Part 4 (1/2)
He had never suffered so much as in the first year of his illness, when 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]
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 1000 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 G.o.d, my sweet Lord and Saviour, on the day of his Resurrection.” His wish was accomplished. On Holy Sat.u.r.day, 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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, a.s.similating it to themselves. His artistic will is mainly objective.
His genius adapts itself to a thousand images of pa.s.sing events, to the nation, to the times in which he lived, even to the fas.h.i.+ons 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 a.s.similation and the prevailing equilibrium of his nature that he never feels submerged and overweighted by the ma.s.s of these strange elements. Everything is duly absorbed, controlled, and cla.s.sified. 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, st.u.r.dy 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 a.s.similate 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 ma.n.u.scripts,[286] and in the accusations made against him by certain French critics.[287] Wherever he pa.s.sed, 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 Ha.s.se and Corelli, he had a veritable pa.s.sion 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 princ.i.p.al 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 surpa.s.sed him in the art of writing beautiful, melodic lines.
Mozart and Ha.s.se 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 pa.s.sing 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, n.o.ble 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 t.i.tle 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]