.
* * *
In 1704 he had made the acquaintance of an Italian prince, Giovanni
Gaston del Medici, an adventurer and a notorious profligate, whose
father was Grand Duke of Tuscany. He was astonished that Handel seemed
so little interested in Italian music, including some specimens he set
before him. Handel insisted that “angels would be necessary to sing them
if such stuff were to sound even agreeable.” At this time his ambition
was to create a German style, independent of foreign influences. And for
Keiser’s successor, Saurbrey, Handel turned out a new opera, “Florindo
und Daphne”, which, like Wagner’s “Rienzi”, proved to be so long that
the composer caused it to be given in two parts, “for fear”, he
admitted, “that the music might tire the hearers.” Then, without taking
leave of Mattheson or any of his friends, he accepted the prince’s
invitation and went to Italy.
More or less mystery surrounds Handel’s arrival in Italy, though the
time was not exactly propitious, what with the War of the Spanish
Succession in full blast and funds in the wanderer’s pocket fairly low.
But the composer did not tarry in Florence, his first stop, for long and
early in 1707 went to Rome. From the operatic standpoint the Eternal
City had nothing to interest him. Pope Innocent III ten years previously
deciding that the opera house was immoral, had closed it; then when
things promised to improve a bit for musicians a devastating earthquake
renewed the religious qualms of the people, so that during the whole of
Handel’s Italian sojourn, Rome had not a single performance of opera.
However, there was abundant church and chamber music, which spurred him
to emulation. To the Easter festivities of April, 1707, he contributed a
“Dixit Dominus” and a few months later he wrote a “Laudate Pueri” and
other Latin Psalms. But more important for his future were the excellent
connections he made. Letters of recommendation from the Medici prince
opened the Roman salons to him; and in such aristocratic circles his
virtuosity on the keyboard seems to have gained him more fame than even
his compositions. “The famous Saxon” (“Il Sassone famoso”), as Handel
was called among the Romans even as early as the summer of 1707, was the
wonder of musical soirees. And he was making inestimable artistic
friendships. When we note that among those with whom he was brought into
contact at one time or another in Rome included the Scarlattis, father
and son; Arcangelo Corelli, Bernardo Pasquini, Benedetto Marcello—to
mention only a few—we can judge to what grandly fertilizing inspirations
Handel was exposed. We must mention in passing Cardinals Panfili and
Ottoboni, as well as the Marquis Ruspoli, who yielded to nobody in his
enthusiasm for Handel’s gifts. All these men belonged to a coterie
called the “Arcadians”, which united “the nobility and the artists in a
spiritual fraternity not only the most illustrious artists and
aristocrats of Italy, but further included four Popes and members of
foreign royalty.”
[Illustration: HANDEL AT THE TIME OF HIS FIRST VISIT TO ITALY.]
The “Arcadians” held weekly meetings at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni,
where poetic and musical improvisations were given. It was for the
concerts in the Ottoboni home that Handel composed his two Roman
oratorios, “The Resurrection” and “The Triumph of Time and Truth”, which
approximate operas and the second of which was to undergo several
transformations during his career. In the Ottoboni palace later took
place that celebrated contest between Handel and the incomparable
Domenico Scarlatti, which was adjudged a draw. The heart-warming
friendship between the two masters was to endure for years. It is by no
means out of the question that in the un-operatic atmosphere of Rome
Handel, nevertheless, began to compose the first of his Italian operas,
“Roderigo”, which was heard for the first time only when he returned to
Florence in the autumn of 1707.
* * *
Handel was not to leave Italy till some time during the late spring of
1710, yet there are not a few blanks in his Italian travels, which it is
impossible to fill out. He worked as industriously as ever—composed,
played, absorbed myriad impressions. In Florence “Roderigo” had a
success which it was claimed by some had been achieved partly through
the favor of the Grand Duke and the love of a prima donna, Vittoria
Tarquini. Possibly it was furthered by the latter but certainly not
caused by it. Handel’s life is conspicuously free from conventional
“love interest”; and perhaps the most celebrated story of his dealings
with women is the one which tells of his raging threat to throw the
soprano, Francesca Cuzzoni, out of a window if she did not sing exactly
as he wanted what he had written for her. Certainly the middle-aged
Tarquini never attracted him physically.
