Part 5 (1/2)

One sees what a variety of forms and styles he used. Handel was too universal and too objective to believe that one kind of art only was the true one. He believed in two kinds of music only, the good and the bad.

Apart from that he appreciated all styles. Thus he has left masterpieces in every style, but he did not open any new way in opera for the simple reason that he went a long way in nearly all paths already opened up.

Constantly he experimented, invented, and always with his singularly sure touch. He seemed to have an extraordinary penetrating knowledge in invention, and consequently few artistic regions remained for him to conquer. He made as masterly a use of the recitative as Gluck, or of the _arioso_ as Mozart, writing the acts of _Tamerlano_, which are the closest and most heartrending dramas, in the manner of _Iphigenie en Tauride_, the most moving and pa.s.sionate scenes in music such as certain pages of _Admeto_ and _Orlando_, where the humorous and tragic are intermingled in the manner of _Don Giovanni_. He has experimented very happily here in new rhythms.[326] There were new forms, the dramatic duet or quartet, the descriptive symphony opening the opera,[327]

refined orchestration,[328] choruses and dances.[329] Nothing seems to have obsessed him. In the following opera we find him returning to the ordinary forms of the Italian or German opera of his time.

Still less can we say that he held to a rigid form with his operas, which were continually adapted to the changing tastes of the theatre public of his age, and of the singers which he had at his disposal, but when he left the opera for the oratorio he varied no less. It was a perpetual experiment of new forms in the vast framework of the free theatre (_theatre en liberte_) of the concert drama; and the sort of instinctive ebb and flow in creation seems to have caused his works to succeed one another in groups of a.n.a.logous or related compositions, each work in a nearly opposite style of feeling and form. In each one Handel indulged momentarily in a certain side of his feelings, and when that was finished he found himself in the possession of other feelings which had been acc.u.mulating whilst he was drawing on his first. He thus kept up a perpetual balance, which is like the pulsation of life itself.

After the realistic _Saul_ comes the impersonal epic of _Israel in Egypt_. After this colossal monument appear the two little _genre_ pictures, _The Ode to Cecilia_ and _L'Allegro ed Penseroso_. After the Herculean _Samson_, an heroic and popular tragic comedy sprang forth, the charming flower of _Semele_, an opera of romanticism and gallantry.

But if the oratorios are so wonderfully varied they have one characteristic in common even more than the operas, they are musical dramas. It was not that religious thought turned Handel to this choice of Biblical subjects, but as Kretzschmar has well shown, it was on account of the stories of the Bible heroes being a part of the very life-blood of the people whom he addressed. They were known to all, whilst the ancient romantic stories could only interest a society of refined and spoilt _dilettanti_. Without doubt, these oratorios were not made for representation, did not seek scenic effects, with rare exceptions, as for instance the scene of the orgy of _Belshazzar_, where one feels that Handel had drawn on the direct vision of theatrical representation, but pa.s.sions, spirits, and personalities were represented always in a dramatic fas.h.i.+on. Handel is a great painter of characters, and the Delilah in _Samson_, the Nitocris in _Belshazzar_, the Cleopatra in _Alexander Balus_, the mother in _Solomon_, the Dejanira in _Hercules_, the beautiful Theodora, all bear witness to the suppleness and the profundity of his psychological genius. If in the course of the action, and the depicting of the ordinary sentiments, he abandoned himself freely to the flow of pure music, in the moments of pa.s.sionate crises he is the equal of the greatest masters in musical drama. Is it necessary to mention the terrible scenes in the third act of _Hercules_, the beautiful scenes of _Alexander Balus_, the Dream of _Belshazzar_, the scenes of _Juno_ and the death of _Semele_, the recognition of Joseph and his brothers, the destruction of the temple in Samson, the second act of _Jephtha_, the prison scenes in _Theodora_, or in the first act of _Saul_, and dominating all, like great pictures, certain of the choruses in _Israel in Egypt_, in _Esther_, and in _Joshua_, and in the _Chandos Anthems_, which seem veritable tempests of pa.s.sion, great upheavals of overpowering effect? It is by these choruses that the oratorio is essentially distinguished from the opera. It is in the first place a choral tragedy. These choruses, which are nearly eliminated in Italian Opera during the time of the Barberini, held a very important place in French Opera, but their _role_ was limited to that of commentator or else merely decorative. In the oratorio of Handel they became the very life and soul of the work. Sometimes they took the part of the ancient cla.s.sical chorus, which exposed the thought of the drama when the hidden fates led on the heroes to their destinies--as in _Saul_, _Hercules_, _Alexander Balus_, _Susanna_. Sometimes they added to the shock of human pa.s.sions the powerful appeal of religion, and crowned the human drama with a supernatural aureole, as in _Theodora_ and _Jephtha_. Or finally they became the actual actors themselves, or the enemy-people and the G.o.d who guided them. It is remarkable that in his very first oratorio _Esther_, Handel had this stroke of genius. In the choruses there we see the drama of an oppressed people and their G.o.d who led them by his voice superbly depicted. In _Deborah_ and _Athaliah_ also, two nations are in evidence. In _Belshazzar_ there are three, but in his chief work of this kind, _Israel in Egypt_, the greatest choral epic which exists, is entirely occupied by Jehovah and His people.

