he was not yet completely blind. In 1752 he was unable to play the organ
at the productions of his oratorios, and the public, moved by sympathy,
saw him tremble and blanch in listening to the admirable complaint of
his blind Samson. But in 1753, when the evil was incurable, Handel
regained his self-possession. He played the organ again at the twelve
performances of oratorios which he gave each year in Lent, and he kept
up this custom until his death.
But with his vanished sight he had lost the best source of his
inspiration. This man, who was neither an intellectual nor a mystic, one
who loved above all things light and nature, beautiful pictures, and the
spectacular view of things, who lived more through his eyes than most of
the German musicians, was engulfed in deepest night. From 1752 to 1759
he was overtaken by the semi-consciousness which precedes death. He only
wrote in 1758 a duet and chorus for _Judas Maccabaeus_, "Zion now her
head shall raise," and reviving in that the happy times of other days he
took up a work of his youth, the _Trionfo del Tempo_,[272] which he now
gave in a new version in March, 1757: _The Triumph of Time and
Truth_.[273]
[Illustration: HANDEL'S MONUMENT IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
(_In the "Poets' Corner."_)]
On April 6, 1759, he again took the organ at a production of _The
Messiah_. His powers failed him in the middle of a movement. He soon
recovered himself and improvised (it is said) with his habitual
grandeur. Returned home he took to bed. On April 11 he added a last
codicil to his will,[274] bequeathing munificently L1000 sterling to
the Society for the Maintenance of Poor Musicians, and expressing, with
tranquillity, his desire of being buried in Westminster Abbey. He said:
"I want to die on Good Friday in the hope of rejoining the good God, my
sweet Lord and Saviour, on the day of his Resurrection." His wish was
accomplished. On Holy Saturday, April 14, at eight in the morning, the
sweet singer of _The Messiah_ slept with his Lord.
* * * * *
His glory spread after his death. On April 20 he was interred in
Westminster Abbey, as he had requested.[275] The annual performances of
his oratorios continued in Lent under the direction of his friend,
Christopher Smith. Popular performances of them were soon given. The
great festival of his Commemoration celebrated at Westminster Abbey and
in the Pantheon, from May 26 to June 5, 1784, for the centenary of his
birth,[276] was observed all over Europe. New festivals took place in
London in 1785, 1786, 1787, 1790, and 1791. On the last occasion more
than a thousand executants[277] took part. Haydn was present, and he
said, through his tears, "He is master of us all."
The English performances attracted the attention of Germany. Two years
after the Commemoration, Johann Adam Hiller produced _The Messiah_ in
the Cathedral Church at Berlin, then at Leipzig, and then at Breslau.
Three years later, in 1789, Mozart made his arrangements of _The
Messiah_, of _Acis and Galatea_, of the _Ode to St. Cecilia_, and of
_Alexander's Feast_.[278] The first complete edition of Handel was
commenced in 1786. A strong feeling of emulation made itself felt in
Germany to imitate the English festivals, and to restore choral singing,
and to found the _Singakademien_ for the preservation of the national
glories.[279] The rendering of Handel's oratorios inspired Haydn to
write _The Creation_. Beethoven at the end of his life said of Handel:
"See there is the truth."[280] Poets also vied equally in rendering him
homage. Goethe admired him, and Herder devoted a chapter to him in his
_Adrastea_ of 1802. The wars of Independence gave an access of favour to
the oratorio of freedom, to _Judas Maccabaeus_.
With romanticism the feeling for the genius of Handel was lost. Berlioz,
who, if he had but known him truly, and had found a model for that grand
popular style which he sought, never understood him. Of all other
musicians, those who approached to the spirit of Handel nearest were
Schumann and Liszt,[281] but they were exceptional in the lucidity of
their perception, and their generous sympathies. It might be said that
Handel's art, distorted by the editions and false renderings--quite as
much those in Germany as the ridiculously colossal representations in
England--would have been completely lost except for the foundation in
1856 of the Handel Society, which devoted itself to the object of
publishing an exact and complete edition of the works of the master.