Encouraged by his Florentine luck Handel was moved to try his fortunes
in Venice, where opera houses had sprung up everywhere and at one time
numbered fifteen. Seven were playing on one and the same evening during
Carnival time and there were musical diversions or solemnities of one
sort or another in churches and in those women’s conservatories called
“hospitals”. Venice was then the musical capital of Italy, somewhat as
Milan was to become at a later date. Handel does not appear to have
contributed to the operatic life of the city at this time but his chance
was to come before long. Yet he did make one encounter in Venice which
was to have consequences—he met Ernest Augustus, Prince of Hanover, and
the Duke of Manchester, English Ambassador Extraordinary. He went back
to Rome (where an unsuccessful attempt was made to convert him to
Catholicism); yet he loved the city and regretfully tore himself away
from it to make a jaunt to Naples, which contributed importantly to his
artistic sensibilities. As he had done elsewhere in Italy he haunted the
picture galleries and nourished his enthusiasm for paintings. He
assimilated the Spanish and French musical styles which “fought for
honors in this city”; saw much of Alessandro Scarlatti, interested
himself in the folk music of the place, noted down the melodies of the
Calabrian Pifferari, met the Venetian Cardinal Grimani, composed for the
Neapolitan “Arcadians” the _serenata_ “Acis and Galatea”. Grimani, whose
family owned the theatre of San Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice, supplied
him with the libretto of an opera, “Agrippina”, which Handel probably
began to compose on the spot. Its performance in Venice was as good as
assured and from Naples he returned to Rome, making another useful
friend in the Bishop Agostino Steffani, who was charged with secret
missions by different German princes and held at the same time the post
of Kapellmeister at the Court of Hanover.
“Agrippina” was produced in Venice, 1709-10. Its reception exceeded
anything the composer had known till then. The chronicles tell of cries
of “Viva il caro Sassone”, also of “extravagances impossible to record.”
Obviously his travels in the peninsula had superbly enriched his
creative powers and the Venetians found the new work “the most melodious
of Handel’s Italian operas.” Nor was its popularity confined to Venice.
He seems to have had some idea of going to Paris, became familiar with
the French language, used it in his correspondence and Romain Rolland
describes his style as “always very correct and having the fine courtesy
of the Court of Louis XIV.”
But Handel did not go to France. Instead, he returned to Germany and
went to Hanover. Prince Ernest had, in Venice, been completely
captivated by “Agrippina” and repeated an invitation he had made once
before. The worthy Steffani invited the “dear Saxon” to succeed him as
Kapellmeister at the Hanoverian Court. Wisely, “the dear Saxon”
accepted. How differently things might have turned had he not been in
Venice at just that providential moment! So Handel, as Chrysander said,
“walked in the steps of Steffani; but his feet were larger.”
[Illustration: Showing Handel’s handwriting and signature when he first
came to London.]
His stay in Hanover in 1710 was brief. Hardly had he prepared to take up
his duties than proposals were made to him from England. He asked leave
of absence and received it; accepted an invitation from the Elector
Johann Wilhelm to visit his court at Düsseldorf; and then, by way of
Holland, traveled to London, which he reached late in 1710, unable to
speak a word of English. Before he had gone back to the Hanoverian Court
he had written an opera, produced it amid prodigious enthusiasm and
taken the first steps toward becoming a sovereign British institution.
