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George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Perhaps the most pernicious and unjust blot on Handel's reputation as a composer is the claim that he was a "borrower" (and by this the accusers generally mean "pilferer") of musical materials, both from himself and from others. This led some commentators in the 19th century who prized originality to undervalue those works that included such borrowings, and the composer who would undertake such borrowings seemingly as a matter of course. This attitude was a hypocritical one even then-is Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony to be dismissed or found wanting because its finale includes a tune that Beethoven had used in at least three previous compositions? Is Act II of Wagner's "Die Walküre" somehow less significant than it might have been because Wagner adapts a theme from Liszt's "Faust Symphony" in it? As musicologists continue their archival work it becomes clear that the recycling of a composer's own musical ideas and the adaptation of those of others is standard procedure in all eras. Nevertheless, the tracking of borrowings in Handel's music has become a full-fledged sport among scholars, and the fact that Handel invariably creates something individual and unique out of what he borrowed has not always lessened the detective instincts of his pursuers. In recent years a group of Handel scholars has begun to look at this issue from another direction. It is known that Handel's first teacher had an extensive library of music from composers of Italy, France, and Germany, and that his pedagogical method was to give a pre-existing composition to students and to ask them to write a piece "on" that model. The thinking is that perhaps this pedagogical method became the basis for Handel's compositional style, and that in some degree everything Handel wrote was based on a model; in any case, Handel kept a large collection of scores, and models have been identified for about 40 percent of his compositions. Handel and the keyboard Handel was recognized as one of the finest keyboard performers of his day. When he and Domenico Scarlatti were still in their early twenties, one of the musical cognoscenti of the day arranged a competition between the two. According to legend, Scarlatti-who had yet to become known for his compositions-was acknowledged to be the flashier player on the harpsichord, but Handel's superiority on the organ was generally conceded outside Germany. In Germany itself, Handel's renown as an organist was also quite high, although those who had the opportunity to observe both Handel and J. S. Bach in action as organists tended to give the higher marks to Bach for the greater complexity of his musical thought and his more elaborate mastery of pedal technique. To be fair to Handel, many of the organs on which he played in England had rudimentary or non-existent pedal keyboards. This did not prevent him from being one of the first composers to write organ concertos-his standard practice was to perform these as interludes between sections of his oratorios. Handel wrote a number of works for harpsichord. Suites form the bulk of this output, but eleven of these date from his early years, and he rarely wrote for the instrument after 1720. Nevertheless, the suites show his stylistic eclecticism in full flower, and contain two pieces that have gone on to greater fame. The Harmonious Blacksmith is the air with variations that concludes the Suite in E (known as "No. 5"); it was Handel's most popular keyboard work, becoming a part of the standard repertory for piano even when the harpsichord was out of favor in the 19th and early twentieth centuries, and ultimately made the suite of which it is a part more famous than its companions. (The recording we will hear demonstrates its continued presence as part of the piano repertory.) In addition, the theme that Brahms used for his set of "Variations on a theme of Handel" is the air from Handel's late suite in B-flat (not numbered among the usual sixteen). Handel's creative personality The nature of Handel's music is confident, deft in drama and characterization, and directly expressive. In terms of Baroque style, which focuses on establishing a single affects per movement of a work, Handel's genius is unquestioned, although by later standards his works are sometimes seem lengthy through repetitive insistence on basic musical ideas. Although it was written in the bad old days when only a few of Handel's works were known, words by George Bernard Shaw remain one of the greatest tributes to Handel's genius and insightful penetrations of the essence of Handel's style:
Water Music This extensive group of orchestral pieces stems from at least 1717, when for the third year in succession Handel's patron King George I undertook a public excursion down the Thames, accompanied by a barge containing fifty musicians playing this music. The group of pieces became one of Handel's most enduringly popular works and was revised frequently in the coming decades. Several arrangements of the music have been proposed, including the idea that the music is in essence three different suites in three different keys. But in any order the witty, catchy dances alternating with longer, more substantial music shows Handel at his most confident. Brief biography Handel was born in Halle in 1685, the son of a doctor over sixty years old and his second wife, nearly three decades younger. Handel's father died when the young composer-to-be was not quite twelve. By this time he had begun to demonstrate an unquenchable interest in music. By his late teens he escaped from the limited circle of his birthplace, becoming employed by the opera at Hamburg, where he fell under the influence of the opera composer Reinhard Keiser and began his public career as a composer. After several years in Italy, he returned to become Kapellmeister at Hanover. Within a few years he first established ties with London and then moved there permanently, becoming the leading composer working in England from 1713 onward. For more than a quarter century he devoted his energies to writing and producing operas, involving himself in the hurly-burly of this world with great enthusiasm. A series of financial setbacks and changing tastes on the part of the public convinced him to switch to writing oratorios (unstaged dramatic entertainments on sacred subjects), and it was this genre of composition