Gervinus was the promoter and Friedrich Chrysander alone accomplished
the task. It did not aim at being a critical edition of his works. His
ardent apostle sought simply to revive them in their pristine
force.[282] He was seconded by the choral societies of north Germany,
particularly by the Berlin _Singakademien_, which from 1830 to 1860
never ceased to perform all the oratorios of Handel. On the contrary,
Austria remained a long way behind. In 1873, Brahms conducted the first
production of _Saul_ in Vienna, but the veritable awakening of Handel's
art in Germany only dates back about half a score years. One recognized
his grandeur, and did not doubt that he had lived. It was chiefly (so it
seems) at the first Handel Festival of Mayence in 1895, where _Hercules
and Deborah_ were given, that his astounding dramatic genius was first
truly felt there.
To us in France we still await the full revelation of the living scenes
of this great and luminous tragic art, so akin to the aims of Ancient
Greece.[283]
HIS TECHNIQUE AND WORKS
No great musician is more impossible to include in the limits of one
definition, or even of several, than Handel. It is a fact that he
reached the complete mastery of his style very early (much earlier than
J. S. Bach), although it was never really fixed, and he never devoted
himself to any one form of art. It is even difficult to see a conscious
and a logical evolution in him. His genius is not of the kind which
follows a single path, and forges right ahead until it reaches its
object. For his aim is none other than to do well whatever he undertook.
All ways are good to him--from his early steps at the crossing of the
ways, he dominated the country, and shed his light on all sides, without
laying siege to any particular part. He is not one of those who impose
on life and art a voluntary idealism, either violent or patient; nor is
he one of those who inscribe in the book of life the formula of their
campaign. He is of the kind who drink in the life universal,
assimilating it to themselves. His artistic will is mainly objective.
His genius adapts itself to a thousand images of passing events, to the
nation, to the times in which he lived, even to the fashions of his day.
It accommodates itself to the various influences, ignoring all
obstacles. It weighs other styles and other thoughts, but such is the
power of assimilation and the prevailing equilibrium of his nature that
he never feels submerged and overweighted by the mass of these strange
elements. Everything is duly absorbed, controlled, and classified. This
immense soul is like the sea itself, into which all the rivers of the
world pour themselves without troubling its serenity.
The German geniuses have often had this power of absorbing thoughts and
strange forms,[284] but it is excessively rare to find amongst them the
grand objectivism, and this superior impersonality, which is, so to
speak, the hall-mark of Handel. Their sentimental lyricism is better
fitted to sing songs, to voice the thoughts of the universe in song,
than to paint the universe in living forms and vital rhythms. Handel is
very different, and approaches much more nearly than any other in
Germany the genius of the South, the Homeric genius of which Goethe
received the sudden revelation on his arrival at Naples.[285] This
capacious mind looks out on the whole universe, and on the way the
universe depicts itself, as a picture is reflected in calm and clear
water. He owes much of this objectivism to Italy, where he spent many
years, and the fascination of which never effaced itself from his mind,
and he owes even more to that, sturdy England, which guards its emotions
with so tight a rein, and which eschews those sentimental and
effervescing effusions, so often displayed in the pious German art; but
that he had all the germs of his art in himself, is already shown in his
early works at Hamburg.
