Handel (63 page)

Chrysander can be forgiven when we consider the extraordinary scope of his achievement in the days before microfilm and photocopying. Like many scholars he appears to have been intolerant of his fellow workers in the field, and the vast edition was produced almost single-handed, with the continuing help of his immense dedication to the composer and his music. However faulty his editorial principles, Chrysander had clear-cut ideas about the nature of Handel's art and Baroque music in general, which must inevitably have been somewhat in advance of those inspiring the muddy-textured Victorian oratorio concerts. The entire enterprise of the ninety-three Handel Gesellschaft volumes, constituting one of the noblest monuments of nineteenth-century musicology, is only now being overtaken by its modern equivalent, the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, taking advantage of the growth of Handel scholarship and related musicological research during recent decades.

The Frenchman Victor Schoelcher, the saviour of Handel's conducting scores, was a serious biographer in his own right.
French interest in the composer was commensurate with the development of those unique characteristics typifying the Parisian musical scene during the last century. We might expect, for example, to find Berlioz showing impatience with ‘the heavy, bewigged face of this tun of pork and beer they call Handel', but his comments on
Admeto
in relation to the
Alceste
of Lully and that of his beloved Gluck acquit him if only because of their almost hilarious lack of sympathy with the genre of Baroque opera seria. Edouard Lalo's reaction – ‘Beautiful, solemn, colossal, but it makes me yawn atrociously, and as I want to keep my jaws on, I'm leaving' – is comparably predictable. But France led the way in presenting
Messiah
and other oratorios in performances more faithful to Handel's intentions than their contemporary equivalents at the Three Choirs or the Crystal Palace, which Paul Dukas scornfully described as ‘organ concertos mixed up with acrobatic displays in an agricultural exhibition'. Admiring the directness and simplicity of the man whose manuscripts he had studied in the British Museum, Dukas noted perceptively: ‘Handel's music is of a kind in which ingenuity and searches after detail seem superfluous and add nothing to the total impression . . . he reaches a fulness of sonority which a modern orchestra, however well stocked with brass, can never challenge.'

The effect of Lamoureux's respectful and intelligent renditions was to create a minor Handel revival in the exciting context of the metropolitan culture nurturing Proust, Picasso and the Ballets Russes. No wonder a correspondent to the
Musical Times
could write: ‘If one wishes to hear Handel it is advisable to settle in Paris,' in 1912, a year when the Sorbonne choral society presented
Messiah
, the Conservatoire offered
Israel in Egypt
and the Société George Frederic Handel did
Alexander's Feast
.
Saul
, the
St Cecilia Ode
and the
Dettingen Te Deum
were given at Saint Eustache and a Lilli Lehmann recital included airs from
Radamisto
,
Partenope
,
Semele
and
Joshua
. Against such a background Reynaldo Hahn enthusiastically measured Handel with Bach. ‘We always feel in Handel', he wrote, ‘the poet and the dramatist imprisoned within the academic musician. Bach, not thus constrained, is at liberty within his bourgeois spirit. But equally he wrote nothing to compare with “Darius great and good . . . welt'ring in his blood”, or with the restlessness of Alexander contemplating his mysterious Thais.
Handel's intelligence is always awake and at work. Bach's is drowned in the counterpoint fermenting within his brain and circulating throughout his entire being in a ceaseless mechanical economy. Handel is visionary and objective. Bach is always himself, putting himself before everything else and placing his grandiose personality in front of all the images he seeks to represent.'

Bach's star, however, was now in the ascendant as Handel's was beginning slowly to wane. The jubilant rediscovery, by instrumentalists in the early gramophone years, of the violin partitas, the forty-eight Preludes and Fugues, and the Brandenburg Concertos was accompanied by the onset in England of a confused reaction against high Victorian Handelmania. By 1891 George Bernard Shaw, a convinced and ardent admirer of Handel, was writing: ‘we know rather less about him in England than they do in the Andaman Islands, since the Andamans are only unconscious of him, whereas we are misconscious . . . Why, instead of wasting huge sums on the multitudinous dullness of a Handel Festival, does not somebody set up a thoroughly rehearsed and exhaustively studied performance of the
Messiah
in St James's Hall with a chorus of twenty capable artists? Most of us would be glad to hear the work seriously performed once before we die.' Similar irritation elsewhere bred active revolt in such works as Ernest Walker's
Music in England
, heretically questioning Handel's authority, and among the younger composers of a generation eagerly renouncing Leipzig for Paris. The feet of clay were being exposed in the revelations of the master's borrowings – their basis imperfectly grasped – and the sense that the twentieth century was substantially losing touch with him was balefully implied by the headlines of an American newspaper article of 1907 reporting a
Belshazzar
performance, which read: ‘Powerful Temperance Lecture Set To Music: Neither the Pomp nor Fervor of the Biblical Occasion in Composer's Work'.

