Handel (56 page)

We return at once to the countryside of
Allegro, Penseroso and Moderato
, and while Susanna and Joachim don the straw hat and leather gaiters of figures in a Gainsborough landscape, the two Elders, unforgettably preposterous in their panting adoration, seem to have wandered in from the pages of
Joseph Andrews
. The quintessential Englishness of everything is brought home to us from almost the very beginning in the sophisticated naïveté with which Handel treats the married idyll of husband and wife in the duet ‘When thou art nigh', whose very rhythms and harmonic simplicity relate it to the world of ballad opera, brought even nearer in the two little songs for Susanna's companion early in Act II, the first of which, ‘Ask if yon damask rose', is the most winsomely simple thing Handel ever composed.

Such a spirit becomes still more marked in the characterization of the two Elders, differentiated with all the shrewdness at Handel's command. The First Elder's music, in his introductory recitative and air ‘When the trumpet sounds to arms', leaves us in no doubt as to how much the composer understood the subliminal eroticism of his text. In the agonized accompagnato shudders of the former and in the latter's mocking glissandos and roulades we hear not so much a parody of nobler heroic passions as a grotesque attack of satyriasis matching the bawdy double entendre of the words. The bass Second Elder, on the other hand, has all the impatient bluster of Polyphemus, a genuine buffo figure embarrassed by his desires, at once fatuous and menacing.

Susanna herself gathers depth and dignity as the work progresses. From its very outset her airs communicate and retain a uniquely exalted beauty, linked on the one hand with graces which, as Handel implies in the limpid semiquaver accompaniment of her bathing song, must surely tempt a saint, let alone an elder, and on the other with the unassuming virtue in which she is finally to triumph. Such unadorned excellence is expressed in the vein of antique solemnity, already established in the overture's quotation from a piece by John Blow, which animates the structure of ‘Bending to the throne of glory', almost like a seventeenth-century instrumental canzona, and the grave wretchedness of ‘If guiltless blood', where the central section,
a hymn of serene resignation, is brusquely interrupted by the Second Elder. Similar qualities colour the longer of the two numbers given to the youthful prophet Daniel: the lines and textures of ‘Chastity, thou cherub bright', using tied crotchets as
points d'appui
, are a study in luminous, unruffled calm anticipating ‘As with rosy steps the morn' in
Theodora
the following year.

If
Susanna
has any flaw it is in the anonymous librettist's approach to the chorus. They inhabit the first two acts solely as a guarantee that what we are hearing is an oratorio in the approved manner. The fact that their opening outburst, a lament of the captive Jews over a Purcellian ground bass, is as fine a piece as anything elsewhere in these late works does little to annul its monumental irrelevance to what follows. Sophistry alone can establish connexions between the central story and an utterance more appropriate to the world of
Judas Maccabaeus
or
Israel in Egypt
. This dichotomy between overall function and individual quality in the choruses is upheld until the close of Act II, when the massed voices are at last drawn into the drama as witnesses of Susanna's supposed apprehension
in flagrante delicto.
Otherwise the magnificent architecture of ‘Righteous heaven', with its four contrasted sections, seems, however excellent in itself, to lay a wholly disproportionate emphasis on the moral implications of the story. The work cannot effectively carry a chorus of such Michelangelesque stature, whereas the primitive rhythmic bite of ‘The cause is decided' at the beginning of Act III is wholly apposite to the air of tension in the court scene.

So awkward a juxtaposition was easily avoided in
Solomon
, written before
Susanna
but brought on after it. Here the chorus is more of a participant than in any of the other dramatic oratorios and thus, though it is not an obvious link in the chain of historical influences through which musicology traces the progress of the art, the work can be said to occupy a singular position in the development of non-liturgical choral writing. From the very beginning, in the eight-part ‘Your harps and cymbals sound', whose meticulous layout, with concertino and ripieno groupings, typifies one of Handel's richest and most imaginative scores, the chorus establishes its primacy. It is, in a sense, the presenter of the vivid and contrasting tableaux of the piece, inset like brilliant fresco panels into the sturdy musculature of a Baroque ceiling.
Its responses firmly govern the succeeding moods: it can take on the guise of a solemn assembly of temple priests, as in the opening modulations of ‘with pious heart and holy tongue', or assume the role, closer to the
Song of Solomon
, of a wedding party hastening bride and bridegroom to bed with the captivating ‘May no rash intruder', in which a pair of flutes over whispering strings become the nightingales who ‘lull them to sleep with their song'. In the final act it provides, using the King himself as a master of ceremonies, an entertainment which is in effect a Cecilian ode celebrating the varying charms of music, from serene harmonies through martial clangour and the anarchies of passion to an emotional calm in the closing analogy to the passing of a storm at sea.