* * *
He could not have timed his coming better. Purcell’s death sixteen years
earlier had given what was something like a death blow to English music;
and what now passed for native compositions amounted to pitiable odds
and ends. Rolland ridicules the claim of some unthinking people that
Handel “killed English music since there was nothing left to kill.” A
renewal of the Puritanical opposition which poisoned the English stage
contributed to the confusion and discouragement of British artists, and
the worst of such attacks as the notorious Jeremy Collier had made on
the “profaneness and immorality” of the theatre lay in the fact that, as
such things often do, they expressed the deep feelings of the nation. In
consequence of a universal hypocrisy foreign elements came to fill the
vacuum created. Some bad Italian librettos were set to wretched music
and served up with momentary success. Other “entertainments” of the sort
mingled Italian and English words and were duly satirized by the jealous
and priggish Joseph Addison, nettled by the failure of his own piece,
“Rosamund”, to which one Thomas Clayton had composed atrocious music.
Handel came into contact with one Aaron Hill, who managed the Queen’s
Theatre in the Haymarket, and received from him an opera text,
“Rinaldo”, which an Italian, Giacomo Rossi, had adapted from Tasso’s
“Jerusalem Delivered.” The new arrival rose magnificently to his
opportunity. The music was completed in just two weeks and performed on
February 24, 1711. And luck aided Handel by supplying him with some
extraordinary singers, all of them new to England—Giuseppe Boschi, a
young and astounding bass, and the sensational castrato, Nicolini, who
took London by storm. The tale of “Rinaldo” was that of the Venetian
“Agrippina” all over again! In one evening the British capital was
subjugated, for all the bile and venom Addison and Steele could
discharge into the columns of _The Spectator_ and _The Tatler_. The
melodies of the opera spread like wildfire and seem to have appealed to
the lower classes as well as to the aristocracy. To this day some of
them have preserved their vitality. The noble air, “Lascia ch’io
pianga”, in sarabande rhythm, is a fairly familiar item on recital
programs; and the Crusaders’ March, a fine, swinging tune, was adapted
to the words “Let us take the road” by Dr. Pepusch when he assembled out
of countless folksongs and dances John Gay’s deathless “Beggar’s
Opera”—in 1728 a thorn in Handel’s side but still, after more than two
centuries, a classic with an iron constitution.
* * *
Roughly speaking, Handel composed forty-four operas from “Almira”, in
1705, at Hamburg to “Deidamia”, 1741, in London. It is obviously
impossible to consider even a small fraction of them here and we shall
have to content ourselves with little more than the names and dates of
only a few. All the same, it may be well to pause here momentarily to
ask ourselves what, in the first place, a Handel opera really is like.
For unless we are specialists, not to say antiquarians, we have little
means of definitely knowing. The lyric drama of that period cannot be
judged by the works of the 19th and 20th Centuries or even by more than
a scant handful of masterpieces of Gluck and Mozart. Its problems, its
musical and dramatic aspects are basically different. A movement, which
had its rise in Germany after the First World War and which continued on
and off for several years (even spreading intermittently to other
countries, including the United States) demonstrated that these baroque
entertainments are essentially museum pieces, prizable as certain of
their elements may be. To us, who have been nurtured on the theatre
works of Mozart, of the composers of the school of dramatic and
pictorial “grand opera”, of the opera buffa and the opéra comique, the
_drame lyrique_ of Gounod and Bizet, the works of Verdi, the music
dramas of Wagner and his assorted successors of various nationalities—to
us the operatic specimens of Handel seem infinitely alien and remote in
their premises and calculated stylizations. The nearest we can approach
them today is through such surviving examples of the old _opera seria_
as Mozart’s “Idomeneo” or Gluck’s “Alceste”. And even those do not
supply genuine parallels.
To the average person reared on the lyric drama as known to two or three
generations preceding ours the long-established description of a
Handelian opera as a “concert in costume” may suffice at a pinch. But in
a larger sense it begs the question, for Handel’s forty odd operas are
both more than this and less. We should find their librettos so cut to a
pattern that the most old-fashioned “books” of the 19th Century would
possibly strike us, by comparison, dramatically bold, even involved.