The choruses are in the most diverse styles. Some are in the church style, and a little antiquated;[330] others tend towards the opera--even the _opera bouffe_;[331] some exhale the perfume of the madrigals at the end of the sixteenth century,[332] and the Academy of Ancient Music in London sought to sustain this art in honour. On the other hand, Handel has frequently used them in the form of a chorale, simple or varied,[333] above all, he employs the choral double fugue in a most astounding manner,[334] and he carries everything on with that impetuosity of genius which drew to him the admiration of the sternest critics of his time, such as Mattheson. His instinct as a great constructor loved to alternate h.o.m.ophonic music with fugal choruses,[335] the ma.s.sive columns of musical harmony with the moving contrapuntal in superimposed strata, very cleverly framing his dramatic choruses in a most imposing architecture of decorative and impersonal character. His choruses are sometimes tragic scenes,[336] or comedy (see the _Vaudeville_),[337] sometimes _genre_ pictures.[338] Handel knew most admirably how to weave in popular motives,[339] or to mingle the dance with the song.[340]

But what belongs chiefly to him--not that he invented it, but made the happiest use of it--is the musical architecture of solo and chorus alternating and intermingled. Purcell and the French composers had given him this idea. He attempted it in his earliest religious works, especially in his _Birthday Ode for Queen Anne_, 1713, where nearly every solo air is taken up again by the following chorus.[341] He had a great feeling for light and pleased himself by introducing in the middle of his choral ma.s.ses, solo songs which soared up into the air like birds.[342] His dramatic genius knew, when required, how to draw from this combination the most astounding effects. Thus in the _Pa.s.sion after Brockes_, 1716, where the dialogue of the Daughter of Sion and the chorus _Eilt ihr angefochten Seelen_, with its questions, its responses, its aeschylian interjections, served as Bach's model for his St. Matthew Pa.s.sion. At the end of _Israel in Egypt_, after those great choral mountains of sounds, by an ingenious contrast a female voice is heard alone without accompaniment, and then a hymn alternating with the chorus which repeats it. It is the same again at the end of the little short _Ode to St. Cecilia_.

In the _Occasional Oratorio_ a duet for Soprano and Alto alternates with the choruses, but it is in _Judas Maccabaeus_ where he best achieves this combination of solos and the chorus. In this victorious epic of an invaded people, who rose up and overcame their oppressors, the individualities are scarcely distinguished from the heroic soul of the nation, and the chiefs of the people are only the choralists, whose songs set dancing the enormous ensembles which unfold themselves in powerful and irresistible progressions, like a giant's procession up a triumphal staircase.

It follows then that when the orchestra is added to the dialogue of solos and of choruses, the third element enters into the psychological drama, sometimes in apparent opposition to the two others. Thus in the second act of _Judas Maccabaeus_ the orchestra which sounds the battle calls makes a vivid contrast to the somewhat funereal choruses on which they are interposed: _We hear the pleasing dreadful call_, or to put it better, they complete them, and fill in the picture. After Death--Glory.

The oratorio being a ”free theatre,” it becomes necessary for the music to supply the place of the scenery. Thus its picturesque and descriptive _role_ is strongly developed and it is by this above all that Handel's genius so struck the English public. Camille Saint-Saens wrote in an interesting letter to C. Bellaigue,[343] ”I have come to the conclusion that it is the picturesque and descriptive side, until then novel and unreached, whereby Handel achieved the astonis.h.i.+ng favour which he enjoyed. This masterly way of writing choruses, of treating the fugue, had been done by others. What really counts with him is the colour--that modern element which we no longer hear in him.... He knew nothing of exotism. But look at _Alexander's Feast_, _Israel in Egypt_, and especially _L'Allegro ed Penseroso_, and try to forget all that has been done since. You find at every turn a striving for the picturesque, for an effect of imitation. It is real and very intense for the medium in which it is produced, and it seems to have been unknown hitherto.”

Perhaps Saint-Saens lays too much weight on the ”masterly way of writing his choruses,” which was not so common in England, even with Purcell.

Perhaps he accentuates too much also the real influence of the French in matters of picturesque and descriptive music and the influence which it exerted on Handel.[344] Finally, it is not necessary to represent these descriptive tendencies of Handel as exceptional in his time. A great breath of nature pa.s.sed over German music, and pushed it towards tone-painting. Telemann was, even more than Handel, a painter in music, and was more celebrated than Handel for his realistic effects. But the England of the eighteenth century had remained very conservative in music, and had devoted itself to cultivating the masters of the past.

