Handel (58 page)

The shift of mood here is significant. Areas of darkness and light are contrasted throughout the work, nowhere better than in the Act II prison scene, one of the most compelling examples of Handel's control of structure. Minor keys prevail, as they do throughout the oratorio, and the gloom is intensified by the ghostly interjections of two flutes, like water dripping into a vault, yet against this Theodora's supreme courage increasingly prevails. From the seeming hopelessness of ‘with darkness deep as is my woe', an invocation to death, she turns to the bright promises of her faith, in a florid E minor andante, ‘O that I on wings could rise', its radiant middle section ushered in with a Handelian cliché used in
Esther
and the third sonata of Opus 2. The cavatina–cabaletta principle, as in
Rodelinda
, effectively operates here years before its general adoption in opera.

Yet, glorious as is the apotheosis achieved by Theodora and her Didymus in the glowing climax to the oratorio formed by the duet ‘Streams of pleasure' and the gentle G minor valediction of the closing chorus, it is to Irene, associated elsewhere with the theme of changing light, that Handel awards his most melting air. From its very outset ‘As with rosy steps the morn' shows the range and depth of his artistry, as the strings softly, stealthily climb upwards over a sinuous bass, which gradually amplifies to introduce a vocal line that itself billows and expands in the ‘hopes of endless light' sealed in the eight-bar middle section welded to the first by the gentle persistence of the bass figure.

Introspective without coldness, awing both in its plainness and complexity, eschewing the mawkish or the vulgar yet always proclaiming its creator's wonderfully human spirituality,
Theodora
has finally joined those works of his that have recently begun to acquire popularity after long neglect. Certainly the London public of his day disdained it, though ‘Angels ever bright and fair', probably because of its unadorned vocal line, only once straying below the octave compass and lacking difficult divisions, quickly entered the ‘concert favourites' repertoire.

The cast, besides such stalwarts as Frasi, Galli and Reinhold (in the rewardingly vigorous role of Valens) included, as Didymus, the exciting new addition of the Lombard castrato Gaetano Guadagni, one of the most arresting vocal artists of his day. He had first appeared in an Italian company at the Haymarket and showed an uncommon interest in acting, in which he was encouraged by Garrick. England, for which he retained a lifelong fondness even after quitting London angrily in 1770, seems to have influenced his general approach to his art, an approach that favoured simplicity and dramatic truth as opposed to bravura display and which took its most notable effect in the first performances of Gluck's
Orfeo ed Euridice
in Vienna in 1762, with Guadagni in the title role. Burney praised his nobility and elegance of manner, noting that ‘his attitudes and gesture were so full of grace and propriety, that they would have been excellent studies for a statuary', and tracing the power of his singular style to ‘his artful manner of diminishing the tones of his voice like the dying notes of an Aeolian harp'. Handel was enthralled enough by this to compose two new versions of ‘But who may abide' and ‘Thou art gone up on high' for him to sing in the Covent Garden
Messiah
performances of 12 April.
In subsequent years Guadagni virtually took over the alto numbers in the oratorio, being given besides a C minor version of ‘How beautiful are the feet'.

That spring the master, in gold braid and white wig, sat for a swagger portrait to Thomas Hudson, who had already painted him two years before and was to do so again for Jennens in 1756. The Foundling
Messiah
on 1 May, to celebrate the laying of the chapel's foundation stone, went off with immense success (the antiquary William Stukely noted ‘an infinite croud of coaches at our end of the town to hear Handel's music') and the run on tickets required a repeat a fortnight later. ‘I am sure it pleased our friend Handel, and I love to have him pleased,' Mrs Delany wrote with endearing loyalty. Plainly in fine form, he set out during the summer on what was to be his last visit to Germany, but we know nothing of where he went or whom he met there. His stay in Holland on either side of it is better documented. A brief notice in the
General Advertiser
in late August tells us that ‘between the Hague and Haarlem' he ‘had the Misfortune to be overturned, by which he was terribly hurt' but ‘is now out of Danger'. In September he gave an organ recital at the Groote Kerk in the town of Deventer, in the presence of his old pupil Princess Anne, with whom he may have been staying at the time. After returning from Germany he gave another recital, this time in The Hague for the court, most of the foreign ambassadors ‘and other distinguished persons of both sexes'. Perhaps he was also on the lookout for more Dutch pictures to add to his collection.

