George Frideric Handel

by Herbert F. Peyser

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Vain resolve! For Handel, crushed, had a most persistent habit of rising again. If political cabals brought him low, the tides of national politics brought him to the top once more. “Messiah”, to be sure, was not to become an unshakable British (shall we not rather say Anglo-Saxon) monument till after the composer’s death; yet Handel was able to make the most, creatively, of the great national emergencies of his last decade. In 1743, as Composer of Music to the Chapel Royal, he wrote a “Te Deum” and an anthem to celebrate the victory of Dettingen, music that conquered the popular heart. To this period belongs the charming secular oratorio, “Semele”, (source of the beloved airs “Where’er you walk” and “O Sleep, why dost thou leave me?”) at the first production of which Mrs. Delany found it significant that “there was no disturbance in the playhouse.” But the old habit of launching operatic or concert enterprises was upon him once more and again threatened to consume his credit and his substance. Bankruptcy threatened. Other oratorios, “Hercules”, “Belshazzar”, grand masterpieces both of them, were given in 1745 to dwindling audiences. Handel’s health was imperiled. Then came 1745, the Jacobite rising and the landing in Scotland of the Pretender, Charles Edward. There was consternation which culminated in the march of the Highlander army on London. Loyally, the composer identified himself with the national cause; to celebrate the early defeats of the Jacobites he wrote the “Occasional Oratorio”, a call to Englishmen to resist the invader. But this occupies a less considerable niche in history than “Judas Maccabaeus”, next to “Messiah” perhaps the most popular of Handel’s oratorios, unless we choose to set above it the earlier “Israel in Egypt”—to Robert Schumann “the model of a choral work.”

“Judas Maccabaeus”, the text of which a certain divine, Thomas Morell, had based on the Old Testament, was set by Handel between July 9 and August 11, 1746, was produced by Handel at Covent Garden, April 1, 1747. The composer was extraordinarily attuned to the emotional mood of the moment. People saw in the heroic Judas an embodiment of the victorious Duke of Cumberland, who had ferociously scattered the hosts of the Pretender. And the Jews of London, proud of the glorification of their warrior hero of old, rallied to Handel’s support and packed the theatre in such numbers that the composer suddenly found himself with a wholly new public at his feet, which to some degree replaced for a time to come the aristocratic patrons he had lost.

HANDEL’S HOUSE, 1875.
Handel lived here—then 57 Lower Brook Street, Hanover Square—for 34 years, 1725 till his death in 1759; “Messiah” was composed within its walls.

In the martial, heroic score of “Judas Maccabaeus” Handel had incorporated some music he had originally designed for other works. “See the conquering hero comes”, probably the best known chorus in the oratorio, had originally been a part of “Joshua”, and was not heard in “Judas Maccabaeus” till a year after its first production. Even the chorus “Zion now her head shall raise”, was a later addition and had not been composed till after Handel had lost his sight.

This is the place to comment briefly on Handel’s “borrowings” about which so much ado has been made that one writer went so far as to allude to him as “the grand old thief.” It is altogether too easy to lay a disproportionate stress on the practice involved, the more so as it was a fairly legitimate custom in the Eighteenth Century. Besides Handel, masters like Bach, Haydn, Gluck, Mozart and even Beethoven, had a way, more or less frequently, of taking their own where they found it. Often, indeed, they found it in their own earlier creations. In any case no moral or ethical question was involved, for the good reason that the treatment of a theme or a melody according to the esthetic of that period, mattered far more than the phrase in question. Handel, when told of some passage from another composer found in his music had a way of retorting: “The pig did not know what to do with such a theme.” Then, too, he adapted to broader purposes music he had conceived earlier in other connections. “Messiah”, for instance, offers many cases in point. The chorus “His yoke is easy, His burthen is light” was adapted for better or worse from an Italian duet composed originally to the words “Quel fior che all’ alba ride”; the great “For unto us a Child is born”, was a madrigal denouncing “Blind Love and Cruel Beauty” thus: “No, di voi non vo’ fidarmi”, while “All we like sheep have gone astray” was at first the Italian duet “So per prova i vostri inganni.” The great ensemble, “And with His Stripes”, employs the same fugal subject which Bach put to use in the A minor fugue of the “Well Tempered Clavier” and is also found in the Kyrie of Mozart’s “Requiem.” But themes of this type were “in the air” in that period and fairly recognized as general property. It would be preposterous to labor too much the points involved—the more so as every now and then the practice is “avenged” (if we like!) by some awkwardness of accent or clumsiness of declamation which results by forcing the older phrase into a newer textual association. Such things are very different from the barefaced claim Bononcini once made to having composed a certain work which, as it transpired, had been written by a minor musician living in Vienna. Then too, in the phrase of W. McNaught, “Handel did not borrow the thoughts of others; he rescued them.” And it must never be forgotten that men like Bach and Handel faced deadlines unthinkable to any musician of today!

Following “Judas Maccabaeus” Handel’s fortunes rose once more and after his conflicts with ill-will and intrigue he was the incontestable victor. The consequence, far from rest and relaxation, was another stream of great works not all of them, unfortunately, having become as familiar to posterity as they undoubtedly deserve to be. Oratorios like “Alexander Balus”, “Susanna”, “Joshua”, “Solomon” and “Jephtha”, treasurable as they are, are known to few, probably because they are eclipsed by the gigantic shadows cast by “Messiah”, “Judas Maccabaeus” or “Israel in Egypt.” In 1749 he had written “Theodora”, which failed. Its ill luck does not seem to have moved him to more than a kind of “wise-crack” to the effect that “the Jews would not come to it because the story was Christian and the ladies because it was virtuous.” In the same year he composed a scene from Tobias Smollet’s “Alceste”, parts of which he later used in his “Choice of Hercules”.

For the signing of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the King demanded a showy festival, little as there was to celebrate in the termination of a war both unpopular and remote. Handel was commissioned to compose music for an ostentatious show to culminate in a grand display of fireworks in Green Park, where a vast and grotesque wooden building, surmounted by unsightly allegorical figures, had been set up. Twelve thousand people foregathered for a rehearsal of Handel’s music, in Vauxhall Gardens, and traffic as a result, was desperately tangled. At the actual celebration everything went awry, the fireworks fizzled and to provide a humiliating climax the edifice in Green Park caught fire. Newman Flower tells in a colorful account of the event that Handel had “a magnificent band worthy of the occasion ... forty trumpets, twenty horns, sixteen hautboys, sixteen bassoons, eight pair of kettledrums; for the first time he introduced that forgotten instrument, the serpent into his score, but took it out again.... He had for that night as fine a band as he ever conducted.”

Handel’s contribution, indeed, was the one indisputable success of the occasion. He gave the bright and sonorous “Fireworks Music” (a kind of companion piece to the “Water Music”) the month after the Green Park fiasco for the Foundling Hospital, or “The Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children.” The concert brought Handel the Governorship of the institution.