Handel (59 page)

April saw the customary Foundling Hospital
Messiah
and a performance on the organ Handel had presented to the chapel. He must also have been at the Decayed Musicians' Benefit Concert that month at the Haymarket, which included such well-known numbers as ‘Father of Heaven' and ‘Return O God of Hosts', but was far more interesting for the reappearance at the King's Theatre, after more than a decade, of a ghost from the Royal Academy days for whom this stage would have held almost intolerably poignant recollections. To the boxes and galleries that once listened enraptured to her Cleopatra and Rodelinda, the ageing and impoverished Francesca Cuzzoni now sang selected numbers from her first major English triumph
Ottone
. The experience of hearing ‘Falsa immagine' sung by the spectral remnants of the voice for which it had been composed some thirty years earlier was as memorable in its way as Giuditta Pasta's comeback in 1850, movingly described by the Victorian critic Henry Chorley, or the disastrous Callas–di Stefano tour in 1974. Burney, intrigued by it all, wrote that ‘her throat was so nearly ossified by age that all the mellifluous qualities which had made it so enchanting were nearly annihilated', though an anonymous note in a copy of Mainwaring says that ‘her voice in 1750, when she was an Old Woman, was equal to that of the angelic Miss Linley [the soprano Elizabeth Linley] in her best days'. Handel did not, as is sometimes stated, give her a part in the
Messiah
concerts. As it was, the wretched Cuzzoni was woefully in debt (on her London visit the previous year her bills had been cleared by the Prince of Wales) and the last we hear of her is at a Hickford's Rooms concert expressly to pay her creditors. She is said to have died in poverty, as a button-moulder, somewhere in Italy.
Sic transit
: ‘silly and fantastical' to the last, she could have done with some practical advice from ‘brown and sensible' Faustina, now the wife of Johann Adolf Hasse, Europe's most successful opera composer.

That summer Handel set off for Cheltenham again, to try the water cure for a second time. The spa, developed by the Manx merchant Captain Skillicorn, was in its infancy, and though there was a smart little well house with adjacent assembly rooms and a theatre, amusements were still markedly rural, including cudgel matches, dancing for gowns, bull-baiting and cockfights. He seems to have lingered there for some time, since on 21 September one of his female acquaintances wrote to another,
‘I hope Mr Handel will not stay all the winter at the Spa, at least hope that he will not neglect Jephtha's Vow.' In fact, he had already returned to London, where he was operated upon by Dr Sharp, surgeon to Guy's Hospital, using the technique known as ‘couching', which involved knocking the lens of the eye backwards. This was the first of three such attempts to arrest his blindness, all of which were doomed to fail. When Sharp suggested that he might gain assistance from Stanley, Handel, with ghastly humour, retorted, ‘Mr Sharp, have you never read the Scriptures? Do you not remember, if the blind lead the blind, they fall into the ditch?' But at any rate he had not forgotten Jephtha's vow, having managed at last to complete the oratorio, which was given its première on the third night of the new season, 26 February 1752.

‘My own favourite' Morell called
Jephtha
in discussing his Handel libretti, and we can easily see why. Undoubtedly his best, it allowed him to develop character in a way that Jennens, far superior as a dramatic poet, would surely not have scorned, besides which the story outline, from the well-known tale in the Book of Judges concerning Jephtha's rash pledge to sacrifice the first living thing he met with after the battle, could easily and convincingly be expanded. Thus the librettist surrounds his protagonist with types who in themselves mirror the unique cultural synthesis which Handelian oratorio embodies. The hero's wife Storge, for example, is one of several hints taken, not from the Bible, but from a Latin tragedy
Jephthes sive Votum
written in 1554 by the Scottish humanist George Buchanan. Her presence in the drama is validated both by such matriarchal ancestors as Erenice in
Sosarme
and Nitocris in
Belshazzar
, and by her affinities with grandly agonized characters like Homer's Andromache or Queen Atossa in Aeschylus's
Persae
. A further debt to Buchanan is the name of Jephtha's daughter Iphis, indicating an obvious parallel with the Greek myth of Iphigenia. As we have already noted, the Achsah–Othniel romance in
Joshua
no doubt laid the ground for her chaste passion for the warrior Hamor, another of Morell's felicitous inventions. They share a world of radiant purity and optimism, which Jephtha himself, with the best of intentions, ironically destroys.

