Handel (64 page)

The sea change in Handel's operatic fortunes seems to have taken place in the wake of the very same tercentennial mentioned above. A shift in sensibility not easily explicable in purely musical terms, but certainly encouraged by the pervasive impact of vocal and instrumental styles and sonorities which owed little to traditional formation in the context of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century opera repertoire, succeeded in returning works like
Serse
,
Rodelinda
and
Agrippina
to a theatrical mainstream. At the same time attention turned to the oratorios and it became possible to hear such unfamiliar pieces as
Deborah
,
The Occasional Oratorio
and
Alexander Balus
in professional performances which made a convincing case for each of them. New audiences were found, meanwhile, for
L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato
through its incarnation as an enchantingly lyrical and humorous ballet devised by the American choreographer Mark Morris. Most remarkable of all was the rediscovery, in the unlikely context of the 1995 opera season at Glyndebourne, of that Cinderella among Handel oratorios
Theodora
. Not everyone liked Peter Sellars's drastic rethink of the work as a modern political drama, whose penultimate scene involved the heroine and her Didymus singing ‘Streams of pleasure' on their way to the electric chair, but the impact on Glyndebourne audiences of the music's sombre beauty suggested that the time had come at last for both
Theodora
and,
in a broader and more meaningful sense, for Handel himself.

Other works had benefited from this sudden receptivity to the composer's unique voice. Even if the idea of a 1707 ‘Carmelite Vespers' was subsequently shown to have been an ignis fatuus, it served to remind us that behind the shock and awe of
Dixit Dominus
lie comparable riches among Handel's Italian church music and early oratorios. Their lineal descendant
Messiah
had been memorably revitalized, almost as if in answer to Bernard Shaw's rage against the ‘multitudinous dullness' of traditional interpretations, in the 1966 recording by Charles Mackerras (whose earlier performance of the
Fireworks Music
using the original wind and brass specifications had already achieved classic status). Using carefully reduced choral and orchestral forces, as well as several unfamiliar textual variants, the recording revealed the sinew, momentum and resourcefulness at the heart of the oratorio. A similar experience was vouchsafed by Christopher Hogwood in his 1980 reconstruction of the 1754 Foundling Hospital performance, presenting us with something which at times sounded almost like a newly discovered work.

That there can never be any such thing as a canonical
Messiah
text embodies what many writers on music, and even more who listen to it, identify as a quintessential problem regarding Handel, that of his elusiveness. The modern biographer, expected to lay bare every detail of an artist's private life and its bearing on his work, meets a continued challenge in a man whose intimate friends were few in number and left no personal records of him beyond a handful of anecdotes. As a composer Handel was unorthodox, both in certain of his working methods and practices, and in the pursuit of his professional goals. The inevitable comparison between him and Johann Sebastian Bach, his exact contemporary, has traditionally been to the advantage of the latter, represented as a semi-divine embodiment of the perfect musician, imbued with a spiritual profundity in which Handel, according to the same invidious parallel, falls short. Setting aside the doubtful value of such a contrast between two artists so widely different in character, experience and musical discourse, we have the right to ask those who seek to belittle Handel in this way how much of his work they actually know. To Theodor Adorno's dictum, more obtuse than lapidary, that ‘Handel is not Bach',
the retort should be ‘Precisely'. He is not a writer for the textbook, a fount of flawless technical example, or in any sense an ideal musical visionary, intellectual and artisan, like the kapellmeister of the Leipzig Thomaskirche. Matthew Arnold's famous sonnet on Shakespeare begins with the line ‘Others abide our question: thou art free' and the same applies to Handel, in his untrammelled universality the most Shakespearian of composers. Canny, venturesome, competitive and more than a little unscrupulous, he was the first great musician to harness shrewd entrepreneurship to the public promotion of his work. One modern Handel scholar indeed calls him ‘an active opportunist who ignored or denied the affiliations of his birth and upbringing in order to advance his career and find an outlet commensurate with his talent'.