Another disillusioned encounter with
Belshazzar
was that of Igor Stravinsky as an adolescent in St Petersburg at the turn of the century. ‘The music relies again and again on the same fugato exposition, the same obvious semicircle of keys, the same small harmonic compass; and when a piece begins with a more interesting chromatic subject, Handel consistently fails to develop and exploit it as soon as all the voices are in. Regularity, harmonic and otherwise, rules every episode . . . Handel's inventions are exterior; he can draw from inexhaustible reservoirs of allegros and largos,
but he cannot pursue a musical idea through an intensifying degree of development.' Later he was to find
Theodora
‘beautiful and boring. Too many pieces finish too long after the end', and his judgement was ultimately destined to the facile summing-up: ‘Handel was the commercial composer of his time, Bach the inward one.'

Such remarks say less about Handel than about the curious limitations of Stravinsky's musical aesthetic. Similar criticism was to be voiced by Schoenberg, who offered the most eloquent evidence of a total failure to appreciate the composer's methods and styles in his grotesque arrangement of the Concerto Grosso Opus 6 no. 7, published in 1933. He told Berg simply that ‘. . . it will be a very good piece, and I can say that it is not because of Handel'. No, indeed, simply for the reason that the delicacy and deftness of the original sink beneath the porridge and molasses of a treatment that sounds more like a malicious parody of the Baroque manner than a serious attempt at elaboration. Handel is here transformed into a neurasthenic Viennese
Schlamper
, and the piece, whatever its intrinsic technical interest, adds little lustre to an already well-established reputation.

The inter-war years witnessed the nadir of Handel's fortunes. During the 1920s Oskar Hagen at Göttingen had undertaken several of the earliest modern revivals of the operas, starting with
Rodelinda.
Fidelity to the text and the cultivation of a suitable performing style were scarcely conceivable during an age in which ‘pre-classical' music was being gradually rediscovered with the aid of Wanda Landowska's noble executions of Bach and Nadia Boulanger gallantly proposing Monteverdi with a piano continuo. Yet whereas Landowska and Boulanger treated their material with imaginative respect, Hagen's attitude to Handel was cavalier in the extreme. The operas were not only to be hacked about, but rewritten in such a way as to destroy the fundamental balance of sonorities upon which real enjoyment of them depends. Teutonic imaginations could not embrace the idea of male roles in soprano registers and since Weimar Germany, whatever its other grotesqueries, was not forthcoming with castrati, down went Giulio Cesare, Bertarido and Serse to the achievement of a wholesome manliness and the effective emasculation of their musical characters. There was no ornament, and tempo markings were interpreted in the sluggish ecclesiastical fashion of the day. The English critic who observed of
Giulio Cesare
at Göttingen in 1923 that ‘a certain monotony was felt,
produced perhaps by the everlasting, never changing beauty of the arias. The soul of man has undergone some changes since the time of Handel,' may indeed be pardoned.

Under the Nazis matters Handelian reached a level of lunacy in obsessive efforts to make the oratorios
judenrein
. It is a scarcely credible fact that
Judas Maccabaeus
was thus transmuted into
Wilhelm, von Nassau
and
Israel in Egypt
into
Mongolensturm
: Handel himself, grateful as he always was for Jewish patronage of his performances, must have turned in his grave. German scholars, meanwhile, continued their search for the essentially Germanic in the composer's work, and the egregious Ribbentrop, in an address to the university of Oxford in 1939, depicted Handel in the unmistakable colours of National Socialism. The speech took place in the Sheldonian Theatre which, it was probably inopportune to remind the Nazi ambassador, had once echoed to the devout Judaic solemnities featured in
Athalia
.