We should not be too critical, however, of Morell's decision to alter the ending in the interests of Baroque taste, or assume that Handel had nothing to do with this.
The appearance of an Angel, ascribing Jephtha's sacrificial pledge to the Holy Spirit and commuting Iphis's death sentence to a species of nun-like religious virginity in an air of meretriciously spanking newfangledness, which already appears in the Foundling Hospital Anthem, is a disappointment only if we expect
Jephtha
to reproduce the authentic gloom of classical tragedy. We should nevertheless recall that none of Handel's music dramas, not even
Tamerlano
,
Saul
or
Hercules
, ends in outright tragedy. Even if the composer himself privately failed to subscribe to the eighteenth-century ethos in this matter (though there is no concrete evidence for this) his audience demanded and nearly always got a happy ending.

Whatever we may think of such a solution, there is no denying the work's superlative aptness as the crown of Handel's unique achievement in music. ‘Swansong' is an inappropriate cliché, since he was not to die for another seven years and we can scarcely believe, in any case, that he must have lacked all hope, as he composed it, of being able subsequently to write another oratorio. Yet the atmosphere of valediction that permeates
Jephtha
's close has an ideal appropriateness. We are saying farewell not to a worn-out old man, but to a young girl who embodies the vivacity and self-renewal of her creator's genius. Added to this, there is a degree of eclecticism which gives the whole piece an emblematic quality both in a purely Handelian context and in terms of the age in which it was written. For while it is the greatest musico-dramatic work of its decade, it is also fascinating in its mixture of references to what is past and what is to come in European music, especially in the choruses, where the classicism of Handel's style is alloyed by a series of quotations from a work published only five years before
Jephtha
itself.

This was the collection of six masses, entitled
Philomela Pia
, by the Bohemian composer Frantisek Habermann, which Handel may have been sent by one of his Continental correspondents – Telemann perhaps – and to which he had already alluded in the organ concerto Opus 7 no. 3 and in Septimius's air ‘From virtue springs' in
Theodora
. Habermann's work is vigorous, cheerfully melodic and very much
au courant
with the latest galant style. We can study Handel's use of this material from his manuscript sketchbooks in the Fitzwilliam Museum and note, as usual, the subtlety with which his writing appropriated and transformed the original. In a chorus like ‘Cherub and Seraphim', for instance, what seems most authentic is the opening string figure,
a series of rising semiquaver patterns over a descending bass, which might easily have come from a page of the
Dixit Dominus
: it is in fact another Habermann quotation, but its Handelian character makes us wonder whether the younger man, who could quite easily have come across the published oratorio scores, had not already absorbed something from the master who now so effectively borrowed from him.

Whatever the condition of his eyesight, Handel was quick to spot other new material for borrowing. When he met up with Christina Passerini and her violinist husband in Holland they may have given him a copy of the serenata
La vittoria d'Imeneo
, recently composed by Baldassare Galuppi for a royal wedding in Turin. A number from this, ‘Cara, se madre', provided the musical framework for the Act I duet in
Jephtha
, ‘These labours past', in which Iphis and Hamor look forward to a happy future together. The striking modernity of idiom in a work by the most versatile and influential composer of the rising generation seems entirely appropriate to a young couple preparing to start out in life together and this, as much as sheer expediency, may have been Handel's reason for folding it into his new oratorio. Galuppi himself had spent two years in London between 1741 and 1743 composing operas for Lord Middlesex. Though he never returned to England, did a score of
Jephtha
ever come his way, and would he have been flattered to identify this theft from his work by a distinguished older contemporary?

Structurally
Jephtha
is scarcely conventional. The whole of the first act and half of the second are carefully weighted towards the excitement of the Israelites asserting their freedom against Ammonite tyranny and towards the happiness of the young lovers. Only Storge, Cassandra-like, marks approaching disaster but is brushed aside, the F minor of her ‘Scenes of horror' clashing with the prevailing major tonalities of the surrounding numbers and allayed besides by Iphis's irrepressible gaiety. This mood is successfully carried over into the rejoicings attending the subsequent victory, thereby brilliantly encapsulating, by means of a head-on clash between the two, the conflict of public duty and private passion, which lies at the core of all Baroque drama. Iphis's music, to an almost sinister degree, underlines her innocence precisely because we know that the story's central irony lies in her disastrous unawareness of her father's promise to God. As she prepares to ‘tune the soft melodious lute', with flute obbligato over pizzicato strings,
our impulse is to warn her not to.

