Handel (55 page)

Handel had begun
Joshua
on 19 July and completed it exactly a month later. Some six weeks before this he had started another piece to a Morell text, the oratorio
Alexander Balus
, but with some shrewdness he had chosen to make this the second of his Covent Garden novelties for 1748, since he must have foreseen that the title, even to those who knew their Apocrypha especially well, was hardly likely to draw as powerfully as that of its companion work. There is little evidence, even from that bible-reading age,
that many people were acquainted with the eponymous hero, for whom Morell had had to quarry deep into the well-excavated
Maccabees
to produce the story of the usurping Syrian king, Alexander, whose love for Cleopatra is thwarted by the wicked designs of her father, Ptolemy of Egypt, and whose alliance with the warlike Jews ends in his death.

Neither the story nor the libretto itself promised much to Handel. Morell, who does not really seem to have known exactly what he was doing with his sketchy materials, was at any rate a compliant collaborator. ‘As to the last Air' (Cleopatra's ‘Convey me to some peaceful shore') he wrote to a friend:

Convey me to some peaceful shore
,

Lead me to some peaceful shore.
'

Before we dismiss so apparently cavalier an attitude towards the text, it is worth recalling once again the Verdi–Piave parallel, where the exchange of letters between composer and poet bears witness to the latter's need to keep his verses flexible in the face of the streamrollings of the martinet musician
.
As the ironic title of a later eighteenth-century opera has it,
Prima la musicae, poi le parole
.

Even with its iambics reversed, the stark beauty of ‘Convey me to some peaceful shore', its skeletal accompaniment (merely punctuating the rests) eloquent of the heroine's emotional exhaustion, can scarcely save
Alexander Balus
from oblivion. It was given only three performances in 1748 and one subsequent revival during Handel's lifetime (plans for another had to be scrapped because of the Prince of Wales's sudden death). Nor has the gradual Handelian re-emergence in modern times brought about much of a reappraisal. The first act is manifestly topheavy and the second does little to advance the story,
which only gets properly going in Act III, when Cleopatra makes the work her own in a succession of potently effective arias and accompanied recitatives. The protagonists are otherwise pallid and conventional, in the case of Alexander and Ptolemy respectively, though the latter's unregenerate villainy at least gave Reinhold a chance for stronger vocal acting than was required of him in
Judas
and
Joshua
. The tenor role of Jonathan, priggish and detached, is perhaps the most antipathetic Handel and his librettists ever created.

A sense of confusion and irritation irradiates the composer's autograph score. That his mind was not wholly on the job is indicated by such telling details as ‘Judah' for ‘Jonathan' against the vocal stave of ‘Great God from whom all blessings spring': ‘Judah' is referred to in the air itself and in the preceding recitative, but it was clearly all one to Handel. The manuscript is in any case fuller than ever of second thoughts, erasures and wholesale transferences of verse lines from one place to another, suggesting that several pieces may have been composed in anticipation of their texts. Yet the old dramatic flair leaps out at us in a handful of irresistible moments, as when Cleopatra's limpid siciliano ‘Here amid the shady Woods' is broken in upon by the entry of Ptolemy's gang of ruffians, who haul her off like the
Rigoletto
courtiers abducting Gilda, or in the unaccompanied opening to her ‘O take me from this hateful light'. Perhaps what Handel really wanted to do here was to write opera rather than oratorio. The very title
Alexander Balus
recalls Italian double-barrels like
Lucio Papirio
or
Caio Fabrizio
, and the sensuality of a score enriched with brass, flutes, a harp and a mandoline seems to hint at a world to which sententious monotheism is alien and disagreeable. Failure here is understandable: in Handel's last works, four oratorios of incalculable brilliance, public caprice alone determined the measure of success.