Not that
Solomon
is by any means the type of static chorus and aria sequence represented by a piece such as
Judas Maccabaeus
. The anonymous librettist cleverly shaped his drama around four different aspects of Solomon's kingship, all of them appropriate within the eighteenth-century context. First we see the King as, by inference, head of the Church, in his newly built temple, then as the ardent lover of his Egyptian queen, then as the wise judge in the famous incident of the two harlots wrangling over the child, and finally as the welcoming host to his illustrious foreign guest the Queen of Sheba ‘from Arabia's spicy shores, bounded by the hoary main'. Fittingly the title role is given to a mezzo-soprano, embodying those qualities of youthful positiveness and optimism that emerge in similar castings for high voice elsewhere in the oratorios (Cyrus in
Belshazzar
, for example). Yet Solomon's own music is less memorable than the exuberant numbers given to the tenor Zadok (the priest, indeed) especially the whirring instrumental Catherine wheels of ‘Sacred raptures', the Egyptian Queen's ‘With thee the unshelter'd moor', which has the same graceful cleanness of line as ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth', or the exalted radiance of the Queen of Sheba's ‘Will the sun forget to streak', another of Handel's inimitable evocations of dawning light, worthy to set beside ‘As steals the morn' in
Il Moderato.

For vigour and pathos, however, it is the two harlots who steal the show, and their judgement scene is a perfect example of Handel's accomplished dramaturgy. The child's real mother wins our sympathy at once in her initial F sharp minor plea at the opening of the extraordinary trio ‘Words are weak to paint my fears', couched in rhythms and harmonies reminiscent of the more poignant moments of the
Brockes Passion
;
the false claimant bursts in with skipping A major quavers, ‘False is all her melting tale', and the King himself establishes an E major balance through Handel's punning treatment of ‘Justice holds the lifted scale', before the pair fall away to leave the first voice in its plaintive solitude. Restlessly, in suitably meretricious modern vein, the second harlot flatters the monarch's wisdom, but her rival, by piercing to the heart of true parental anguish in the despairing phrases of ‘Can I see my infant gored', whose eleven-bar closing adagio reduces her to a figure of noble abjection, conquers and earns her right to join Solomon in a final duet.

Both trio and duet bear witness to Handel's interest in the potential of ensemble, something Baroque lyric drama, with its focus on solistic glamour, tended understandably to shy away from, but which he had already begun to develop in middle-period operas such as
Partenope
and
Orlando.
The mature oratorios feature several outstanding examples, such as
Semele
's quartet in Act I, and the confrontation between Susanna and the two Elders, in which, as with the
Solomon
trio, the rhythmic patterns of the several lines are carefully adjusted to the character and intentions of the protagonists.

Susanna
enjoyed a modest success at its first performances, and several individual numbers in
Solomon
, such as ‘With thee the unshelter'd moor', became popular favourites. At the season's close, with a
Messiah
performance (the first since 1743) on 23 March, Handel turned to an altogether different project in the composition of what has since become one of his best-known works, the
Music for the Royal Fireworks
, designed to be given as ‘a grand Overture of Warlike Instruments' to the opulent pyrotechnical display in the Green Park to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, signed with France the previous October.

The War of the Austrian Succession had degenerated into aimless attrition, with neither side seeing much more advantage in sustaining an expensive and desultory international conflict. If victory festivities were not in order, and if George II's motives as Elector of Hanover in pursuing the war to preserve his German domains were all too readily appreciated, he could at least now be hailed as the bringer of harmony. As such, in effigy at least, he formed the centrepiece of the amazing confection specially constructed for the open-air spectacle on 27 April 1749.

