The second and third volumes have a much greater value, containing trios or sonatas in two parts (for two violins, or two oboes, or two flauti-traversi) with Bass (harpsichord or violoncello). All the sonatas in the second volume, with only one exception,[380] have four movements, two slow and two fast alternatively, as in the Opus 1. Sometimes they are inspired by the airs of the operas, or of the oratorios; at other times they have furnished a brief sketch for them. The elegiac Largo which opens the First Sonata is found again in Alessandro, the allegro which finishes the Third Sonata forms one of the movements in the overture of Athaliah, the larghetto of the Fourth serves for the second movement of the Esther overture. Other pieces have been transferred to the clavier or other instrumental works, where they are joined to other movements. The finest of these Trios are the First and the Ninth, both of enchanting poetry. In the second movement of the Ninth Trio, Handel has utilised very happily a popular English theme.
The Seven Trios from the third volume afford a much greater variety in the style and in the number[381] of the pieces. Dances occupy a great part.[382] They are indeed veritable Suites. They were composed in the years when Handel was attracted by the form of ballet-opera. The Musette and the Allegro of the Second Sonata come from Ariodante. Some of the other slow and pompous movements are borrowed from his oratorios. The two Allegri which open the Fourth Sonata are taken from the Overture of Athaliah. On the other hand, Handel inserts in the final movement of Belshazzar the beautiful Andante which opens his First Sonata.
Whoever wishes to judge these works historically or from the intellectual point of view, will find, like Chrysander, that Handel has not invented here any new forms, and, as he advanced, he returned to the form of the Suite, which already belonged to the past, instead of continuing on his way towards the future Sonata. But those who will judge them artistically, for their own personal charm, will find in them some of the purest creations of Handel, and those which best retain their freshness. Their beautiful Italian lines, their delicate expression, their aristocratic simplicity, are refreshing alike to the mind and to the heart. Our own epoch, tired of the post-Beethoven and post-Wagnerian art, can find here, as in the chamber music of Mozart, a safe haven, where it can escape the sterile agitation of the present and find again quiet peace and sanity.
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The orchestral music of Handel comprises twelve Concerti Grossi (1740), the six Oboe Concertos (1734), the Symphonies from his operas, oratorios, and his open-air music—Water-Music (1715 or 1717), Firework Music (1749),—and Concerti for two horns.
Although Handel was in art a visualist, and though his music had a highly descriptive and evocatory power, he only made a very restrained use of instrumental tone-colour.[383] However, he showed on occasion a refined intelligence in its use. The two oratorios written at Rome when he found himself in the society of the Cardinal Ottoboni, and his great virtuoso works, The Triumph of Time and The Resurrection of 1708, have a fine and well-varied orchestration.[384] In London he was one of the first to introduce the use of the horn into the orchestra of the opera.[385] “He was the first,” says Volbach, “to assert the expressive personality of the violoncello.”[386] From the viola he knew how to secure many curious effects of indefinite and disquieting half-tones,[387] he gave to the bassoons a lugubrious and fantastic character,[388] he experimented with new instruments, small[389] and great,[390] he used the drum (tambour) solo in a dramatic fashion for Jupiter’s oath in Semele. For special situations, by instrumental tone-colours, he secures effects not only of dramatic expression, but also of exotism and local colour. It is so in the two scenes from the two Cleopatras, Giulio Cesare (1724)[391] and Alexander Balus (1748).
But great painter as Handel was he did not work so much through the brilliancy, variety, and novelty of his tone-colours as by the beauty of his designs, and his effects of light and shade. With a voluntarily restrained palette, and by satisfying himself with the sober colours of the strings, he yet was able to produce surprising and thrilling effects. Volbach has shown[392] that he had less recourse to the contrast and mixing of instruments than to the division of the same family of instruments into different groups. In the introductory piece movement to his second Esther (1732) the violins are divided into five groups;[393] in The Resurrection (1708), into four divisions;[394] the violas are sometimes divided into two, the second being reinforced by the third violin, or by the violoncellos.[395] On the other hand, Handel, when he considered it advisable, reduced his instrumental forces by suppressing the viola and the second violin, whose places were taken by the clavecin. All his orchestral art is in the true instinct of balance and economy, which, with the most restricted means in managing a few colours, yet knows how to obtain as powerful impressions as our musicians of to-day, with their crowded palette.[396] Nothing, then, is more important, if we wish to render this music truly, than the avoidance of upsetting the equilibrium of the various sections of the orchestra under the pretext of enriching it and bringing it up to date. The worse fault is to deprive it, by a useless surplus of tone-colours, of that suppleness and subtlety of nuance which is its principal charm.
One is prone to accept too readily the idea, that expressive nuance is a privilege of the modern musical art, and that Handel’s orchestra knew only the great theatrical contrasts between force and sweetness, or loudness and softness. It is nothing of the kind. The range of Handel’s nuances is extremely varied. One finds with him the pianissimo, the piano, the mezzo piano, the mezzo forte, un poco più F, un poco F, forte, fortissimo. We never find the orchestral crescendo and decrescendo, which hardly appears marked expressly until the time of Jommelli,[397] and the school of Mannheim; but there is no doubt that it was practised long before it was marked in the music.[398] The President of Brosses wrote in 1739 from Rome: “The voices, like the violins, used with light and shade, with unconscious swelling of sound, which augments the force from note to note, even to a very high degree, since its use as a nuance is extremely sweet and touching.” And endless examples occur in Handel of long crescendi and diminuendi without its expression being marked in the scores.[399] Another kind of crescendo and diminuendo on the same note was very common in the time of Handel, and his friend, Geminiani, helped to set the fashion. Volbach, and with him Hugo Riemann,[400] has shown that Geminiani used in the later editions of his first Violin Sonatas in 1739, and in his Violin School in 1751, the two following signs:
Swelling the sound [\]
Diminishing (falling) the sound [/]