Handel (54 page)

The libretto of
Judas
was the first of five written for the composer by the Reverend Thomas Morell, a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, rector of Buckland, Hertfordshire, and as sub-curate of St Anne's, Kew Green, a member of the circle surrounding Queen Caroline, on whose Richmond Grotto he wrote a poem and of whose memorial sermon to her household we have noted him as the preacher. Morell was an accomplished classical scholar, an experienced if not inspired translator, and the friend of Garrick and Hogarth. ‘He was warm in his attachments,' says John Nicholls in his
Anecdotes
, ‘and was a cheerful and entertaining companion. He loved a jest, told a good story, was fond of musick,
and would occasionally indulge his friends with a song. In his exterior appearance, however, he never condescended to study the Graces; and, unfortunately for himself, he was a total stranger to economy.'

He and Handel seem to have got along very well together. For the composer the working relationship was probably easier than his rather more deferential collaborations with Jennens. Morell, more relaxed, more compliant, less self-regarding than his predecessor, and Handel, impatient, peremptory and exacting, are not unlike another celebrated pairing of librettist and composer, Francesco Maria Piave and Giuseppe Verdi. Morell was to recall their partnership somewhat wrily in later years, when he wrote of the difficulties of supplying oratorio text, ‘especially if it be considered, what alterations he must submit to, if the Composer be of an haughty disposition, and has but an imperfect acquaintance with the English language . . . Mr Handell', he goes on,

applied to me, when at Kew . . . in 1746 [
sic
] and added to his request the honour of a recommendation from Prince Frederic. Upon this I thought I could do as well as some that had gone before me, and within 2 or 3 days carried him the first Act of
Judas Maccabaeus
, which he approved of. ‘Well,' says he, ‘and how are you to go on?' ‘Why, we are to suppose an engagement, and that the Israelites have conquered, and so begin with a chorus as

or, something like it.' ‘No, I will have this', and began working it, as it is, upon the Harpsichord. ‘Well, go on.' ‘I will bring you more tomorrow.' ‘No, something now,

that will do', and immediately carried on the composition as we have it in that admirable chorus . . .'

This episode probably took place before the production of
The Occasional Oratorio
since the appearance in that work of the air ‘O Liberty, thou choicest treasure' was subsequently remarked on by the librettist in a footnote to the
Judas
wordbook: ‘the following Air was design'd, and wrote for this Place, but it got I know not how,
into the
Occasional Oratorio
, and was there incomparably Set, and as finely executed.' What may have happened was that
Judas
was originally projected without any obvious reference to current events, but was shelved in favour of the other work, and only given its pronounced air of national triumph and popular rejoicing when the victorious outcome of Cumberland's Scottish campaign became apparent during the spring and summer of 1746. The emphasis in the libretto is on the blessings of peace and freedom as much as on the successful outcome of the conflict. Though the Jacobite rebellion had been crushed, the global struggle with France in the ongoing War of the Austrian Succession, now extended to India and Canada, seemed unlikely to reach a swift conclusion. Politics, as in
The Occasional Oratorio
, reverberates through the text. According to Morell, recently turned out of his Kew curacy and looking perhaps to make money from libretto writing, ‘the plan was designed as a compliment to the Duke of Cumberland, upon his returning victorious from Scotland. I had introduced several incidents more apropos, but it was thought they would make it too long and [they] were therefore omitted. The Duke, however, made me a handsome present.'

Judas Maccabaeus
is the least dramatic of Handel's narrative oratorios. There are no characters (Judas, Simon and Eupolemus are the only named figures) and the chorus is a pious mouthpiece for a range of collective emotions – sadness, reverence, festal joy, martial resolve, steadfast faith. The military actions that form the work's historical background, based on passages from the Apocrypha's first book of Maccabees and the historian Flavius Josephus describing the Jewish struggle against King Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria and the ultimate acceptance of Roman protection, are all reported by messengers. The significant absence of personal relationships is enhanced by the abstract nature of the female roles. Morell's verse is not particularly distinguished, sometimes ungainly, and there are signs in the music, especially in the uncharacteristically rebarbative rhythms and textures of ‘O never, never bow we down' in Act II, that Handel was losing interest in, and patience with, the mood of the text. It is significant that his later additions of ‘Sion now her head shall raise', ‘Wise men flatt'ring' and ‘See the conq'ring hero' have all kept their place in the work, where so many of his other inserted pieces for oratorio revivals have since been cast aside.