Its architect was the Florentine Giovanni Nicola Servandoni,
scenic artist to the French court (his services in London were perhaps a generous gesture by Louis XV) and best known today as the creator of the grandiose church of St Sulpice in Paris. The ‘Machine', as it was called, stood at the bottom of the park and represented ‘a magnificent
Doric
Temple, from which extend two Wings terminated by Pavilions . . . adorned with Frets, Gilding, Lustres, Artificial Flowers, Inscriptions, Statues, Allegorical Pictures &c' together with Latin inscriptions and twenty-three figures by Andrea Casali, an Italian statuary and painter much in favour with young English patrons of the rococo style. The descriptions only make its essentially ephemeral nature more regrettable, particularly when we read that Servandoni and his Bolognese assistants Gaetano Ruggieri and Giuseppe Sarti had devised a special firework trick whereby eighteen pictures suddenly appeared as ‘Marble Basso Relievos' then changed colour by means of ‘a great Number of Lampions' to culminate in the image of the King giving peace to Britannia, Neptune and Mars.

Handel's instrumental suite of overture and dances was to open the programme, but its rehearsals were not without their difficulties. The whole show was managed by Charles Frederick, ‘Comptroller of his Majesty's Fireworks as well for War as for Triumph', and Captain Thomas Desaguliers, Chief Fire Master of the Royal Laboratory. A letter to the former from the Duke of Montague, Master of the Ordnance, anxiously pondered the composer's orchestral forces. Uncharacteristically, the King had jibbed at there being any music, but ‘when I told him the quantity and nomber of martial musick . . . he was better satisfied, and said he hoped there would be no fidles'. Handel, however, had suddenly decided to cut down the number of trumpets and horns from sixteen to twelve apiece and to introduce ‘violeens', something Montague was sure would put George out of humour. ‘I am shure it behoves Hendel to have as many trumpets, and other martial instruments as possible, tho he dont retrench the violins, which I think he shoud, tho I beleeve he will never be persuaded to do so.' We can sympathize with the Duke in having to act as intermediary between two such intransigent characters as the sovereign and the composer.

Further problems were being created by Handel's unwillingness to release the music for a public rehearsal at Vauxhall Gardens, where Jonathan Tyers had offered to lend his illuminations and servants to manage them for the Green Park fête.
Montague, exasperated at Handel's apparently ‘absolute determination' on the point, told Frederick: ‘If he wont let us have his overture we must get an other, and I think it would be proper to inclose my letter to you in your letter to him, that he may know my centiments; but don't say I bid you send it to him.' This was a covering note to a longer letter written on the same day, in which the Duke artfully stressed the King's interest in the whole matter, implying that Handel's consent would best show his duty to his sovereign. The ruse was successful, and after a shuffling of rehearsal dates owing to wet weather and a desire to accommodate the Duke of Cumberland, the music was played to ‘the brightest and most numerous Assembly', though the
General Advertiser
noted that ‘several Footmen who attended their Masters, &c thither, behaved very sausily, and were justly corrected by the Gentlemen for their Insolence'.

Five days later off it all went at the showery close of a hot April day, the salute of 101 brass ordnance, the Girandole and Caduceus rockets, the mortars with ‘Air Ballons', the ‘Magnificent Jet
de Feu
of forty Feet High', the 141 large fountains, the explosions of serpents, rain and stars, the Tourbillons, Pots de Brins and ‘Marrons in Battery'. John Byrom, witty bard of ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee' Handel versus Bononcini, sat down under a tree stump to write a line to his wife. ‘It has been a very hot day, but there is a dark overcast of cloudiness which may possibly turn to rain, which occasions some of better habits to think of retiring; and while I am now writing it spits a little . . . 11 o'clock: all over, and somewhat in a hurry, by an accidental fire at one of the ends of the building, which, whether it be extinguished I know not, for I left it in an ambiguous condition that I might finish my letter, which otherwise I could not have done.' He was better off, he considered, in the park with ‘the mobility' than in the official stands, where privy councillors had been issued with twelve seats and peers got four. During the fire Servandoni quarrelled with Charles Frederick and drew his sword on him, and was only released from custody the following day after he had asked pardon in the Duke of Cumberland's presence.