Does this hucksterish, almost low-life quality diminish his artistic stature? No more, surely, than his studied distance from what was going on around him in the European musical culture of his day. Always ready to borrow material from younger composers when it suited him, he never felt the need for a complete stylistic makeover in order to blend in with them. A marginal figure in the historical development of opera, Handel might be considered more significant as a writer of oratorio, essentially creating the English form of the genre, yet even here he neither set a fashion nor established a school. As for his approach to instrumental composition, with the obvious exception of Opus 6 this seems more often governed by expediency and the force of circumstance than by any interest in creating a benchmark for other masters in the field through the publication of carefully prepared sets of concertos and suites. Nurtured by a variety of different traditions, he managed to remain semi-detached from them, never wholeheartedly espousing a German, French, Italian or English musical idiom but nonchalantly fluent in each, as he was in the respective languages they accompanied.

Unable to pigeonhole Handel satisfactorily, critical musicology has seldom found it easy to explain the way his music works or its power to convince and inspire us with the help of what are sometimes the very simplest of gestures and resources. Performers, in this respect, are often more articulate than critics in identifying his command of effect, whether as an inexhaustible melodist, an absolute master of vocal writing or a dramatist whose grasp of character, situation and emotional predicament never fails.
Epic and painterly, his gift for narrative is as potent in works like
Messiah
or
Alexander's Feast
as in the grand episodic sequences of
Saul
,
Belshazzar
and
Jephtha
. He is passionately absorbed with who we are and how we stand in relation to one another or to the powers we worship, heavenly and earthly. From the humane wisdom of this perspective springs that warmth and immediacy of personal engagement with which Handel binds audiences to him. His music gives us a reason for existence.

Notes

Unless otherwise indicated,
full details of works cited are included in the
bibliography.

1
The Liberal Arts

1     
Georg Händel medical practitioner
Friedlaender: ‘Einiger archivalische Nachrichten über Georg Friedr. Händel und Seine Familie'

Rudloff's operation
details and illustration in Dreyhaupt:
Pagus Neletici et Nudzici

2     
Georg Händel's career
J.O. Opel:
Mitteilungen zur Geschichte der Familie des Tonkünstlers Handel
&c, from
Neue Mitteilungen aus dem Gebiete historisch-antiquarischer Forschungen
, Halle, 1885

3     
She always took pains
Piechocki: ‘Die Familie Handel'

4     
From his very childhood
Mainwaring p. 2

5     
Halle
details from Günter Thomas: ‘Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow'

6     
Gymnasium curriculum
Cambridge Companion to Handel
p. 13

7     
Handel's journey to Weissenfels
Mainwaring op. cit. pp.2–3

9     
Mourning poem
quoted in Deutsch pp. 6–7

Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow
Thomas op. cit. See also Bernd Baselt: ‘Handel and his Central German Background' in Hicks & Sadie eds.
Handel Tercentenary Collection
pp. 43–60

10   
Handel as cathedral organist
Deutsch p. 9

11   
Handel and the King of Prussia
Mainwaring pp. 22–23

12   
Addison on Hamburg
Letters ed. Graham, 1941 p. 146

Hamburg opera
Wolff:
Die Barockoper in Hamburg

14   
Johann Mattheson
Beekman C. Cannon:
Johann Mattheson, Spectator in Music
. See also Deutsch op. cit. p. 14

16   
Handel to Mattheson
Deutsch pp. 11–12

20   
How is a musician
ibid p. 16

22   
Ferdinando de' Medici
Mario Fabbri:
Alessandro Scarlatti e il Principe Ferdinando de' Medici
, Florence, 1961 pp. 19–21, 31