Yet why, if
Judas
really is the ‘decline into claptrap' that modern commentators seem to think it,
has its popularity so powerfully endured? The answer surely lies in its very absence of local, individualized drama, a weakness according to some, but the inevitable spring of its occasionally rather coarse appeal to communal sentiment. The serene, unyielding beauty of ‘From mighty kings he took the spoil' and ‘O lovely Peace', reflecting that English melodic temper of which Handel was now the nonchalant master, and the classic sublimity of ‘Father of Heaven' opening the Chanukah celebrations in Act III, win us over paradoxically because they do
not
belong to anybody in particular, because they are universal expressions of happiness, freedom and religious devotion. From a purely artistic aspect, few of the choruses bid fair to rival those in many of the other oratorios. But
Judas
succeeds through this very simplicity. Its ambition is the not unworthy one of distilling those general feelings that bind us all together.

The oratorio, revived, with one exception, each succeeding season until Handel's death, sent its reverberations through his bank accounts (the second of two performances in 1752 brought him the staggering total of £640) and became a dependable money-spinner. Everyone, from Shaftesbury, who noted that it ‘went off with very great Applause', to Lady Luxborough's steward Mr Outing, who ‘speaks with such ecstasy of the music, as I confess I cannot conceive anyone can feel who understands no more of music than myself', was enraptured and Catherine Talbot memorably told Miss Carter: ‘Those oratorios of Handel's are certainly (next to the
hooting of owls
) the most solemnly striking music one can hear.'

Cashing in upon the wave of Handelian enthusiasm the Haymarket opera directors, anxious to curb rising debts, announced a pasticcio,
Lucio Vero
, based on ‘Airs, borrow'd entirely from Mr Handel's favourite Operas . . . The Lovers of Musick among us, whose Ears have been charm'd with Farinello, Faustina, Senesino, Cuzzoni, and other great Performers will now have an Opportunity of Reviving their former Delight . . . Mr Handel is acknowledged (universally) so great a Master of the Lyre; that nothing urg'd in Favour of his Capital Performances, can reasonably be considered as a Puff.' Handel himself seems to have made no objection to such an act of homage from his former rivals and Walsh, a publisher to the bone, issued the favourite songs using his stock of old plates from
Admeto
,
Siroe
and other pieces. Comment is superfluous on the fact that
Lucio Vero
was given every Saturday during the season from 14 November to 26 December, and revived the following January and March. As if this were not enough,
Alessandro
was once more brought on at the opera as
Rossane
during February. Everyone, it seemed, suddenly wanted to hear nothing but Handel.

His 1748 Lenten programme at Covent Garden began fittingly with
Judas Maccabaeus
. Beard had quitted the company, not to return for four years, and was replaced by Thomas Lowe, a popular singer at pleasure gardens, but according to Burney ‘with the finest tenor voice I ever heard in my life, for want of diligence and cultivation, he never could be safely trusted with anything better than a ballad, which he constantly learned by his ear' – shortcomings which made little difference to the sort of music Handel was prepared to give him. Francesina's place as ‘the first woman' (she had not sung in the
Judas
première) was taken more or less permanently by the Haymarket soprano Giulia Frasi, whose clear and agile voice was assisted by a good English accent. She was a flighty and indolent creature: Horace Walpole notes her as the mistress of the MP Sir Thomas Winnington, and Handel was greatly tickled when Burney, briefly her music master, told him of her intention to study thoroughbass. The composer who knew her all too well, simply remarked with his inimitable dryness, ‘What may we not expect?'