What follows should be essential study for anyone interested in music as a dramatic medium. When Iphis and her maidens dance inexorably forward to a jolly little gavotte, they and their music seem calculated to determine a chain reaction in which one number magnificently sets up the next. Jephtha's breathless and hauntingly inchoate ‘Open thy marble jaws, O tomb' tell us everything about the father's horror at what greets him, as do the close welding of recitative and air (more like arioso) in Storge's appalled remonstrance with her husband and Hamor's ‘On me let blind mistaken zeal', which knocks into being the superb, multi-textured quartet ‘O spare your daughter'. In this piece music works on manifold levels: an insistently chromatic bass supports a three-part string accompaniment independent of the vocal lines, in which Storge, Hamor and Zebul's pleadings are set in rhythmic and melodic contrast against Jephtha's obstinate constancy to his vow.

What moves him most, however, is the unaffectedly simple resignation of his daughter to her fate. His anguish, a kind of nervous breakdown in music, shows Handel as unequalled in his age for the imaginative exploration of what we are nowadays all too ready to dismiss as the ‘dry' or ‘static' medium of recitative. ‘Deeper and deeper still' carries Jephtha not merely through a wide range of emotions but through such an astonishing variety of keys that the customary tonal flexibility of recitative has seldom been more effectively linked to expressiveness.

The chorus, one of Handel's longest, which concludes the act is a world away from the buoyant aggressiveness flourished by the Israelites in the oratorio's opening section. Neither Habermann nor anybody else could have written an extended choral statement of the drama's essential metaphysical dilemma (well summed up in the opening line, ‘How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees! all hid from mortal sight') which so urges upon us a sense of the limitless perspectives of human moral experience in relation to God. Those who accuse Handel of not being ‘profound' in the sense that Bach is apparently so should be made to listen to this chorus and then return, if they can, to so stale a charge. The piece's four sections, beginning with a significant reminiscence of ‘The people shall hear' in
Israel in Egypt
, leading to a gloomy canon, followed in turn by a groping chromatic fugue and concluding with a wearily hopeless iteration of Pope's words ‘Whatever is is right',
are the philosophical essays of a cultivated eighteenth-century mind.

Nowadays among the most highly regarded of all Handel oratorios,
Jephtha
enjoyed a comparative success in its own time. There was, however, only one Covent Garden performance in 1752, with the composer himself directing, as he was to do at the other oratorios and at the Foundling Hospital that year. On 4 November he was couched once more, this time by the Princess of Wales's surgeon William Bromfield, ‘when it was thought there was all imaginable Hopes of Success by the Operation, which must give the greatest Pleasure to all Lovers of Musick'. Mrs Delany, nevertheless, recalling
Samson
, thought ‘how feelingly he must recollect the “
total eclipse
”' and lamented his ‘dark and melancholy circumstances'. On 27 January 1753, after a brief spell of hopes for a positive recovery, one newspaper told its readers that ‘Mr Handel has at length, unhappily, quite lost his sight' and the depressing announcement was shortly followed up with an even more dismal rumour that he was now engaged on his own funeral anthem. The Foundling Hospital governors, touchingly concerned and ‘expressing their surprize thereat,
RESOLVED
That the Secretary do acquaint Mr Handel, That the said Paragraph has given this Committee great Concern; they being highly sensible that all Well-Wishers to this Charity must be desirous for the Continuance of his Life, who has been, and is so good and generous a Benefactor thereto'. Is such solicitude, we may wonder, unique in the annals of music history? Were the administrators of the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice similarly anxious for the asthmatic Antonio Vivaldi? Viewed in its most cynical light, the resolution perhaps simply shows that the Foundling governors knew where their advantage lay. The news was, as it turned out, quite baseless.