Handel

by Romain Rolland

Religion was not his business; Law certainly was not. However, he had for his master the most remarkable professor in Germany, Christian Thomasius, the advocate in the arraignment of witchcraft,[28] the reformer of the teaching of law, who himself made a thorough study of German customs, and who did not cease to make battle with the gross and stupid abuses of the universities, with their spirit of caste, pedantry, ignorance, hypocrisy, and judicial and religious acerbity. If such a training was not of the nature to retain Handel it was certainly not the fault of the professor; there were no more vital lessons in the whole of the Germany of that day; none which offered a more fruitful field of activity to a young man. Let us be sure that a Beethoven would not have been insensible to them. But Handel was a pure musician; he was music itself; nothing else could occupy his thoughts.

In the year in which he had completed his terms in the Faculty of Law he found a post of organist at Halle: and in a church more than strictly Lutheran, being of the Reformed order, where the organist had expressly to conform to the new cult. However, he was only seventeen years old.[29] This simple fact showed what musical authority he already exercised in the town where he had studied law.[30] Not only was he organist, but he was also Professor at the College of the Reformists; he took vocal music there for two hours every week; he selected the most gifted of his pupils and formed from them a vocal and instrumental body which was to be heard every Sunday in one church or another of the town. He included in his musical repertoire, chorales, Psalms, motets, cantatas—which were changed every Sunday. Truly an excellent school for learning to write quickly and well. Handel there formed his creative fecundity.[31] Of hundreds of cantatas which he then wrote, none were preserved by him.[32] But it is certain that his memory retained more than one idea to serve in later compositions, for he never lost anything, and from that time for the rest of his life he retained in his mind his earlier musical ideas. This should not be attributed to his speed in working, but to the unity of his thought and his strenuous search for perfection.

Handel renewed neither his yearly engagement at the Cathedral of Halle nor at the University. In his period as organist he had gauged his own musical force and he no longer wished to constrain it. A wider field of activity was necessary. He quitted Halle in the spring of 1703, and guided both by his instincts and by a preference of his master Zachau[33] he betook himself to Hamburg, the city of German Opera.

Hamburg was the Venice of Germany. A free town far from the noise of wars, a refuge of artists, and people of large fortunes, the centre of the commerce of Northern Europe, a cosmopolitan city where they spoke all languages and especially the French tongue, it was in continual relationship with both England and Italy, and particularly with Venice, which constituted for it a model for emulation. It was by way of Hamburg that the English ideas were circulated in Germany. It was there where the first German newspapers appeared.[34] In the time of Handel, Hamburg shared with Leipzig the intellectual prestige of Germany. There was no other place in Germany where music was held in such high esteem.[35] The artists there hobnobbed with the rich merchants. Christoph, pupil of Schütz, had founded there a celebrated Collegium Musicum, a Society of Musicians, and started there in 1677-8 the first theatre of German Opera. It was not a princely opera open only to those invited by the prince, but a public opera, popular in spirit and in prices. It was the example of Italy, notably that of Venice, which called forth this foundation, but the spirits of the two theatres were very different. Whilst that of Venice satisfied itself with fantastic melodramas, curiously devised from the ancient mythology and history, the Hamburg Opera retained, despite the grossness of taste and licentiousness of manners, an old religious foundation. The Hamburg opera was inaugurated in 1678 by the production of Joh. Theile’s Creation of the World. The composer was a pupil of Schütz. From 1678 to 1692 a large number of religious dramas were given there; some of an allegorical character, others inspired by the Bible. In certain of these subjects one can already see the future oratorios of Handel.[36] Feeble as these pieces were, they were yet on the definite road for the founding of a real German theatre. It seems to have been the idea of one of these poets, Pastor Elmenhorst, who wished to give to the religious opera the value of a classic form of art.[37] Unfortunately, the public spirit was on the decline; its religious resources, however, were well protected, save in a minority where religion took a more aggressive character as it felt itself less able to hold people. There were two factions in the Hamburg public; one (the most numerous) whom religion bored, and who wished to amuse themselves at the theatre. The other party was religious and would not have anything to do with the opera under the impression that it was a work of Satan, opera diabolica.[38] The struggle was warmly contested between the two factions, and religious opera came to grief. The last representation took place in 1692. When Handel arrived it was truly the opera diabolica which ran with its many extravagances and its licentious habits.