She did not, as it turned out, sing in the new oratorio of
Joshua
, given its first performance on 9 March, where the soprano role of Achsah was taken by her fellow King's Theatre star Casarini. Like its predecessor, which in certain points it was obviously intended to follow up,
Joshua
was an instant and continuing success. A typical audience reaction came from the romance writer and
feuilletoniste
Eliza Heywood, who wrote: ‘I closed my Eyes, and imagined myself amidst the angelic Choir in the bright Regions of everlasting Day, chanting the Praises of my great Creator, and his ineffable
Messiah
. I seemed, methought, to have nothing of this gross Earth about me, but was all Soul! – all Spirit!' She was moved enough to suggest that free oratorio performances be given ‘in every City and great Town throughout the Kingdom' with the object of arresting the depravity and irreverence of the age.

Mrs Heywood, however, was unimpressed with Morell's libretto, which she thought ‘not quite so elegant, nor so well as I could have wished adapted to the Music'.
Warfare, liberty and patriotism once more play their part, in this story of Joshua's victories over the Canaanites, among them the siege of Jericho, assisted by divine intervention, but Morell also introduces a love interest between the warrior Othniel and Achsah, daughter of grizzled old Caleb. The pair, foreshadowing the more strongly characterized Hamor and Iphis in
Jephtha
, sometimes seem like some simpering Colin and Kitty from bourgeois Vauxhall pastoral. Othniel is treated to two of Morell's most bathetic lines when in Act I he has to confront an angel with the words ‘Awful, pleasing being, say', and in Act III, volunteering to take the city of Debir in exchange for Achsah's hand he exclaims: ‘Transporting thought! Caleb, the town's thy own.' Achsah herself gets by far the worst of it in an air to the quatrain:

Handel's impatience with all this makes itself clear. Whatever his anxieties as to the state of his bank account or the need to replenish his cellar, he could scarcely do without the inspiration of powerful character and vicissitude upon which to build artistic concepts that would be more than mere sops to the bourgeois piety of his audience. The third act, for instance, illustrates with grim clarity the composer's loss of interest in his material. The choruses, mere noisy flourishes, culminate in thirty-four bars of D major rejoicing, as perfunctory an ending as he had ever composed to any of his works (even the final ensembles of the most routine operas,
Lotario
, say, or
Arianna
, have greater power to engage us). Of the four airs Caleb's ‘Shall I in Mamre's fertile plain' alone has real distinction. Achsah's ‘O had I Jubal's lyre' loses little as a concert piece and, indeed, it has proved popular as a showpiece for warbling divas.

Joshua himself, a cardboard captain along the lines of Judas Maccabaeus, comes into his own in the two truly compelling moments of the work, in which Handel awakes from torpor to produce music whose graphic immediacy in its dramatic use of the chorus looks across the centuries to the ambience of Mussorgsky's
Boris Godunov
or Prokofiev's
Aleksandr Nevsky
(and Handel was well enough regarded in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian musical circles for a direct link to be plausible).
In Act I the hero ushers in a choral picture of the crossing of the Jordan whose declamatory opening, stressing Joshua's role as intermediary with God, contrasts with rich Baroque description of the river standing ‘in wat'ry heaps affrighted' and turning itself backwards. Still better is ‘Glory to God', at the beginning of Act II, whose overwhelming blaze of sound we might well believe to have brought down Jericho's walls. Its deceptively simple start dovetails into the vivid dotted quaver passages portraying the fall of the city, leading in turn to the shatteringly original ‘The nations tremble', with its unforgettable sonorities created by demisemiquaver rushes on the strings and menacing timpani tremolandi, with trumpets and horns rallying urgently across the B minor war clouds, far distant from their traditional celebratory roles.

It was this chorus that made Haydn tell the English composer William Shield that he ‘never knew half its powers before he heard it, and he was perfectly certain that only one inspired author ever did, or ever could, pen so sublime a composition'. He must also have been stirred by the act's uniquely spectacular finale, in which the famous staying in their courses of the sun and moon is re-enacted in music whose effectiveness is created as much by orchestral as by choral means. Joshua, as earlier, sets everything going as the sun climbs to a high A on the first and second violins, reinforced by the moon on third violins and violas and by the entrance of a solo trumpet, and held as a pedal point for twenty-four bars while the chorus, against bustling string patterns, describes the scattered nations flying before it. The accumulated volume of sound dies away as the accompaniment is fragmented with rests and the oboes and brass, marked pianissimo, fall out, leaving the bare strings to articulate a solitary final D.