Both the forms, that of Handel and that of Bach, have individuality and distinct limitations. Bach's style, capable as it is of intense feeling, is essentially intimate, personal, and undramatic. It is always the voice of Bach in direct address to you that you hear. Handel's method is productive of broad and imposing effects, and while it is frequently only theatrical, it is quite as often sincerely and convincingly dramatic. One of Handel's biographers says of his great choruses: "They are choral recitatives, uttered by the voice of a multitude instead of a man. And strangely enough, the path that led to this embodiment of the composer's aspirations was the dusty path of Italian opera, where great combinations were impossible, science all but wasted, and where a giant intellect found little to grasp." Yet it is precisely the development of Handel's oratorio style from his work as an Italian opera composer that establishes its direct connection with the progress of the original Italian school of oratorio founded in Rome. It was the outcome, the climax, and the end of this school. Bach's Passion oratorios were the product of a purely German and Protestant ancestry, and they, too, were the highest achievement of their school. The subsequent history of oratorio will show us how attempts were made to fuse the elements of the two schools.
[Chapter XVII]
Haydn and Mendelssohn
Decadence of oratorio after Handel and Bach—Haydn and "The Creation"—Development of descriptive orchestration in oratorio—Haydn's oratorios descriptive and contemplative—Mendelssohn and the fusion of styles—His dramatic German Protestant oratorios—Mingling of elements from Handel and Bach.
FOR a considerable period after the deaths of Handel and Bach nothing of note in oratorio form was produced. One must seek for the cause of this in the vitiated state of public taste. Europe was addicted to the Italian opera habit, and in those days Italian opera was quite as empty, meaningless, and insincere as it has been at most periods in its history. There were no Italian composers who had sufficient genius to combine dramatic truth with musical beauty, so those who were writing contented themselves with the easily attainable, and turned out watery arias to please the superficial multitude. It was much easier for people to listen to that sort of music than to the imposing works of Handel or the subtle productions of Bach. Indeed the work of the latter was not known far outside of his own country. The large and comprehensive "History of Music," by Sir John Hawkins, published in 1776, when England was not yet through mourning the loss of Handel, contains a very brief mention of Bach, and says nothing at all about his Passions. They indeed were quite forgotten till Mendelssohn found that according to St. Matthew and resurrected it a hundred years after it was written. In the meantime Sacchini, Paisiello, Jomelli, and other Italian opera composers, whose works are now as dead as the Pharaohs, were writing worthless oratorios in operatic style.
Josef Haydn (1732-1813) began his career as an oratorio composer by writing an Italian work, in 1774, called "Il ritorno di Tobia." It was in the accepted form of its time, and though it contained some melodious solo parts and some well made fugal choruses, it shared the fate of other oratorios in the same style and sank into oblivion. Before Haydn reached the closing years of his life, however, two influences combined to change the public attitude toward operatic and oratorio music. Gluck had made a determined stand against the meaningless jingle of Italian opera music and had shown how to write operas which should be simple, melodious, and dramatically honest. Mozart had taken the entire extant apparatus of Italian opera and shown how it could be made the vehicle of the fullest dramatic expression and the most faithful characterization. The people in general were led to revolt against the employment of the unsuitable style of the old-fashioned opera in church music, of which they felt oratorio was a close connection. They saw that if Italian opera music was unfit for the stage, it was certainly less suited to a form closely allied to worship.
Meanwhile Haydn had been in London and had heard some of Handel's oratorios. The knowledge gained therefrom he was now to put to good use in constructing the choruses of his new works. His own developments in orchestration had been supplemented by Mozart's revelation of the wide possibilities of tone-coloring, and Haydn, equipped with all this knowledge, was to make a most important contribution to the growth of oratorio in its orchestral department. In the latter days of his great career, in 1798, Haydn produced "The Creation," a work which has survived its worthless predecessors of the post-Handelian period, and which is welcomed today wherever music lovers have not lost their ability to appreciate simplicity and unpretentious beauty. In form "The Creation" is much more closely allied to the epic form of "The Messiah" than the dramatic shape of "Samson" and other works. The solo parts of "The Creation" are assigned to persons in the drama, as Adam and Eve, but these persons have no dramatic character or function. Their voices are employed only as those of narrators or commentators. They narrate the events of creation and comment on its wonders. The reader will at once see that this method deprived the work of the powerful element of personal characterization. The emotions of Adam and Eve never come to the surface. There is no passion, no grief in "The Creation." Thus it makes a step backward toward the music of pure religious contemplation, such as we found at the close of the era of church counterpoint. But Haydn's means were more modern. His arias for the solo voices have all the beauty of melody and style to be found in the best Italian writing for the stage, while they add to these elements a sincerity never wanting in the music of Haydn.
The choruses are naturally designed on a less imposing scale than those of Handel, which, as we have seen, had a certain dramatic quality. The general style and purpose of Haydn's oratorio writing made it inevitable that his choruses should be more contemplative or descriptive and less dramatic, and his development of the instrumental accompaniment emphasized this condition. It was Haydn who introduced into the oratorio purely descriptive orchestral music, and in doing this he paved the way for later composers to make stronger dramatic effects. Descriptive music in the orchestra, and instrumental accompaniments with special significance, are now a familiar part of the apparatus of the lyric drama as well as of the oratorio. Haydn employed these means as a part of his general scheme of descriptive writing. In order to give his instrumental description full scope, he was obliged to cast his choruses in a simpler mould than those of Handel, but his contributions to the art of descriptive writing were quite as valuable within their field as Handel's to the art of building huge choral climaxes. The prelude to "The Creation" is an instrumental representation of chaos; in the recitative beginning "And God made the firmament" are instrumental illustrations of storms, winds, thunders, and floods; the air "Rolling in foaming billows" has an accompaniment designed to suggest to the hearer the movement of waves. These were Haydn's original devices, and as such, although they sound simple and even naive to us today, they claim an important place in the advancement of musical art.