Handel (52 page)

The presence in the story of three national groups, the Babylonians, their Jewish captives and the attacking Persians, gave Handel the chance to develop a type of contrast he had already illustrated in
Athalia
and
Samson
, where worshippers of the true God and pagan idolaters receive distinctive musical treatments. In
Belshazzar
each nation is clearly identifiable. With its fierce, foot-stamping rhythms, the Babylonian music reaches a pitch of primitive exultation in the drunken orgy, ‘Ye tutelar gods of our empire look down', which sets the scene for the Writing on the Wall. Who else but Handel could have achieved such an effect with so confident a simplicity of means? The Persians, on the other hand, give utterance with a sturdiness and lucidity that emphasize their uncompromising resolve. In the limpid fluency of ‘See, from his post Euphrates flies' (later effectively transformed into a movement for the first of three double wind band concertos written for the 1747–8 season),
we can hear a gleeful rejoinder to the facile laughter of the Babylonians ‘deriding Cyrus as engag'd in an impracticable Undertaking'. For the Jews, grave, patient and dignified, an altogether more thoughtful vein is exercised, and both
Israel in Egypt
and the Funeral Anthem are recalled in their hieratic solemnities.

Belshazzar
, though nuanced with Jennens's dissident politics and his personal absorption with the significance of biblical prophecy, deals as cogently with individuals as with abstracts. The opening soliloquy, in which the King's mother Queen Nitocris (pertinently borrowed from Herodotus) contemplates the ‘vain, fluctuating state of human empire' in an accompanied recitative of profound gloom, sums up the entire nature of the work in the tension sprung between the realities of power and destiny on the one hand, and the human beings who confront them on the other. There is no romantic interest, nor do we feel a need of it, but the characters' emotions and motives are varied and convincing throughout. Nitocris, a matriarch of truly Racinian grandeur, ultimately finds her peace in the counsels of Daniel, an eloquent alto role, and in the heroic magnanimity of Cyrus, the ‘new man' in the imperial struggle, who is given appropriately modern-sounding airs (‘Destructive war' might easily have been composed by Hasse or Graun). Belshazzar himself is an insouciant bon vivant, a noisily drunken aristocrat of apparently imperishable breed.

The great scene of the Writing on the Wall, the drama's pivotal episode, offers a check to the King's arrogance which, though only temporary, is yet severe. In the midst of his defiance of Jehovah's power, the music crumbles into recitative and the astonished chorus of feasting nobles loses all tonal foundation as the horrified King watches the spectral hand spelling out the doom of his realm. The authentic quality of sheer terror must have been enhanced here by recollection of the Bible's vivid ‘his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another'. In come the hastily summoned Chaldean soothsayers, to an ‘Allegro Postillions' borrowed from Telemann's
Musique de Table
to evoke their fussy inconsequence. Only Daniel can resolve the enigma, which he does with awesome, almost contemptuous remoteness, after which the scene closes abruptly with Nitocris's sombre ‘Regard, O son, my flowing tears', a largo siciliano charged with all the pathos at Handel's command.

If this number brings back reminiscences of Cuzzoni and Faustina, the association is scarcely accidental, for
Belshazzar
is among the most markedly dramatic of the oratorios. It was not written for stage performance, but that did not prevent composer and librettist from conceiving it in histrionic terms, with detailed stage directions to help the audience with wordbooks in hand, and the airs, choruses and recitatives are often thrillingly theatrical. The debate endures as to whether or not the oratorios may be adequately staged, but the directions in
Belshazzar
frequently seem less like real indications for performance than hints to the audience as to how Handel and Jennens wanted them to imagine the various scenes. In fairness, however, to advocates of dramatic presentation, it must be said that the piece undoubtedly works in the theatre and holds out splendid opportunities to the imaginative director.