Handelian operas have no trace of psychological subtlety or elementary
“conflict”. What theatrical “action” there is passes before us with
something like lightning speed. Incidents which need to be communicated
to the spectator are, in the main, recounted in recitative. What we
understand as “incident” is subordinate to phases of emotional
expression; and in ensemble pieces. Joy, rage, sadness, a broad scale of
elemental feelings, are recognizably embodied in musical moods and
tempos unmistakable in their lyrical or dramatic communications of
“affetti” (“emotions”). There is little, if indeed any, of what a later
esthetic was to call “the art of transition” and it was nothing in any
manner unusual for a fiery or combative _presto_ to precede (or follow)
a tender _largo_ or _andante_, and other formalistic clichés. The
accompaniment, the orchestra, indeed the “action” and the stage picture
is not much more than incidental background and frame.
The true center of gravity of a Handel opera lies in the performance of
the singers and their command of declamation, florid utterance,
sustained song and artifices at that epoch accepted as supremely
expressive. Only in grasping these facts can we put ourselves in the
frame of mind needed to understand the essential principles of these
baroque masterpieces and to appreciate what—apart from their sheer
melodic beauties—lifts them to a higher level than curios lacking any
further validity, difficult as it may be for many of us to force our
imagination and our feelings into such a mold.
* * *
Having conquered England at a blow and become the idol not only of high
society but of the common people as well, Handel recalled in the spring
of 1711 that he was still Kapellmeister of Hanover. In London he had
made enemies as well as friends and one of the most implacable of his
foes was the great but churlish Addison. His admirers, on the other
hand, included a child named Mary Granville, later Mrs. Delany, one of
his staunchest friends; the Duke of Burlington, through whom he had
entrée to Burlington House; and the famous eccentric, Thomas Britton, a
coal dealer by day but who, on certain evenings, sponsored memorable
concerts in a specially outfitted loft above his coal shop, which drew
prominent London musicians and cultured aristocrats to the Clerkenwell
“garret”, where Handel frequently appeared as harpsichord and even organ
virtuoso.
Back in Hanover June, 1711, he renewed his contacts with Bishop
Steffani, composed organ concertos and other chamber music, as well as a
quantity of songs to German texts by the Hamburg Senator, Brockes. He
would have liked to produce “Rinaldo” but the Hanover Opera was closed.
Yet London had entered his blood and nothing would content him but his
speedy return, the more so because his English admirers demanded him. He
obtained leave “on condition that he return to Hanover after a
reasonable time”; and by November, 1712, he arrived in England to
supervise preparations for a pastoral, “Il Pastor Fido”, a work hastily
thrown together and variously improved more than twenty years later.
This time Handel did not repeat his “Rinaldo” sensation and the piece
had only half a dozen hearings. To make matters worse, a certain
MacSwiney, who succeeded Aaron Hill at the Queen’s Theatre, absconded,
leaving nothing but unpaid bills and enraged singers. At this stage
there enters the picture a Swiss adventurer, by name Heidegger, a man of
unbelievable conceit and homeliness, who was, however, to play an
important role in Handel’s future. To recoup the failure of “Il Pastor
Fido” the composer turned out in less than three weeks a “tragic opera”
in five acts, “Teseo”, with a libretto by Nicolo Francesco Haym, and
dedicated tactfully to the Earl of Burlington. “Teseo” came near
duplicating the fortunes of “Rinaldo”; and if, as Rolland says, it was
“full of haste”, it was also “full of genius.” If anything could have
intrenched the composer still more firmly in London it was this opera.
He went for a while to live at Burlington House at the Duke’s
invitation; met Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, struck up friendships with this
and that musician at the Queen’s Arms Tavern in St. Paul’s Churchyard
and was never so happy as when he sat with some musical crony, a mug of
beer at hand and a harpsichord nearby. The first work he composed in the
ideal peace of Burlington House was a Birthday Ode for Queen Anne, whom
he had met on his first London visit. The Ode was produced at St.