A letter he wrote in December was addressed to an even older friend than the Princess. Georg Philipp Telemann had recently recommended the Italian soprano Christina Passerini to Handel's notice (she was later to play a significant part in English provincial oratorio performances of the 1750s) and the tone of his reply suggests that the two composers had maintained a warm regard for each other over the half-century that had passed since their youthful first meeting at Halle. Though there were only four years between them, Handel congratulates Telemann on ‘the perfect health that you are enjoying at your somewhat advanced age' and adds that he is hoping to send him a box of exotic plants as a gift. We know that the plants were actually sent off, via the Hamburg skipper Johann Carsten, but not until four years later,
after a false rumour of Telemann's death had reached Handel and been happily contradicted by the arrival of a list of the older composer's horticultural requisites, which Handel busied himself in obtaining.

The Dutch carriage accident may have contributed in some way to his increasing eye trouble, which began seriously plaguing him during the composition of
Jephtha
, the season's new oratorio, started in January 1751. Handel's normal practice was to compose during the long, clear days of July and August, and writing during the candlelit gloom of a London winter can hardly have helped matters. On 13 February we find him noting in German on his score ‘got as far as this on Wednesday . . . unable to go on owing to weakening of the sight of my left eye'. Ten days later he tells us he is ‘a little better, started work again', but the oratorio was not completed until 30 August that year. In the meantime sight had gone from the one eye altogether.

A connexion between his blindness and any other disorder, rheumatic or digestive, which in the past might have sent him to spas and watering places for relief, has never properly been established. By the middle of March this condition was being discussed anxiously by the Handelians, and Sir Edward Turner told Sanderson Miller that ‘noble Handel hath lost an eye, but I have the Rapture to say that St Cecilia makes no complaint of any Defect in his Fingers'. It was not quite the end, rather, on the other hand, the beginning of a bizarre and unexpected final phase in a great career.

15

A gloomy picture of the blind Handel being led towards the keyboard may be all too easily acceptable, but even total blindness need not necessarily have meant an end to composition. There was the example before him of John Stanley, organist of the Temple Church and sightless from the age of two, a composer of sterling gifts whose playing drew admiration from Handel himself. Yet after 1752 Handel was never to produce another entirely original work: whatever the special pleading on behalf of the 1757 version of
Il Trionfo del Tempo
in its English dress as
The Triumph of Time and Truth
, we have only to listen to it to appreciate its essentially garbled and inauthentic character. His use of a musical assistant, in the shape of John Christopher Smith, son of his business manager Johann Christoph Schmidt, was nearly always as arranger and interpolator rather than as the transcriber of freshly conceived ideas.

So far, however, only one eye had given up and Handel's health was otherwise excellent. Shaftesbury wrote on 16 February that ‘Belshazar is now advertized and Smith tells me the parts will go off excellently. Handel himself is actually better in health and in a higher flow of genius than he has been for several years past. His late journey has help'd his constitution vastly.' At the end of the season he noted that ‘the Buck' was ‘now so well that I much hope harmony will flourish yet another year in renewed vigour'.

Jephtha
was not yet finished by the time the 1751 concert series opened, and thus the performances of
Belshazzar
,
Judas Maccabaeus
and
Esther
framed only one new work, the little nonesuch worked up through the marriage of an already existing text to the music for Smollett's
Alceste
and entitled
The Choice of Hercules
, produced on 1 March as ‘an Additional New Act' to
Alexander's Feast
, given on the same evening. No doubt the composer felt that something was needed to offer the public their money's worth,
since even with extra concertos Dryden's ode was hardly as long as any of the full-scale dramatic oratorios. The new act, based, like the story of Alexander at Persepolis, upon a classical hero's obligation to make a moral choice, would come in opportunely as a conclusion to the evening, though on subsequent occasions when Handel revived the two works together he chose unaccountably to use
The Choice
as an interlude between the acts of
Alexander's Feast
.