From his infancy at Halle, Zachau had trained him not in one style, but
in all the styles of the different nations, leading him to understand
not only the spirit of each great composer, but to assimilate the styles
by writing in various manners. This education, essentially cosmopolitan,
was completed by his three tours in Italy, and his sojourn of half a
century in England. Above all he never ceased to follow up the lessons
learnt at Halle, always appropriating to himself the best from all
artists and their works. If he was never in France (it is not absolutely
proved), he knew her nevertheless. He was anxious to master their
language and musical style. We have proofs of that in his
manuscripts,[286] and in the accusations made against him by certain
French critics.[287] Wherever he passed, he gathered some musical
souvenir, buying and collecting foreign works, copying them, or rather
(for he had not the careful patience of J. S. Bach, who scrupulously
wrote out in his own hand the entire scores of the French organists and
the Italian violinists) copying down in hasty and often inexact
expressions any idea which struck him in the course of his reading. This
vast collection of European thoughts, which only remains in remnants at
the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, was the reservoir, so to speak,
from which his creative genius continually fed itself. Profoundly German
in race and character, he had become a world citizen, like his
compatriot Leibnitz, whom he had known at Hanover, a European with a
tendency for the Latin culture. The great Germans at the end of that
century, Goethe and Herder, were never more free, or more universal,
than this great Saxon in music, saturated as he was with all the
artistic thoughts of the West.
He drew not only from the sources of learned and refined music--the
music of musicians; but also drank deeply from the founts of popular
music--that of the most simple and rustic folk.[288] He loved the
latter. One finds noted down in his manuscripts the street cries of
London, and he once told a friend that he received many inspirations for
his best airs from them.[289] Certain of his oratorios, like _L'Allegro
ed Il Penseroso_, are threaded with remembrances of his walks in the
English country, and who can ignore the _Pifferari_ (Italian peasant's
pipe) in _The Messiah_, the Flemish carillon in _Saul_, the joyous
popular Italian songs in _Hercules_, and in _Alexander Balus_? Handel
was not an artist lost in introspection. He watched all around him, he
listened, and observed. Sight was for him a source of inspiration,
hardly of less importance than hearing. I do not know any great German
musician who has been as much a visual as Handel. Like Hasse and
Corelli, he had a veritable passion for beautiful pictures. He hardly
ever went out without going to a theatre or to a picture sale. He was a
connoisseur, and he made a collection, in which some Rembrandts[290]
were found after his death. It has been remarked that his blindness
(which should have rendered his hearing still more sensitive, his
creative powers translating everything into sonorous dreams) soon
paralysed his hearing when its principal source of renewal was
withdrawn.
Thus, saturated in all the European music of his time, impregnated with
the music of musicians, and the still richer music which flows in all
Nature herself, which is specially diffused in the vibrations of light
and shade, that song of the rivers, of the forest, of the birds, in
which all his works abound, and which have inspired some of his most
picturesque pages with a semi-romantic colour,[291] he wrote as one
speaks, he composed as one breathes. He never sketched out on paper in
order to prepare his definite work. He wrote straight off as he
improvised, and in truth he seems to have been the greatest improviser
that ever was. Whether extemporising on the organ at the midday services
in St. Paul's Cathedral, or playing the _capriccios_ during the
_entr'actes_ of his oratorios at Covent Garden--or improvising on the
clavier in the orchestra at the opera, at Hamburg or in London, or "when
he accompanied the singers in a most marvellous fashion, adapting
himself to their temperament and virtuosity, without having any written
notes," he astounded the connoisseurs of his time; and Mattheson, who
may hardly be suspected of any indulgence towards him, proclaimed that
he had no equal in this. One can truly say that "he improvised every
minute of his life." He wrote his music with such an impetuosity of
feeling, and such a wealth of ideas, that his hand was constantly
lagging behind his thoughts, and in order to keep pace with them at all
he had to note them down in an abbreviated manner.[292] But (and this
seems contradictory) he had at the same time an exquisite sense of form.
No German surpassed him in the art of writing beautiful, melodic lines.