25   
Scarlatti on Corelli
Burney:
A General History of Music vol. 2
p. 443

28   
Moral cantatas
Carolyn Gianturco: ‘Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno'

Cardinal Pamphilj
Lina Montalto:
Un Mecenate in Roma barrocca

30   
Ruspoli
Ursula Kirkendale: ‘The Ruspoli Documents on Handel'

33   
Handel, Durastanti and Ruspoli
Ursula Kirkendale: ‘Handel with Ruspoli' p. 304–6

Diana cacciatrice
ibid p. 310

Handel and Ruspoli at Civitavecchia
ibid p. 312

34   
Summer at Vignanello
ibid p. 321–22

37   
Handel and Vittoria
Mainwaring p. 50

Handel and Scarlatti in Venice
Mainwaring pp. 51–52

Rodrigo
J. Merrill Knapp: ‘Handel's First Italian Opera',
M & L
, January 1981

38   
Partenope
Robert Freeman: ‘The Travels of Partenope',
Studies in Music History
, Princeton 1968

43   
Pamphilj's flattery
Dean: ‘Charles Jennens's Marginalia to Mainwaring's Life of Handel'. The text of ‘Hendel, non pu`o mia musa' is printed in Deutsch pp. 24–25

44   
Parade outside Palazzo Bonelli
Piazza's painting is reproduced in Kirkendale: ‘Handel with Ruspoli' op. cit. pp. 340–1

46   
Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo
Details from Venice, Archivio di Stato, Giudizi di Petizion, Inventari, busta 411

The audience was so enchanted
Mainwaring p. 46

48   
Death of Grimani
Details in Marcus Landau:
Rom, Wien, Neapel, während des spanischen Erfolgekrieges

50.   
Handel and the Roman cardinals
Mainwaring pp. 64–66

Georg Ludwig
For a balanced modern view, see Ragnhild Hatton:
George I, Elector and King

52   
Such an acquaintance
Mainwaring pp. 70

54   
Her extreme old age
ibid pp. 73–74

56.   
Addison on Italian theatre poets
‘Remarks on Several Parts of Italy' in
Miscellaneous Works
, ed. Guthkelch.

57   
Popery in wit
Epilogue to Steele's ‘The Tender Husband', 1705

58   
Aaron Hill
Dorothy Brewster:
Aaron Hill

59   
The nobility and gentry
R.O. Bucholz:
The Augustan Court
, p. 218

61   
While composing the music
Deutsch p. 33   
Steele on Nicolino ‘
Tatler' 113

62   
‘Spectator' papers on
Rinaldo
6 March, 1711 (Addison) 16 March, 1711 (Steele)

64   
Johann Wilhelm to Sophia
Deutsch p. 43
Hill versus Collier
Judith Milhous & Robert D.Hume: ‘The Haymarket Opera in 1711'
Owen Swiney
Elizabeth Gibson: ‘Owen Swiney and the Italian Opera in London
'

66   
Treaties unfinished
Attributed to Charles Montagu, Lord Halifax.

67   
‘Teseo'
David Kimbell: ‘The Libretto of Handel's
Teseo
'

69   
‘Silla'
Duncan Chisholm: ‘Handel's
Lucio Cornelio Silla
'

72   
‘Amadigi'
David Kimbell: ‘The
Amadis
Operas of Destouches & Handel'
M & L
, October 1968

78.  
Britton's concerts
Sir John Hawkins:
A General History of the Science and Practice of Music
vol.2 p. 817

Handel plays Mattheson
Hawkins op. cit. vol 2 p. 852

Richard Elford
Donald Burrows:
Handel and the English Chapel Royal
pp. 582–4

81   
Kreienberg's letter
Donald Burrows: ‘Handel and Hanover', in Williams ed.:
Handel, Bach, Scarlatti
p. 35

82   
I find myself soe much tyerd
Edward Gregg:
Queen Anne
p. 368

The Church Opera
Burrows:
Chapel Royal
op. cit. p. 82

84   
I believe sleep
Gregg op. cit. p. 394

88   
Water Music
Accounts of performance background in Donald Burrows: ‘King George I, the Haymarket Opera Company and the Water Music', Howard Serwer: ‘The World of the Water Music', and in Stanley Sadie: Handel's Concertos, London 1972. ‘Daily Courant' and Prussian Resident's reports in Deutsch pp. 76–78

89   
Energie des Modes
Pierre Crussard: ‘Marc-Antoine Charpentier, theoricien',
Revue de Musicologie
XXVII, Paris, 1945