14

The last and greatest phase of Handel's career as a composer saw him the approved master of a form for which his imagination had devised new dimensions. The term ‘oratorio' seems altogether too limiting to apply to the type of work he had developed during the course of the 1740s. Though
Semele
and
Hercules
are not oratorios, they represent a crucial stage in this process, for without them
Belshazzar
and
Judas Maccabaeus
are inconceivable, just as none of these works is imaginable without the experience of
Messiah
, a piece that appears like a sublime exercise in the reduction of Handel's genius to its essential components. Nor does any of the oratorios aim merely at formulaic repetition of another. Like the plays of Shakespeare or the operas of Verdi, each, despite external pressures from the entertainment world, creates its own individual dimensions. Though, like the English playwright and the Italian composer, Handel had occasional recourse to quickfire solutions and half-hearted fudging, the particular quality of his absorption in a given work gave it a unique character. Thus when we speak vaguely of ‘Handel oratorio' we mean something whose connexion with the form as then accepted in Italy and Germany is only a general one. Yet the more closely we look at pieces like
Susanna
and
Theodora
, imparting an intimacy comparable to the novels of Richardson or the comedies of Goldoni being written in the same epoch, the stronger seems the relationship of such compositions to another cultural milieu altogether, that of the seventeenth-century Italian oratorios which established the musical genre, with their singular amalgam of introspection, intimacy and sensuality.

To carry his special kind of elastic expressiveness in the mature oratorios Handel significantly altered his approach to orchestration. He had never relinquished the very highest standards in his demands on all his performers. Burney recalled that ‘Handel wore an enormous white wig and,
when things went well at the Oratorio, it had a certain nod, or vibration, which manifested his pleasure and satisfaction. Without it, nice observers were certain that he was out of humour.' He could command some of the best musical hands in a city whose expectations went increasingly higher as each new Continental virtuoso arrived, and players such as the violinist Matthew Dubourg evidently found working with him a stimulating experience. But, unlike Bach or Vivaldi, he consistently refrained from treating his medium as a platform for instrumental display. After Sammartini's oboe pyrotechnics had graced the operas of the late 1730s Handel never again sought to throw an orchestral soloist into such bold relief. Though his sense of instrumental colour in terms of appropriate shading is subtler than that of any other contemporary master, he created a deliberate and momentous area of difference between his opera and oratorio scorings in his resolute restriction of the oboes, in the latter, to the choral numbers. Not, of course, exclusively or dogmatically, but enough, in a piece like
Solomon
, where they do not participate in a single air, for their former function of giving bite to the string tone in the ritornelli of opera arias to be substantially abrogated.

It is not clear why he should have done this, unless he saw the oratorios as demanding a distinctive orchestral sound or was beginning to view the oboes in terms closer to those of his younger German and Italian contemporaries, anticipating the symphonists of the mid-century. Brass instruments are treated in similar fashion. The trumpet is still given an occasional solo outing, most notably in ‘With honour let desert be crown'd' from
Judas Maccabaeus
, where the striking use of it in an unaccustomed A minor effectively pinpoints the moral underlay of the hero's aria, but otherwise its use is to brighten moments of victorious festivity and religious assertiveness. Horns, as we have noted earlier in
Athalia
, could be used to conjure up the world of pagan revelry or to lend a dignified amplitude to pieces like ‘See, the conqu'ring hero comes' (originally in
Joshua
and transferred to
Judas
around 1750), or the overture in
Samson
. The flute (recorders do not figure in any of the mature oratorios) has a special function in enhancing erotic tenderness, as in the nightingale chorus of
Solomon
, or in deepening an atmosphere of solemn sadness like that which broods over the prison scene in
Theodora
. Yet, like the other instruments of Handel's oratorio orchestra, it is simply an artistic component of the score,
never an obbligato in the full sense of the label.

His setting of English texts had grown correspondingly more sensitive. He was never quite to rival Purcell in demonstrating the language's full validity as a medium for song, and his own grasp of it led him now and then to some odd stresses – ‘extrava
gant
ly' in
Hercules
, for instance, ‘to
re
ceive' and ‘in
cor
rup
ti
ble' in
Messiah
(though the seemingly Germanic ‘Phi
lis
tine' in Samuel's prophecy to Saul is wholly owing to Jennens) – but his understanding of the colour and nuance of English words is comparable in its awareness to that of another great foreign Englishman over a century later, the novelist Joseph Conrad.