that he cultivated most assiduously from 1741 until his death in 1759. Always recognized as one of the great masters of composition, it has not been until the late twentieth century that the full range of his creative work has been rediscovered; he was prolific in all known compositional genres of his day, and boasted a style which was both distinctive in its forthrightness and appealing in character. "Utrecht" Te Deum Handel wrote this magnificent choral work in 1713, just as the succession to the English crown was to settle on the Hanover line in whose service Handel was nominally employed, and just as peace between England and France was to be achieved. Handel was no doubt aware of the "official" English Te Deum setting by Purcell, written some two decades earlier, but his own setting became the new model and established a new degree of pomp and scale for English ceremonial music. Sonata in c This work is one of Handel's early contributions to the solo sonata literature. In this case the sonata was written for oboe, with bassoon involved in doubling the bass line, and seems to have been written during the period of 1711-12 when Handel was employed in Hanover but gradually establishing a reputation in England. Apollo e Dafne This large-scale dramatic cantata was begun in Venice during Handel's Italian sojourn when he was in his early twenties, but was not completed until after he returned to Germany. The subject is a variation on the famous myth of Apollo, who is struck by one of Cupid's arrows and falls in love with the bewitchingly beautiful nymph Daphne; in the course of his pursuit of her she turns into a laurel tree. Zadok the Priest is one of four anthems Handel wrote in 1727 for the coronation festivities for George II. It has been performed at every subsequent British coronation. It begins with an orchestral passage with consistent figuration and an implied crescendo; the grandeur of the choral entrance, complete with trumpets and timpani, is one of Handel's most memorable strokes, and the joyously energetic melismas associated with the repeated exclamations "God save the King" bring this work to a thrilling close. Acis and Galatea Handel first turned to the subject of what became his most popular dramatic work during his Italian years when he was in his early twenties, but it was not until a decade later, when he was living just outside London, that he first wrote the work in a form that was the basis for all future revivals of it. From the (presumed) first performance in 1718 until the score was published twenty-five years later Handel supervised performances of this work on at least eight occasions (including during the months in Dublin that saw the first performance of Messiah), each time making changes depending on the singers or circumstances at his disposal. The story that is the basis for Acis and Galatea is recorded in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The shepherd Acis (tenor) and nymph Galatea (soprano) are in love, but the giant Polyphemus (bass) also loves Galatea and courts her clumsily. Acis persists, and is killed by Polyphemus in a fit of rage, but Galatea then transforms him into a fountain, whereby he may forever murmur his love. Other characters include the cupid-like Damon and the shepherd Coridon. Handel's work has been attributed to many genres; Winton Dean and others believe that it is best to call it a masque-a kind of semi-staged courtly entertainment involving singing, choruses, and dancing that by Handel's time was applied to short semi-operas. At the same time, had Handel pursued the implications of the work when it first was written he might have established a thriving school of English opera that never came to be. At first Handel's work did not involve a chorus at all, but as it now stands it consists of two acts, each of which begins and ends with a chorus (including the famous "Happy we" at the end of Act I). In between are many arias, all based on the da capo style that was then prevalent-an opening section, a contrasting section, and then a more or less literal repetition of all or part of the opening section (although this reprise was the opportunity for greater ornamentation from the singer). Many of the arias in this work are famous, none more so than Acis's "Love in her eyes sits playing" from Act 1 and Polyphemus's "O ruddier than the cherry" from Act 2. Incidentally, Polyphemus here counts soprano recorders among the accompanying instruments, a touch that shows Handel willing to characterize the giant in a relatively ludicrous way. Opus numbers mean nothing in assessing chronology in Handel's works-they were provided only for collections of similarly scored instrumental music. Thus no vocal compositions were assigned opus numbers in Handel's own day, and his "opus 1" contains all solo sonatas, opus 2 all trio sonatas, opus 3 and opus 6 two different sets of concerti grossi, and so on. This technical discussion is relevant to the Violin Sonata in D major (HWV 371), written near the end of Handel's compositional activity around 1750 and recognized as his last chamber work (and one of his best), because it was assigned the number "opus 1, #13" when in fact the first twelve items of opus 1 had been written by the 1720s and published as a set around 1730! In fact, recent scholarship suggests that some of the pieces published in the original opus 1 were not by Handel at all-such was the confusion of the music-publishing world in 18th-century England. The recorder, by Handel's day a venerable instrument, remained much used in his orchestras and chamber music, and a number of the solo sonatas of opus 1 are written for it, including the popular Sonata in A minor. One of the novelties of Handel's oratorio productions was that during intermissions he would perform organ concertos. There really was no precedent for works featuring organ solo with orchestra, and since that time only a few concerted works with organ solo have made any headway in the popular repertory (for example, Poulenc's Concerto in G minor, although the sound of organ and orchestra is familiar from Saint-Saëns's Third Symphony, Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra, and so on). These organ concertos ended up being as popular as the oratorios into which they were inserted, and have remained much loved. Although published as the last of Handel's six organ concertos, Opus 4, the concerto in F op. 4 #6 was originally a harp concerto; in order to