Mozart and Hasse alone were his equals in this. It was to this love of
perfection that we attribute that habit which, despite his fertility of
invention, causes him to use time after time, the same phrases (those
most important, and dearest to him) each time introducing an
imperceptible change, a light stroke of the pencil, which renders them
more perfect. The examination of these kinds of musical _eaux-fortes_ in
their successive states is very instructive for the musician who is
interested in plastic beauty.[293] It shows also how certain melodies,
once written down, continued to slumber in Handel's mind for many years,
until they had penetrated his subconscious nature, were applied at
first, by following the chances of his inspiration, to a certain
situation, which suited them moderately well. They are, so to speak, in
search of a body where they can reincarnate themselves, seeking the true
situation, the real sentiment of which they are but the latent
expression; and once having found it, they expand themselves with
ease.[294]
Handel worked no less with the music of other composers than with his
own. If one had the time to study here what superficial readers have
called his plagiarisms, particularly taking, for example, _Israel in
Egypt_, where the most barefaced of these cases occur, one would see
with what genius and insight Handel has evoked from the very depths of
these musical phrases, their secret soul, of which the first creators
had not even a presentiment. It needed his eye, or his ear, to discover
in the serenade of Stradella its Biblical cataclysms. Each read and
heard a work of art as it is, and yet not as it is; and one may conclude
that it is not always the creator himself who has the most fertile idea
of it. The example of Handel well proves this. Not only did he create
music, but very often he created that of others for them. Stradella and
Erba were only for him (however humiliating the comparison) the flames
of fire, and the cracks in the wall, through which Leonardo saw the
living figures. Handel heard great storms passing through the gentle
quivering of Stradella's guitar.[295]
This evocatory character of Handel's genius should never be forgotten.
He who is satisfied with listening to this music without _seeing_ what
it expresses--who judges this art as a purely formal art, who does not
feel his expressive and suggestive power, occasionally so far as
hallucination, will never understand it. It is a music which paints
emotions, souls, and situations, to see the epochs and the places, which
are the framework of the emotions, and which tint them with their own
peculiar moral tone. In a word, his is an art essentially picturesque
and dramatic. It is scarcely twenty to thirty years since the key to it
was found in Germany, thanks to the Handel Musical Festivals. As Heuss
says, concerning a recent performance at Leipzig, "For a proper
comprehension no master more than Handel has greater need of being
performed, and _well_ performed. One can study J. S. Bach at home, and
enjoy it even more than at a good concert, but he who has never heard
Handel well performed can with difficulty imagine what he really is, for
really good performances of Handel are excessively rare." The intimate
sense of his works was falsified in the century which followed his death
by the English interpretations, strengthened further still in Germany by
those of Mendelssohn, and his numerous following. By the exclusion of
and systematic contempt for all the operas of Handel, by an elimination
of nearly all the dramatic oratorios, the most powerful and the
freshest, by a narrow choice more and more restrained to the four or
five oratorios, and even here, by giving an exaggerated supremacy to
_The Messiah_, by the interpretation finally of these works, and notably
of _The Messiah_ in a pompous, rigid, and stolid manner, with an
orchestra and choir far too numerous and badly balanced, with singers
frightfully correct and pious, without any feeling or intimacy, there
has been established that tradition which makes Handel a church
musician after the style of Louis XIV, all decoration--pompous columns,
noble and cold statues, and pictures by Le Brun. It is not surprising
that this has reduced works executed on such principles, and degraded
them to a monumental tiresomeness similar to that which emanates from
the bewigged Alexanders, and the very conventional Christs of Le Brun.