Certainly Handel's turn from Italian to English not only gave an immense fillip to the growth of a native tradition of solo singing in its introduction of talents like those of John Beard and the Young sisters, Cecilia and Esther, but encouraged other composers to follow his example in the field of oratorio and its kindred forms. Younger masters, William Boyce, Thomas Augustine Arne and John Stanley among them, looked towards newer styles in their music yet simultaneously reflected the powerful impress of his manner, whether in form or idiom. When the progress of the blindness, which began its serious onset in 1751, put an end, despite flickering hopes of a recovery, to full-scale composition, there was the gratification for Handel of feeling that he had ended, not in stale repetition of trusted formulas, but at the height of his powers, extending even further the scope of the oratorio as a dramatic medium.
Jephtha
, his last original work, makes a memorable and impressive conclusion to half a century of unyielding dedication to his art.

Rivals were in any case now less likely to trouble him, the more so since foreign composers visiting London tended to concentrate upon opera and none of them seriously set up to dare him on his own ground. Some time in 1747 the news may have reached him of the death in Vienna, at the age of seventy-six, of his old challenger Giovanni Bononcini. Almost forgotten in circles where he had formerly reigned supreme, the Modenese composer lived in modest circumstances on the pension of fifty florins granted him by Maria Theresa in consideration of services to the imperial household. A pathetic list of his effects, made on the day after he died, includes, among such items as a mouse-coloured coat, an old hat,
two wigs with a block, a spinet and a fiddle bow, a night commode and two tin lamps, the tantalizing mention of two travelling trunks ‘wherein various musical concertos'. But it was not much for the man whose pride had rebuked emperors and duchesses.

The contrast with Handel as he found himself at the opening of the 1749 season can scarcely have been more marked. Lady Shaftesbury went to the new oratorio of
Susanna
‘in the light operatic style' and told James Harris ‘I think I never saw a fuller house. Rich told me that he believed he would receive near 400
1
.' Sir Edward Turner urged his friend the talented amateur architect Sanderson Miller to come at once to London: ‘Will not the sedate Raptures of Oratorical Harmony attract hither an Admirer of the sublime in music? . . . Glorious Entertainment! Divine Efficacy of Music!' and glorious entertainment the new piece indeed was, Handel depositing some £550 in his bank account after three performances.

He had begun work on
Susanna
the previous July, completing it within seven weeks on 24 August. Morell, for the time being, stepped aside as his librettist. Since there seem to have been no hard feelings over the issue on either part, some practical consideration doubtless forced Handel to turn elsewhere and choose an anonymous poet who supplied him with the texts of
Susanna
and
Solomon
. We know that both had a common source simply through the widespread and recurrent parallels in the poetry of each. The writer may have been Newburgh Hamilton, though only the vaguest evidence supports his candidature. For the time being these capably handled and often felicitous libretti retain their secret.

The story of Susanna, with its inbuilt paradox of senile lust opposed to wounded innocence and wifely fidelity, had always been popular in Baroque art, but its most outstanding expression in music before Handel was in Alessandro Stradella's vividly conceived oratorio of 1666, written for Queen Christina of Sweden, a score of which the younger composer may have seen in Italy. The elements in each, Susanna, the two Elders, the Prophet Daniel and a chorus, are more or less the same, with the addition in Handel's setting of Susanna's father Chelsias and her husband Joachim. Each, too, fully partakes of that essentially secular narrative quality, which has placed the tale alongside those of Tobit and Judith in the Apocrypha. As material for a sacred oratorio the little Book of Susanna is justified only by its Jewish background and the presence of the boy Daniel. Otherwise its atmosphere is that of a rustic folk tale, and it was in this vein that Handel and his librettist chose to treat it.