In England meanwhile attempts to secure the Brook Street house for a Handel museum attracted scant interest and in this connexion an acrimonious correspondence with Major Benton Fletcher, collector of the antique musical instruments at Fenton House, Hampstead, can have done little credit to Herbert Westerby, secretary to the proposed fund. The
Musical Times
drily commented of the BBC's 1937 Handel revival concert that the hall was scarcely half full and that
Alexander's Feast
had little to say to a generation uninterested in choral singing for its own sake. Conductors continued the heartless process of reorchestration – Henry Wood overhauled
Judas Maccabaeus
, Beecham re-orchestrated
Solomon
and Malcolm Sargent brass-plated
Israel in Egypt
for the massed choirs of Huddersfield.

Now and then an ember or two crackled up: staged performances of the oratorios were given by the enterprising Cambridge University Music Society and the Falmouth Opera Singers, and in March 1933
Rinaldo
was performed by girl students of the Hammersmith Day Continuation School under the direction of Miss Daunt. ‘Such a performance', wrote a kindly critic, ‘is none the worse for being somewhat unsophisticated. One entered into the spirit of the thing, and shared the performers' obvious delight in music and action. In spirit we all “prowlered up and down a bit”, and it was a jolly good show.'

The admirable Miss Daunt was a lone pioneer in an English revival of the operas,
which only really got going in the post-war years. Much is surely owing, in this connexion, to the interest already fostered in Handel as an operatic master by Edward J. Dent, whose scholarly enthusiasm had done so much to broaden awareness not merely of Handel but of the Baroque musical legacy in general. During the 1950s and 1960s, for example, the Handel Opera Society showed that his faith had been fully justified, presenting staged performances both of opera and oratorio, notable for their encouragement of promising young singers. Memorably enjoyable during the same period was the series given under the direction of Alan and Frances Kitching at Abingdon and Henley on a heroically limited budget. Appropriate costume and gesture brought the spectator closer to appreciating the essential rhetoric of the works themselves, and the gusto of these performances remains unforgettable. Conviction was, alas, not enough to balance the accounts and in an atmosphere further complicated by acrimony the splendid undertaking folded after the first revival of
Lotario
for over two centuries.

One by one the best of the operas have found their way back into the theatre. If East Germany could still, in 1960, issue a practical edition of
Poro
with the hero unblushingly assigned to the bass register and the names of the two heroines altered with ethno-archaeological pedantry from Cleofide and Erissena to Mahamaya and Nimbavati, there was the compensation of performances such as that of
Giulio Cesare
given privately at Birmingham University's Barber Institute in 1977, offering the work complete and following the relatively novel practice which restored the overlap of vocal and continuo lines in the closing cadences of the recitative. Singers in their turn began to study a style more suitable to the cantilena of Baroque lyric drama and the rise of a new breed of countertenor, though it might hardly supply an authentic Senesino or Caffarelli, at any rate offered an adequate solution to the problem of matching roles to voices. As one twentieth-century musicologist somewhat wearily observed, ‘there is no humane answer to the castrato problem', but modern compromises have achieved some spectacular results.

The gradual restoration of Handel's operas to that theatrical domain where they belong has been, and continues to be, a controversial process. Few are likely to pine for the sort of production given
Giulio Cesare
at the New York City Opera in 1964, when the title role (in a version largely designed as a showcase for the prima donna Beverly Sills as Cleopatra) was sung by a bass.
Yet both this and the 1962 Covent Garden
Alcina
, ‘sensitively re-ordered' by its director Franco Zeffirelli so as to accommodate the vocal pyrotechnics of Joan Sutherland, were important in focusing attention on their composer from a public nurtured on works like
Aida
,
La Bohème
and
Der Rosenkavalier
. The classical recording industry, on an all too brief late-twentieth-century roll, played its own part in rediscovering Handel as a theatrical master. In an age when serious attempts were being made to recover an appropriate performance style for Baroque music, it was inevitable that a new generation of singers, instrumentalists and conductors would turn to the incalculable treasury contained in his opera scores. The result has been that in the twenty-year period since the 1985 tercentenary celebrations of Handel's birth, thirty-nine out of his forty-six existing stage works, including the third act of
Muzio Scevola
and at least one of his seven pasticci, have appeared in a commercial recording, and that for fourteen of these there is often more than one version available.