Three of Handel's new works written for the 1744 and 1745 seasons had been rejected by his London public, and his subsequent attempts to rehabilitate them by carefully adapted revivals were wholly unsuccessful. Each was a creation of bold originality in design and intention, displaying its composer's authoritative grasp of musical idiom as something from which he had fashioned his own markedly personal, rich and cosmopolitan language, to make each piece into something unique in the dramatic music of the day. It has taken over 200 years for
Semele
,
Hercules
and
Belshazzar
to gain their due of admiration from those less hidebound either by conventional genres or by notions of sacred choral proprieties. An indication that Handel realized that he might have gone too fast for the taste of his audiences to catch up with him is given by the fact that each of his next four oratorios represents an effort to regain popularity by appealing to the simpler, louder, less intellectual elements among the concert-going English. He knew what the people wanted and was ready to give it to them.

13

Handel was now sixty years old, and despite the bewildering uncertainties of his professional career, the malice of his enemies and the incalculable fluctuations of popular favour, he had established himself as the doyen of London's musical life. More significantly, from a personal aspect, he had surrounded himself with a select circle of loyal and trusted friends, able to appreciate his stature as an artist as well as valuing his cheerful presence as a dinner guest, a travelling companion or a country visitor. Younger musicians and amateur performers, playing at his concerts or meeting him socially, noted their impressions, and gradually a wealth of anecdote and reminiscence began to surround him. He was, in short, becoming the great man.

Portraits convey a physical image, but for a more rounded impression we turn to the comments of contemporaries like Dr Charles Burney and Sir John Hawkins. Burney, who, as a schoolboy, had seen him at Chester, later joined his orchestra and formed a lifelong admiration for him. ‘Handel's general look', he recalls, ‘was somewhat heavy and sour; but when he did smile, it was his sire the sun, bursting out of a black cloud. There was a sudden flash of intelligence, wit and good humour, beaming in his countenance, which I hardly ever saw in any other.' Hawkins, who came to know him during his final years, tells us that ‘he was in his person a large made and very portly man. His gait, which was ever sauntering, was rather ungraceful, as it had in it somewhat of rocking motion, which distinguishes those whose legs are bowed. His features were finely marked, and the general cast of his countenance placid, bespeaking dignity tempered with benevolence, and every quality of the heart that has a tendency to beget confidence and insure esteem.'

Evidence, however, tends to contradict Hawkins's notion of Handel as a demure hermit,
with ‘no impertinent visits, no idle engagements to card parties, or other expedients to kill time'. We can readily accept his impression of a composer perpetually brimming over with ideas and always eager to be composing, so much so that the keys of his ‘favourite Ruckers harpsichord . . . were hollowed like the bowl of a spoon', but those suppers at Mrs Delany's, Mainwaring's comment apropos of Handel and food that ‘he paid more attention to it than is becoming to any man' and the eloquent jotting by the composer himself in one of his sketchbooks ‘12 Gallons Port 12 Gallons French', besides the attribution to him of the dictum that ‘the goose is a most inconvenient bird, too much for one and not enough for two', rule out any idea of a recluse whose ‘social affections were not very strong'. A satire published in 1750,
The Scandalizade
, has Heidegger describing Handel thus:

As if these testimonies were not enough, his erstwhile friend the scene painter Joseph Goupy published a caricature of him, entitled
The Charming Brute
in which a monkey and a racehorse listen to a pig playing the organ (decorated with hams and dead fowl) among a litter of musical instruments and oyster barrels. The cause of Goupy's attack, for which Handel expunged the artist's name from his will, was a dinner in Brook Street at which the composer had apologized for the frugal fare, promising Goupy that he would treat him with a better meal when he had more money to hand. After dinner Handel excused himself from the table and was so long away that Goupy, bored with waiting, wandered into the next room, from which a window giving on to the adjacent parlour showed him Handel guzzling off ‘claret and French dishes'.