James’s on February 6, 1713, and was the first English he had set to
music. All his life Handel’s English remained bad, sometimes even
grotesque, and the incorrect accenting in his compositions repeatedly
betray his deficiencies in our tongue. Of such faults the Birthday Ode
has its full share, in spite of which the Queen was so delighted with
the work that she settled on the composer an annual pension of 200
Pounds. He found it politic to write music for patriotic purposes, and
instantly complied with the sovereign’s command to supply a “Te Deum”
and a “Jubilate” to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht, both compositions
given at a solemn service at St. Paul’s before the assembled Members of
Parliament.
* * *
Queen Anne died on August 1, 1714, and for a time the skies over Handel
threatened to cloud; for on the very day of her passing the Elector of
Hanover was proclaimed by the Secret Council King of England. He arrived
in London on September 20 and was crowned George I at Westminster a
month later. Here was a pretty kettle of fish! His former master to
whose service he had most certainly not returned “in a reasonable time”
suddenly seated on the English throne—and not even a new “Te Deum”
prepared against his coming to the land which Handel now regarded as
home!
Handelian luck got him out of what might have been a serious
predicament. He must have trusted to his destiny in the first place to
help him out of an obviously awkward situation and, being tactful, he
made no open move to aggravate it. George I was and remained intensely
German, brought to England with him “a compact body of
Germans”—chamberlains, secretaries, even his pair of elderly mistresses,
the Baroness Kielmansegge and Madame Schulenburg; and all manner of
comforts and consolations he could not find in his new island kingdom.
He made no effort to shed his German love of music, wherefore as Rolland
points out, “he could not punish Handel without punishing himself.” And
after he heard Handel’s fascinating new opera, “Amadigi”, in May, 1715,
he lost all idea (if, indeed, he ever harbored any) of disciplining his
former servant. He appointed Handel music master to the little
princesses and when, in 1716, the monarch had to go to Hanover the
composer accompanied him on the trip, took occasion to study musical
developments in Germany and even wrote a Passion on a text by Heinrich
Brockes.
Here is the point to consider for a moment the tale of the “Water
Music”, one of the most venerable Handelian anecdotes. The story runs
somewhat as follows: Lord Burlington and Baron Kielmansegge, the Master
of the King’s Horse, in order to reconcile sovereign and musician, in
1715 persuaded the latter to write a set of light pieces to be played on
a boat close to the royal barge at a water party on the Thames. The King
liked the music sufficiently to inquire who composed it and, being told,
summoned Handel, promised to let bygones be bygones and received him
back into favor. Unfortunately for romance, later documents have shown
that the “Water Music” was not played till 1717 and then under wholly
different conditions. But the legend has become so ingrained in British
musical tradition that, as Newman Flower wrote, “it is precisely what
ought to have happened.” At all events, the “Water Music” is an adorable
suite, definitely English in character—like much else in Handel’s
music—and to this day an ornament of concert programs in one or another
arrangement.
King George, far from remembering past annoyances, saw to it that
Handel’s yearly pension from Queen Anne should be increased to 600
Pounds, so that even without further earnings his financial state was
tolerably secure. His good fortunes were enhanced by the musical
enthusiasms of the King, who could not hear enough of “Rinaldo” and
“Amadigi” (to the spectacular features of which live birds, which
sometimes misbehaved, and a fountain of real water, heightened the
attractions of sumptuous settings). He went to them, often incognito,
several times a week sharing his private box with his bevy of lady
friends, new and old; or he would vary his visits to the opera with
attendance at plays or concerts, so that his chances to admire the works
of Handel, in one form or another, were rarely lacking. Many found that
the monarch’s habit of parading his amours before London audiences added
to the piquancy of a Handelian score!
By the side of the famed artificial soprano, Nicolini, sang the
brilliant Anastasia Robinson, who had been a soprano but whose voice,
after a siege of illness, suddenly dropped to contralto. Mrs. Robinson
was particularly noted for the fact that her morals were at all times
spotless. Mrs. Delany was to describe her as “of middling stature, not
handsome but of a pleasing modest countenance, with large blue eyes....