The text had been adapted, probably by Thomas Morell, from a poem originally published in Glasgow in 1743 and based on an allegory by the Greek poet Prodicus, whose fundamental concept became the ‘Hercules at the Crossroads' emblem so beloved of Renaissance moral philosophy. The young champion, faced with the challenge of Virtue and the blandishments of Pleasure, of course opts ultimately for the former – regardless, it would seem, of mythology's evidence that Hercules's noble acts were performed in the interstices of a life of unbridled and wholly unexemplary self-indulgence, with whose last moments Handelians were already familiar. Musicians were also drawn to the story. Maurice Greene wrote a
Judgment of Hercules
in 1740, and John Stanley's
Choice of Hercules
, though using a different libretto from Handel's, follows similar outlines. J. S. Bach, meanwhile, had composed a
Hercules am Scheideweg
as a homage to an infant Saxon prince, reworking much of its music into the Nativity sections of the
Christmas Oratorio
.

The author of Handel's
Choice
was Dr Robert Lowth, bishop of St David's, a witty and talented Wykehamist, author of elegant if sometimes rather risqué verse and a distinguished Hebrew scholar, noteworthy, later in his career, for having nearly become Archbishop of Canterbury, finally rejecting the appointment on grounds of illness. Morell, if he was the actual adaptor, chiefly busied himself with matching chorus and aria texts to the
Alceste
numbers, nearly all of which found an eventual place in the work though inevitably losing some of their appositeness in the process. In their earlier context the pieces form an attractively sophisticated frame to a lost picture (the leaden verses of Smollett's only surviving full-length play
The Regicide
scarcely suggest any thrilling possibilities in
Alceste
's rediscovery) and offer interesting evidence of Handel's abiding strain of musical Gallicism. The spirit which breathes through this music,
especially in the handsomely fashioned overture and the two symphonies introducing the final sections of the score, is one that recalls the dances, written for Sallé over a decade earlier, reflecting the Frenchified urbanity of the German courts Handel had frequented on his return from Italy.

Its transference to
The Choice of Hercules
is not always happy. Charon's ‘Ye fleeting shades, I come', in the earlier work, has an amiably comic touch as a jaunty bass aria, but its mannerisms seem wholly inappropriate to Hercules's ‘Lead, goddess, lead the way'. Similarly awkward is ‘Go, assert thy heav'nly race', in which the divisions originally designed to illustrate the flight of Thetis's messenger are pointlessly applied to Virtue's ‘level Pride's high-plumed crest, and bravely succour the distrest'. In its new setting, however, the vocal line of ‘Yet can I hear' still seems a perfect illustration of that seductive ease and supple charm with which Handel engaged his singers. Equally good in its buoyant artlessness is Pleasure's gavotte, ‘Turn thee, youth'. Best of all, nevertheless, are the newly composed numbers, a thrilling central sequence of a trio, accompanied recitative and air worked out of Virtue's line in the ensemble, and the magnificent ‘See the brisk sparkling nectar', modern enough in rhythms and sonorities (with telling use of two horns) to make Pleasure an up-to-date miss in the decade of young Haydn and the infant Mozart.

The season closed abruptly on 21 March with ‘an Order . . . to both Theatres to forbid their Performance on the Account of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales's Death'. Frederick had died the day before from ‘the sudden breaking of a large abscess under the sternum bone, where it had been gathering for two or three years past; having been first occasioned by a fall he rec'd at playing at what they call Prison-Bars'. This was in fact the game known as ‘Prisoner's Base', ancestor of American baseball and played with a cricket bat. His deathbed can scarcely have been cheered by the unfeeling reactions of his father and sisters, but Handel must genuinely have lamented the loss of someone whose real love of music he had captured in enduring enthusiasm after an initial muddle of allegiances. Was it wholly without significance that he was not called upon to provide any music for the funeral? The King, constant alike in loyalty and loathing, was not going to have his favourite composer providing threnodies for the son he had so cordially detested.