allow this delicate instrument to be heard, the orchestration features muted strings and pizzicato basses, a timbre which lends unique sound to the concerto when an organ rather than harp is employed as the solo instrument. "Laudate, pueri Dominum"-Handel wrote two settings of Psalm 112, and both come from early in his career. The one in F major has been speculated to come from as early as his first compositional attempts in Halle (although it reached its final form only during Handel's Italian years). The second, in D major, was definitely written in Rome in 1707 and turns out to have been important later in Handel's career; one passage serves as the basis for the famous aria "O had I Jubal's lyre" from the oratorio Joshua, written forty years later. This second one is more surely drawn and foreshadows some of the drama and grandeur for which Handel was to become famous. Messiah is one of the great icons of Western music and Western civilization; it's hard for us to imagine a world without it. Churchgoers find the tunes, rhythms, and spirit of the work infecting their minds when they encounter the words Handel set in scriptural readings. Some of the melodies are thoroughly catchy, made doubly so through frequent performance. No matter how significant other works of music may be, few others leave their imprint on audience behavior like the "Hallelujah" chorus, in which, following the lead of King George on first hearing the work, the audience rises to its feet in homage to the music and the God whose glory it proclaims. This same chorus prompted Haydn to cry out "He is the master of us all!" when he first heard it; Handel's oratorios in general caused Haydn (already sixty years old) to feel "as if he had been put back to the beginning of his studies and known nothing up to that moment." The greatness of Messiah comes from a combination of features. By using the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer as the basis of his enterprise, Handel was assured that the words would be thoroughly understood by his devout audience. By writing extensively for chorus in this work he played into and helped to develop the English love of amateur participation in music making. By writing in English he foreswore the dying fad of Italian opera on the English scene, aligning himself more thoroughly with the emerging middle class. Although some of the solo writing is demanding, it was recognized on the first appearance of the work that the level of difficulty in such arias was considerably less than in the operas that had preceded Handel's switch to writing oratorios. The variety of musical procedures Handel uses is much greater than with his operas-this work includes extensive word painting, choruses that are variously contrapuntal and chordal, arias that range from operatic in scope and structure to simple, pleasing songs, and occasional instrumental passages. All this combined to make the work accessible, memorable, and uplifting. The occasion for the writing and premiere of the work was Handel's visit of more than six months' duration to Dublin in the winter of 1741-42. Handel had written most of the work before leaving London for Dublin, although he adapted the work a bit on seeing the limitations of the Dublin forces at his disposal. One of the soloists (for whom nothing was changed) was the notorious Mrs. Cibber, a renowned actress who had run off with a man who was not her husband, thereby (in those puritanical times) hindering her career. She was not a great musician but her way of declaiming her solos was so moving that when she sang "He was despised," one of her most ardent critics, the chancellor of St. Patrick's cathedral, called out "Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee!" The librettist for Messiah was a great admirer of Handel, but he was unaccountably displeased with the overture to this work, which to us today seems quite appropriate, and which is often referred to as a textbook example of what is known as French overture form. The Reverend Charles Jennens thought that Handel had made "a fine entertainment of [Messiah], tho' not near so good as he might & ought to have done. I have with great difficulty made him correct some of the grossest faults in the composition, but he retain'd his overture obstinately, in which there are some passages far unworthy of Handel, but much more unworthy of the Messiah." Perhaps Handel really did know best! Handel's personal character Since the 19th century it has become fashionable for posterity to try to find evidence of a composer's character in his work, and to attempt to read his inner life through his music. There are gratifying correspondences between the works and lives of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and numerous other great composers. But to attempt to read that inner life through the music of earlier composers is bound to be frustrating, since the composers themselves did not share the same perspective-to say nothing of the fact that they were much less in control of deciding what to write. Circumstances, commissions, and professional necessity determined the character of their works more than their own inner feelings. In Handel's case, the "inner" personality of the man is not well known. He seems to have been a politically savvy operator, and such people often neither leave many traces of their inner life in letters nor reveal much of their "real" selves to those with whom they come into contact. Be that as it may, it is definitely known that Haydn had a brusque exterior and a boisterous temper. His relations with the singers he employed were sometimes turbulent. He once seems to have threatened one of the great divas of her day with being dropped out of a window when she did not want to sing one of the arias in her role. Slightly less known is the occasion on which one of his male singers threatened to jump on (and thus destroy) the harpsichord Handel was playing because of the nature of the accompaniment Handel was providing, and Handel's response ran along the lines of: go ahead and jump, but let me advertise first, because more people will pay to see you jump than to hear you sing. At several stages of his life Handel had students, but none of them lasted very long; biographers suggest that he was temperamentally unsuited to the life of a pedagogue. Here are a few anecdotes and eyewitness accounts of Handel the man:
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Handel's
borrowings