I have told elsewhere[39] the story of this period of theatrical history in Hamburg, of which the golden age was certainly between 1692 and 1703. Many conditions contributed to the establishment of a good Theatre and Opera at Hamburg; money and the wealthy patrons disposed to expend it, an excellent band of instruments, good but small in number, a scenic art well advanced, a luxury of decoration and machinery, renowned poets, musicians of great value, and, rarest of all, the poets and musicians who assembled from “die sich wohl verstanden,” as Mattheson wrote. The poets were named Bressand of Wolfenbüttel, who was inspired by the French theatre, and Christian Postel, whom Chrysander calls very complacently a German Metastasio. The feeblest part was the singing. For a long time the Hamburg Opera had no professional singers. The rôles were taken by students and artisans, by shoemakers, tailors, fruiterers, and girls of little talent and less virtue; generally the artisans found it more convenient themselves to take the female rôles. Men and women alike had a profound ignorance of music. Towards 1693 the Opera at Hamburg was fortunately completely transformed from top to bottom by the great Kapellmeister Sigismund Cousser, who introduced reforms in the orchestra after the French model, and in the singing on Italian lines. France was represented in his eyes (as for all foreign musicians) by the personage of Lully, by whom Cousser was trained for six years in Paris. Italy was represented by a remarkable artist settled at Hanover from 1689 to 1696, who produced ten operas; Agostino Steffani from the province of Venice.

This dual model from Italy and France, aided by the personal example of Cousser, played the chief part in producing the best musician of the Hamburg Opera, Reinhard Keiser, a man who, despite his character and presumptuous knowledge, had certainly genius.[40]

Keiser was under thirty years old when Handel arrived, but he was then at the zenith of his fame. Kapellmeister of the Hamburg Opera since 1695, then director of the theatre since the end of 1702, very highly gifted, but of scanty culture, dissipated, voluptuous, careless, he was the incontestable ruler of the German Opera; the artist type of that epoch, overflowing with material life, and devoting itself to the love of pleasure. The influence of both Lully[41] and that of Steffani[42] is shown in his first operas. But his own personality is easily recognizable under these traces of borrowing. He has a very fine sense of instrumental colour, widely differing from that of the followers of Lully, who were a little disdainful of expressive power in the orchestra, and were always disposed to sacrifice it to the primacy of the voice.[43] He believed, as did his admirer and commentator, Mattheson, that one can express the feelings by means of the orchestra alone.[44]

He was, moreover, a true master of recitative; one might say that he created the German recitative. He attached extreme importance to it, saying that the expression in recitative often gave the intelligent composer much more trouble than the invention of the air.[45] He sought to note with exactitude, accent, punctuation, the living breath itself, without sacrificing anything of the musical beauty. His Recitative arioso takes an intermediate place between the oratorical recitative of the French, and the recitative secco of the Italians, and was one of the models for the recitative of J. S. Bach,[46] and even not excepting Bach and Handel, Mattheson persists in seeing in Keiser the master of this style.—But the real supreme gift of Keiser was his melodic invention. In that he was one of the first artists in Germany, and the Mozart of the first part of the eighteenth century. He had an abundant and winning inspiration. As Mattheson said, “His true nature was tenderness, love....” From the commencement to the end of his career he could reproduce voluptuous feelings with such exquisite art that no one could surpass him. His melodic style, much more advanced than that of Handel—not only at this particular epoch but at any moment of his life—is free, unsophisticated and happy. It is not the contrapuntal style of Handelian Opera, but it inclines rather to that of Hasse (who was trained entirely in it), to the symphonists of Mannheim, and to Mozart. Never has Handel, greater and more perfect as he was, possessed the exquisite note which breathes in the melodies of Keiser—that fresh perfume of the simple flower of the field.[47] Keiser had the taste for popular songs and rustic scenes,[48] but he knew also how to rise to the very summits of classical tragedy, and some of his airs of stately grief might have been written by Handel himself.[49] Keiser was, then, full of lessons and of models for Handel, who was not slow to take them,[50] but he also set him several bad examples too. The worst was the renunciation of the national language. Whilst Postel and Schott had been at the head of the Hamburg Opera the Italian language had been kept within bounds,[51] but since Keiser had become Director he had changed all that. In his Claudius (1703) he made the first barbarous attempt at a mixture of Italian and German languages. It was for him a pure fanfare of virtuosity, and he wished to show, as he explained in his Preface, that he was capable of beating the Italians on their own ground. He took no account of the detriment to German Opera. Handel, following his example, mixes, in his first operas, the airs with Italian words with those set to German words.[52] Since that time he no longer wrote Italian operas; and after that, his musical theatre was without foundation and without public. The sanction of this error resulted in Germany’s neglect of Keiser’s operas and even of those of Handel, despite the genius of both composers.

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