[139] Le goût musical en France (1905).
[140] Histoire de la musique, Vol. I.
CHAPTER XIV
HANDEL AND THE ORATORIO
The consequences of the seventeenth century: Bach and Handel—Handel’s early life; the opera at Hamburg; the German oratorio—The Italian period, ‘Rodrigo,’ ‘Agrippina,’ and ‘Resurrezione’—Music in England; Handel as opera composer and impresario—Origins of the Handelian oratorio; from ‘Esther’ to ‘The Messiah’—Handel’s instrumental music; conclusion.
In myriad ways the seventeenth century had wrought a mighty task. Founding their practice upon the technique acquired by previous generations, its composers had evolved definite styles of composition, both in the polyphonic and the monodic schools. The demand for greater sonority had caused them to exploit the harmonic resources of music more than before; the perfection of instruments and instrumental technique had stimulated melodic invention and rhythmic variety, and this increased technique had in turn been applied to vocal music, which, beginning with Caccini in 1600, had developed a marvellous virtuosity demanding ever greater means of display. While the old vocal polyphony had largely yielded its sway to the more individualistic art of solo singing, its technique and ideals were preserved in the instrumental forms of chamber music, which, as we have seen, crystallized during the course of the century, and, as the same composers were bound to essay both styles, a union of the two had, in a measure, been effected.
In such a period of transition there was little chance for ultimate perfection; it was an age of innovators rather than masters. Yet the century had produced some great men, too: Alessandro Scarlatti and Arcangelo Corelli in Italy, Lully, Rameau and Couperin in France, Schütz, Froberger, and Kuhnau were men of no small attainments. Their work had sufficient power and charm to gain acceptance for the new styles and to popularize them. But it remained for another generation to bring forth two men great enough to make them survive through posterity, to give them lasting life. Those two men were Georg Friedrich Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach. It is notable that both came of the same spiritual stock, that of the Thuringian church organists—that contemplative, sequestered school of artists,—imbued with a homely philosophy and influenced by the sweet quietude of German domesticity,—which wrought for the glory of God and the uplift of the human soul. Handel[141] and Bach were born within one month of each other, and within a very short distance, for Eisenach is less than an hour’s run from Halle, where Handel saw the light of day, February 23d, 1685. They were as nearly contemporaries, in the literal sense, as men can be—Bach died but nine years before his colleague,—but in spirit they were generations removed from one another. Curious as it is that they never in their life met, though well acquainted with each other’s work, we may find a psychological explanation for the fact in that Handel represented the spirit and apogee of his age, summing up the achievements of the generations immediately gone before, while Bach, penetrating into the very essence of the music of past ages, evolved from it a new art that should inspire the musicians of generations to come, that should go surging down through the centuries like a mighty everlasting stream from which the genius of composers could draw continuous inspiration without the danger of exhaustion, an art so great that it had to break all the shackles and restrictions of its time and build for itself a new system, create a new language.
I
Who shall say which of the two men had the greater talent? Their difference is one of character, not of degree. Bach, exploring quietly the resources of his own soul, hardly stirred from his narrow surroundings; Handel, of infinite flexibility and adaptability, appropriated every style, every trick, every brilliant effect he heard, imbuing it with new power. Restlessly he roamed to Berlin and Hamburg, to Italy, and finally to England, everywhere sweeping up in his mighty grasp the achievements of men gone before him, indefatigably composing and rousing a wondering world to new enthusiasms. Bach, unmindful of the public taste, retiring, profound, inexorable; Handel constantly trimming his sails to the wind of public favor, achieving success after success, not by new means, but by using those at his command with the full power of genius. From early youth he felt the stirrings of that genius; before he was seven, indeed, he had taught himself to play upon the harpsichord,—surreptitiously, we are told, for his father, village surgeon at Giebichenstein, near Halle, intent upon the social advancement of his son, was so fearful of his son’s developing a ‘non-productive’ talent that he even refused to send him to school, lest he should learn his notes. Well known is the story of how admiring friends smuggled the harpsichord into the garret, where young Georg would delight his heart in the still hours of the night. No less known, also, are the circumstances of his father’s journey to the court of Saxe-Weissenfels, where a son by a former marriage was valet-de-chambre to the duke. Young Handel insisted on following the carriage on foot until his father relented and took him to the court, where he came in contact with the duke’s musicians and was permitted to play upon the organ. It was at the duke’s peremptory advice that the father finally consented to give his boy a musical training. F. W. Zachau, the organist of the Liebfrauenkirche, which raises its tall spires in the market-place of Halle, where opposite it we now behold Handel’s monument, became his master. For three years he was made to compose a sacred motet every week, by way of exercise. When, in 1696, Handel was sent on a visit to Berlin, he already astounded musicians like Attilio Ariosti by his powers of improvisation, though the famous Bononcini, who was later to become his bitter rival, seems already to have looked upon the boy with suspicion, for he gave him the difficult test of playing a newly composed fugue at sight, which Handel promptly fulfilled. The elector of Brandenburg desired to attach him to his court and send him to Italy for further study, but to forestall this he was summoned to return home, and again placed in charge of the competent Zachau. In the next year his father died, and, obliged to support himself and his mother, he secured, on probation, the post of organist at the Dom- und Schlosskirche, at the same time entering the university—that university so closely identified with Protestant theology—as a student.
Handel’s nature was not one to tolerate the comparative seclusion and retirement of Halle for long. Moreover, it inclined to a style of music less austere than that of the Lutheran church—so that when echoes of quite a different school, joined to reports of brilliant successes, reached his ears, he gave them ready heed. Such reports came from Hamburg, now the chief stronghold of Italian opera in Germany. In order to explain its existence we must for a moment turn the reader’s mind back to the already related importation of opera into Germany in 1627 and its first exponent there—Heinrich Schütz. This event had been followed by operatic performances—in Italian—at Regensburg (L’inganno d’amore, by Ferrari, 1653); Vienna (Antonio Draghi’s Alcindo and Cloridia, 1655); and Munich (Giulio Riva’s Adelaida Regia Principiosa di Susa). But no further attempt at opera in German was made till the appearance at Hamburg of Johann Teile’s singspiel, Adam und Eva, in 1678. By virtue of this composer’s efforts Hamburg attained the operatic supremacy of Germany. Names now all but forgotten, Johann Förtsch, Johann Franck, Johann Cousser, were staunch pioneers in the cause of German art at this northern output, though their Germanism no doubt suffered a generous admixture of Italian influence. The same is true of the work of the triumvirate of the Hamburg opera—Keiser, Mattheson, and Telemann—which held sway there from the early sixties on. The first of these produced no less than 116, and probably more, operas for Hamburg during 1694-1734. To him especially the opera house owed its word-wide fame—to his work as impresario perhaps more than as composer, for, from Basilius (first performed at Wolfenbüttel in 1693 and the next year in Hamburg) to Circe, his swan song of forty years after, all the works that were able to arouse enthusiasm in his time are but names to us. Nevertheless Keiser may well count as having placed German opera upon a firm foundation. The style of his works, rediscovered in 1810, is more German than that of his colleagues and, though less remarkable for rhetorical perfection, compares favorably with Lully’s in the matter of variety of expression and dramatic truth.