It is necessary to turn back. Handel was never a church musician, and he
hardly ever wrote for the church. Apart from his _Psalms_ and his _Te
Deum_, composed for the private chapels, and for exceptional events, he
only wrote instrumental music for concerts and for open-air _fetes_, for
operas, and for those so-called oratorios, which were really written for
the theatre. The first oratorios he composed were really acted: _Acis
and Galatea_ in May, 1732, at the Haymarket Theatre, with scenery,
decoration, and costumes, under the title of _English Pastoral
Opera--Esther_, in February, 1732, at the Academy of Ancient Music after
the manner of the Grecian tragedy, the chorus being placed behind the
stage and the orchestra. And if Handel resolutely abstained from
theatrical representation[296]--which alone gives the full value to
certain scenes, such as the orgie and the dream of Belshazzar, expressly
conceived for acting--on the other hand he stood out firmly for having
his oratorios at the theatre and not in the church. There were not
wanting churches any less than dissenting chapels in which he could give
his works, and by not doing so he turned against him the opinion of
religious people who considered it sacrilegious to carry pious subjects
on to the stage,[297] but he continued to affirm that he did not write
compositions for the church, but worked for the theatre--a free
theatre.[298]
This briefly dramatic character of Handel's works has been well
comprehended by the German historians who have studied him during recent
times. Chrysander compares him to Shakespeare,[299] Kretzschmar calls
him the reformer of musical drama, Volbach and A. Heuss see in him a
dramatic musician, and claim for the performance of his oratorios
dramatic singers. Richard Strauss, in his introduction to Berlioz's
_Treatise of Orchestration_, opposes the great polyphonic and symphonic
stream issuing from J. S. Bach with that homophonic and dramatic one
which comes from Handel. We hope that the readers of this little book
have found here in nearly all these pages a confirmation of these ideas.
* * * * *
It remains for us, after having attempted to indicate the general
characteristics of Handel's art, to sketch the technique of the
different styles in which he worked.
To speak truly, it is difficult to speak of the opera or of the oratorio
of Handel. It is necessary to say: _of the operas or of the oratorios_,
for we do not find that they point back to any single type. We can
verify here what we said at the commencement of this chapter, about the
magnificent vitality of Handel in choosing amongst his art forms the
different directions of the music of his times.
All the European tendencies at that time are reflected in his operas:
the model of Keiser in his early works, the Venetian model in his
_Agrippina_, the model of Scarlatti and Steffani in his first early
operas; in the London works he soon introduces English influences,
particularly in the rhythms. Then it was Bononcini whom he rivalled.
Again, those great attempts of genius to create a new musical drama,
_Giulio Cesare_, _Tamerlano_, _Orlando_; later on, those charming
ballet-operas inspired by France, _Ariodante_, _Alcina_; later still,
those operas which point towards the _opera comique_ and the light style
of the second half of the century, _Serse Deidamia_.... Handel continued
to try every other style, without making any permanent choice as did
Gluck, with whom alone he can be compared.
Without doubt (and it is his greatest fault in the theatre) he was
constrained by the conventions of the Italian Opera at tunes and by the
composition of his troupe of singers to overlook his choruses, and to
write operas for solo voices, of which the principal _roles_ were cast
for the Prima Donna and for the contralto,[300] but whenever he could,
he wrote his operas with choruses, like _Ariodante_, _Alcina_, and he
only owed it to himself that he did not give to the tenor or to the bass
their place in the concert of voices.[301] If it was not possible to
break the uniformity of the solo voices by the addition of choruses,
still he enlivened these solos by the flexibility and the variety of his
instrumental accompaniments. Such of his most celebrated airs, as the
Garden scene in _Rinaldo_, "_Augelletti che cantate_," are only in truth
an orchestral tone picture. The voice mingles itself only as an
instrument,[302] and with what art Handel always decides his melodies in
disengaging the beautiful lines, drawing all the parts possible in pure
tone colours from single instruments, and from the voice isolated,--then
united,--and what of his silences!
The appeal of his melodies is much more varied than one usually
believes. If the _Da Capo_ form abounds in his works,[303] it is
necessary to admit that it was practically the only one of that period.
In _Almira_, Handel uses the form of a little strophic song, very
happily. For this, Keiser supplied him with models, and he never
renounces the use of these little melodies, so simple and touching,
almost bare, which speak direct to the soul. He seems to return to them
even with special predilection in his last operas, _Atalanta_,
_Giustina_, _Serse_, _Deidamia_.[304] He gives also to Hasse and to
Graun the model of his six cavatinas, airs in two parts,[305] which they
later on brought into prominence. We find his dramatic airs also have
the second part and the repeat.[306]