Handel's art was then more striking to them on account of ”its colour”

and ”its imitative effects.” I will not say with Saint-Saens that ”there was no question of exotism with him,” for Handel seems to have sought this very thing more than once; notably in the orchestration of certain scenes for the two Cleopatras, of _Giulio Cesare_, and of _Alexander Balus_. But that which was constantly with him was tone-painting, the reproduction through pa.s.sages of music of natural impressions, a painting very characterised, and, as Beethoven put it, ”more an expression of feelings than of painting,” a poetic evocation of the raging tempests, of the tranquillity of the sea, of the dark shades of night, of the twilight which envelops the English country, of the parks by moonlight, of the sunrise in springtime, and of the awakening of birds. _Acis and Galatea_, _Israel in Egypt_, _Allegro_, _The Messiah_, _Semele_, _Joseph_, _Solomon_, _Susanna_, all offer a wondrous picture gallery of nature, carefully noted by Handel with the sure stroke of a Flemish painter, and of a romantic poet at the same time. This romanticism struck powerfully on his time with a strength which would not be denied. It drew upon him both admiration and violent criticism. A letter of 1751 depicts him as a Berlioz or Wagner, raising storms by his orchestra and chorus.

”He cannot give people pleasure after the proper fas.h.i.+on,” writes this anonymous author in his letter, ”and his evil genius will not allow him to do this. He imagines a new _grandioso_ kind of music, and in order to make more noise he has it executed by the greatest number of voices and instruments which one has ever heard before in a theatre. He thinks thus to rival not only the G.o.d of musicians, but even all the other G.o.ds, like Iole, Neptune, and Jupiter: for either I expected that the house would be brought down by his tempest, or that the sea would engulf the whole. But more unbearable still was his thunder. Never have such terrible rumblings fallen on my head.”[345]

Similarly Goethe, irritated and upset, said, after having heard the first movement of the Beethoven C Minor symphony, ”It is meaningless.

One expected the house to fall about one's ears.”

It is not by chance that I couple the names of Handel and Beethoven.

Handel is a kind of Beethoven in chains. He had the unapproachable manner like the great Italian artists who surrounded him: the Porporas, the Ha.s.ses, and between him and them there was a whole world.[346]

Under the cla.s.sic ideal with which he covered himself burned a romantic genius, precursor of the _Sturm und Drang_ period; and sometimes this hidden demon broke out in brusque fits of pa.s.sion--perhaps despite himself.

Handel's instrumental music deserves very close notice: for it is nearly always wrongly a.s.sessed by historians, and badly understood by artists, who treat it for the most part as a merely formal art.

Its chief characteristic is that of a perpetual improvisation. If it was published, it was more in spite of Handel than at his instigation.[347]

It was not made to be played and judged coldly, but to be produced at white heat to the public. They were free sketches, in which the form was never completely tightened up, but remained always moving and living, modifying itself at the concert, as the two sensibilities--the artist and the public--came into touch with one another.[348] It is necessary then to preserve in this music a certain measure of the character of living improvisation. What we too often do, on the contrary, is to petrify them. One cannot say that they are a caricature of the work of Handel. They are rather a negation of it. When one studies with a minute care every detail of the work, when one has attained from the orchestra a precision of attack, an ensemble, a justness, an irreproachable finish, we have yet done nothing more than raise up the mere figure of this genial improvisator.

Further, there is with his instrumental music, as with his vocal music, nearly always an intimate and picturesque expression. For Handel, as with his friend Geminiani, ”the aim of instrumental music is not only to please the ear, but to express the sentiments, the emotions, to paint the feelings.”[349] It reflects not only the interior world, but it also turns to the actual spectacle of things.[350] It is a precise poetry, and if one cannot define the sources of his inspiration, one can often find in certain of his instrumental works the souvenir of days and journeys, and of scenes visited and experienced by Handel. It was here that he was visibly inspired by Nature.[351]

Others have a relations.h.i.+p with vocal and dramatic works. Certain of the heroic fugues in the fourth book of the Clavier pieces published in 1735 were taken up again by Handel in his _Israel in Egypt_ and clothed with words which agreed precisely with their hidden feeling. The first _Allegro_ from the Fourth Organ Concerto (the first book appeared in 1738) soon became shortly afterwards one of the prettiest of the choruses in _Alcina_. The second and monumental concerto for two horns in F Major[352] is a reincarnation of some of the finest pages from _Esther_. It was quite evident to the public of his time that the instrumental works had an expressive meaning, or that as Geminiani wrote, ”all good music ought to be an imitation of a fine discourse.”

Thus the publisher Walsh was justified in issuing his six volumes of Favourite Airs from Handel's operas and oratorios, arranged as _Sonatas for the flute, violin, and harpsichord_, and Handel himself, or his pupil, W. Babell, arranged excellently for the clavier, some suites of airs from the operas, binding them together with preludes, interludes, and variations.--It is necessary always to keep in view this intimate relation of the instrumental works of Handel with the rest of his music.

It ought to draw our attention more and more to the expressive contents of these works.