Her manner and address were very engaging, and her behavior on all
occasions that of a gentlewoman.” When her husband, Lord Peterborough,
died she burned the diaries he had kept, wherein he had noted his
various infidelities and other secrets not meant for the scrutiny of his
wife.
Handel’s star was steadily rising and his fame was not to be transcended
till a number of years later and then only by virtue of his own genius
and after many fluctuations of fortune. But when the King returned to
London from his trip to Germany opera fell upon bad days. Musical and
theatrical life flourished, indeed, yet suddenly farces and other
diversions, imported from France, captured the mood of the town and
delighted the monarch and his ladies. Now nobody felt like putting up
money on opera, since inexpensive vulgarity was a safer bet. At just
about this period Handel and James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, former
Paymaster-General of the Army during the Marlborough wars, were brought
into contact. The erstwhile Earl of Carnarvon had accumulated his wealth
by heaven knows what sharp practices, and inherited an estate at
Cannons, near Edgware, where he had erected a luxurious palace,
including a chapel, a theatre, and other musical appurtenances
inseparable from such an establishment. The Prince of Wales was a
frequent visitor at Cannons, braving even the swarming footpads of
Edgware Road. The Duke of Chandos seems to have been in a position to
buy anything which struck his fancy and there is a story that on one
occasion, he or his son (the accounts differ) coming across a man
unmercifully thrashing his well-favored wife, rescued the lady by buying
her on the spot. He, therefore, had no particular trouble securing
Handel as master of his music in place of his former employee, the
German Dr. Pepusch. Some ten years later Dr. Pepusch had his revenge by
compiling the score of the “Beggar’s Opera” which was to become such a
grievous obstacle in Handel’s path.
But until 1720 Handel was in the service of the Duke of Chandos, even if
he spent much of his time in London, busily attending to the musical
instruction of the daughters of Caroline, Princess of Wales, and writing
numerous “Lessons” and clavier suites for his royal pupils. Which brings
us to another celebrated Handelian fiction, “The Harmonious Blacksmith.”
The legend is quite as diversified and even more far-fetched than the
one about the “Water Music.” For well over a century the world has been
fed the story of the blacksmith and his forge near Whitchurch, close to
Edgware. In the house of this blacksmith Handel is supposed to have
taken refuge from a thunderstorm, the blacksmith meantime continuing his
hammering. When the storm was over the composer went forth and, still
haunted by the rhythm of the pounding, set down the melody and then
proceeded to write variations on it. This “Air and Variations” form part
of Handel’s Fifth Suite of clavecin pieces, but it was not till 1820
that some imaginative publisher, taking his cue from an apprentice who
continually whistled Handel’s tune, invented the fanciful title; and not
till 1835 that the London _Times_ published an anonymous letter
retailing the legend of the blacksmith and his forge. We have no place
here to recount the complex ramifications of the amiable myth which
culminated in the auctioning off of an old anvil—supposedly the very one
which the composer heard struck! But the publisher had the last word and
to the end of time the Fifth Suite will assuredly remain “The Harmonious
Blacksmith.”
Far more important in the development of Handel’s style are the “Chandos
Anthems” (or Psalms), composed during the years from 1717 to 1720 while
the master, at Cannons, was steadily evolving. They fill three volumes
of the Complete Handel edition and “stand in relationship to Handel’s
oratorios in the same position as his Italian cantatas stand to his
operas. In these religious cantatas, written for the Duke’s chapel,
Handel gives the first place to the chorus.... There is already in them
the spirit and the style of ‘Israel in Egypt’, the great monumental
lines, the popular feeling. It was only a step from this to the colossal
Biblical dramas.” (Rolland) And Handel took this first step with
“Esther”, called in its first form “Haman and Mordecai, a masque.” It
was staged on August 29, 1720. Almost simultaneously he wrote the
exquisite pastoral tragedy, “Acis and Galatea”, a Sicilian legend he had
already treated during his Neapolitan days but which, in its later shape
took on an unsurpassable element of classical finish.
* * *