The style of living at Brook Street was plain but not mean. Judging by the details of the inventory made at his death, the furniture had got a trifle shabby, and his ‘family' of servants seems only to have consisted of two men, an uncle and nephew, whose names, Peter Le Blond and John Duburk, suggest that they were probably of Huguenot origin. Hawkins praises him for not having kept a carriage – he used to hire ‘a chariot and horses' when he went into the city to see his broker Gael Morris at Garraway's or Batson's coffee house, or to bank his takings – but how many London musicians, we may wonder, had their own equipages?

His stormy temper remained a force to be reckoned with. Burney recalls that ‘at the close of an air, the voice with which he used to cry out, “Chorus!” was very formidable indeed; and at the rehearsals of his Oratorios, at Carlton House, if the Prince and Princess of Wales were not exact in coming to the Music-room he used to be very violent . . . if the maids of honour, or any other female attendant talked during the performance, I fear that our modern Timotheus not only swore, but called names; yet at such times, the Princess of Wales, with her accustomed mildness and benignity, used to say, “Hush! hush! Handel is in a passion.”'

They relished his wit as much as his passion. Once, auditioning an ambitious chorister, he asked him, ‘This is the way you praise God at Worcester?' ‘Yes,' replied the unsuspecting victim. ‘God is very good,' the answer came back, ‘and will no doubt hear your praises at Worcester, but no man will hear them at London.' In Dublin no less a master than his friend Matthew Dubourg was teased, as Burney tells us: ‘having a solo part in a song, and a close to make,
ad libitum
, he wandered about in different keys a great while, and seemed indeed a little bewildered, and uncertain of his original key . . . but, at length, coming to the shake, which was to terminate this long close, Handel, to the great delight of the audience, and augmentation of applause, cried out loud enough to be heard in the most remote parts of the theatre: “You are welcome home, Mr Dubourg!”'

‘Social affections' had brought him friends among the nobility as well as ‘within the pale of his own profession', and his summers seem by now to have established a fairly regular pattern in alternating visits to the country estates of his aristocratic acquaintance with trips to the watering places in search of elusive cures for his recurrent rheumatic ailments.
In Kent he could journey over from Tunbridge to stay with Sir Wyndham Knatchbull, in Dorset he might be the guest of Lord Shaftesbury at St Giles before going on to Salisbury to call on James Harris, and in the north Midlands he was a welcome visitor at Calwich Abbey, Staffordshire, home of Mrs Delany's brother Bernard Granville, where he is said to have worked on his oratorios in the rococo ‘fishing temple' on an island in the lake. In the same county was Teddesley Hall, where, according to uncorroborated tradition, he used to play in the amateur concerts of its squire Fisher Littleton. Further afield he spent time with Jennens at the newly rebuilt Gopsal, and at Exton in Rutland we catch a glimpse of him during June 1745, on his way to Scarborough.

Exton belonged to Lord Gainsborough, whose sister was Shaftesbury's wife and whose brother James Noel wrote describing a performance of
Comus
got up to celebrate a family anniversary while Handel was a house guest. The Noels opted for Milton's original masque, with one or two modifications, rather than the recent theatrical version by Arne and Dalton; their favourite composer's presence was a stroke of great good luck. ‘As Handel came to this place for Quiet and Retirement we were very loath to lay any task of Composition upon him. Selfishness however prevailed; but we were determined at the same time to be very moderate in our requests. His readiness to oblidge soon took off all our apprehensions upon that account. A hint of what we wanted was sufficient, and what should have been an act of Compliance he made a voluntary Deed.'

Their reluctance to put upon Handel says much, both for the intelligent kindliness of the Noels towards someone they might otherwise have been disposed to patronize as a mere musician, and for the esteem in which he was now held.
Comus
was put together by the enthusiastic summer house party in the space of five days, but rain forced them to perform indoors, though ‘we contrived however to entertain the Company there afterwards with an imitation of Vaux Hall: and in the style of a newspaper, the whole concluded with what variety of fireworks we could possibly get'. It must all have been tremendous fun, and Handel's three agreeably lightweight pieces, only discovered in 1969, conjure up an appropriate atmosphere of festive conviviality.