Handel

by Romain Rolland

The vocal ensemble pieces hold a much humbler place in Italian Opera, and Handel has made fewer innovations on this ground than in the vocal solo. However, one finds some very interesting experiments here. His duets are often written in an imitative style, serious and rather sad, in the old Italian school of Provenzale and Steffani,[321] or in the Lully style, where the two voices mingle together note by note with exactitude.[322] But Atalanta and Poro furnish us also with duets of an alluring freedom and uncommon artistry. And in the duet in the third act of Orlando, Handel attempts to differentiate the characters of the weeping Angelica and the furious Roland.—Similarly with the trios written in the strict style of imitation, like that in Alcina, Act III, the trio in Acis and Galatea carefully defines the couple of lovers from the colossal figure of Polyphemus, the trio in Tamerlano contrasts the exasperated Tamerlano with Bajazet and with Asteria, who aggravated him, and the trio in the judgment of Solomon distinguishes the three diverse characters: the calm power of Solomon, the aggressive cries of the wicked mother, and the sorrowful supplications of the good mother. The trio from Susanna is no less free, but in the humorous style: one of the two old men madrigalises whilst the other menaces. The ensemble forms altogether a most vivid little scene which Mozart himself would not have disowned.[323] Quartets are rare. There are two little ones in the Triumph of Time, written in Rome. In Radamisto Handel made the attempt at a dramatic quartet, but rather clumsily, and with repeated Da Capo.[324] The most moving quartet is found in the second act of Jephtha. It is in Jephtha also, Act III, where the only quintet which he wrote is to be found.

The choruses in the Italian opera of the eighteenth century[325] were reduced to a rudimentary stage, and they consist merely of the union of the voices of soloists at the end of a piece, with certain banal and brilliant acclamations during the course of the action. Notwithstanding this, Handel wrote some stronger ones in Alcina; those of Giulio Cesare, Ariodante, and Atalanta, were also exceptional in the operas of his time. So with the final choruses Handel arranged after a fashion to escape from the current banality: that of Tamerlano is written in a melancholy dramatic vein; that of Orlando strives to preserve the individual character of their personality; that of Giulio Cesare is tacked on to a duet. There are also choruses of people; the Matelots in Giustino; that of the hunters in Deidamia, where the choruses take up the refrain from the air announced by the solo voice. It is the same in Alessandro, where the soldiers’ chorus repeats Alessandro’s hymn, slightly curtailed.

Finally, Handel frequently attempted to build up great musical architecture, raising it by successive stages from solos to ensemble pieces, and then to choruses. At the end of the first act of Ariodante, a duet (gavotte style) is taken up by the chorus, then danced without voices; finally sung and danced. The close of Act III from the same opera gives us a chain of processions, dances, and choruses. The final scenes of Alessandro constitute a veritable opera finale, 2 duets and a trio running into a chorus.

But it is in his oratorios that Handel attempted these ensemble vocal combinations on the larger scale, and principally that mixture of movements where the powerful contrasts of soli and chorus are grouped together in the same picture.

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 Iphigénie en Tauride, the most moving and passionate 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.

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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 liberté) 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 analogous 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 accumulating 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 passions, spirits, and personalities were represented always in a dramatic fashion. 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 passionate 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 passion, 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 rôle 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 classical 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 passions 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 God 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 God 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 opéra 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 homophonic music with fugal choruses,[335] the massive 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 masses, 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 Passion after Brockes, 1716, where the dialogue of the Daughter of Sion and the chorus Eilt ihr angefochten Seelen, with its questions, its responses, its Æschylian interjections, served as Bach’s model for his St. Matthew Passion. 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.