Handel (14 page)

Mechanical as the reflexes of its plot and characters appear,
Amadigi
provides an excellent illustration of the ideal functioning of the Baroque recitative-and-aria form in the hands of a master. Take, for example, the sequence which opens Act II. Amadigi, searching for Oriana, gazes into the waters of True Love to examine her faith. His F major air, accompanied by paired recorders, suggests that in the end it is less Oriana's constancy that preoccupies him than his own solitude. There is no middle section, for he is jerked back into the present by a vision of her making up to Dardano, and faints with half the word
moro
(I die) still on his lips. Melissa, stirring the pot avidly, commands her attendant spirits to bring in Oriana who, believing her lover dead, throws herself into one of those F minor outbursts Handel saves for special moments of anguish. The resulting tiff when Amadigi awakes leads naturally into an air whose alternation of slow and fast tempi reflects his muddled state of mind. Oriana ripostes in an impatient accusation of injustice and Melissa's eager attempts to make capital out of the situation after her rival has left the stage are furiously rebuffed by Amadigi. ‘Let me be, I don't love you,' he cries, whipping up her anger by his scorn. The duet which follows, edgily patterned with dotted quavers, is the inevitable outpouring of their rage at each other. In the face of dramatic music of this calibre, can it still be said that nothing happens in a Handel aria? So far from invalidating the form, its very artifice helps to convey the atmosphere of those all too familiar moments when civilized human beings are driven to break out of their emotional reserve.

The 1716 season ended with an
Amadigi
performance on 12 July, featuring a solo on the viola d'amore played by Attilio Ariosti, later to join Handel as composer of the King's Theatre operas, following which Handel himself left for a trip to Germany. He visited his family and friends at Halle, and went on to Ansbach, apparently charged with a mission by the Princess of Wales, though the nature of his errand is unknown. Doubtless it was while on this journey that he came across the text of the Passion oratorio
Der für die Sünden der Welt gemartete und sterbende Jesus
(Jesus martyred and dying for the sins of the World) by the Hamburg litterateur Barthold Heinrich Brockes, subsequently made a senator of the city and highly regarded throughout the Germany of his age as a gifted poet and translator. Spending some time in Halle in 1702, Brockes may perhaps have made the acquaintance of the young Georg Friedrich Handel. His Passion drama, an alternation of biblical paraphrase, highly coloured reflective aria and arioso verses and turbae (crowd) choruses and chorales, with inset recitative and air sequences designated as
soliloquia
, was first published in 1712 and soon became a favourite with German composers during the next three decades. Bach himself incorporated sections of it in the
St John Passion
, and complete settings were made by Telemann, Mattheson, Fasch and Stölzel.

Part of its appeal lay in the flamboyantly dramatic imagery employed by Brockes as a sort of literary homage to the seventeenth-century Italian poets he so admired. His conceits, belonging to an earlier Baroque world, seem to have left Handel comparatively cold, however, when he embarked on his version of the
Brockes Passion
at some stage between 1716 and 1717. Where we might expect the chorus to receive the kind of treatment afforded it in pieces such as the
Utrecht Te Deum
or the
Dixit Dominus
, its role is reduced to relative insignificance by the brevity of the turbae moments and the plainness of the chorales. The contemplative soloists, Daughter of Sion and a trio of Believing Souls, are given accomplished but scarcely individualized arias, essentially operatic in feeling. Only with Jesus, Peter and Judas does Handel respond to emotions of agony and guilt with music of genuine substance, as in Peter's contrasted meditations on his denial in ‘Heul, du Schaum' and ‘Schau, ich fall', and in Christ's ‘Mein Vater, mein Vater',
its vocal line carried on a typically Handelian dotted accompaniment.

Highly finished and yet somewhat pallid and generic as the piece now seems, it achieved considerable popularity in north Germany after its first performance under Mattheson's direction in Hamburg on the Monday of Holy Week (Handel had sent him the ‘unusually close-written score' from London) and Bach himself copied out part of it in manuscript. Facile assumptions as to an absence of some sort of nebulously conceived ‘spirituality' in Handel are too easily made by comparing the
Brockes Passion
with the two masterpieces in the same genre of his great contemporary. That the former work should come off as the loser means nothing in the face of that encyclopaedic analysis of human spiritual experience, complete with its doubts and terrors, manifested to us by the oratorios and the operas. Handel's study, scarcely an unworthy one by any standards, was the compassionate scrutiny of his fellow men.

4

The musical London in which Handel arrived in 1710 was far from being the desert that has occasionally been portrayed. True, the death of Purcell in 1695 had deprived English music of a central figure, versatile, prolific and highly regarded by his contemporaries, to whom he seems to have given the kind of co-ordinating inspiration which was only to be renewed by Handel himself. But as the seat of a royal court and noble patrons, a flourishing centre of church music and host to a lively tradition of amateur performance, London could hardly be considered a dull or backward capital. Among the official musicians at court and in the Chapel Royal were several accomplished composers, including William Croft, an ex-chorister of the Chapel and a protégé of Purcell's mentor John Blow. In 1708, following Blow's death, Croft had been made Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal and organist of Westminster Abbey, which meant that he had to provide music for all the various state occasions celebrated by the court. Though he lacked melodic inspiration, his anthems and keyboard music show a lucidity and expansiveness of design unrivalled by any of his English contemporaries.

He clearly took his functions as teacher, composer and performer very seriously, which is more than can be said for the eccentric, though undeniably talented John Eccles, who had been made Master of Music by King William in 1700. He had started as a sympathetic songwriter for the actress Anne Bracegirdle, who appointed him her music director at Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre, and had joined Daniel Purcell, John Weldon (candidate for authorship of ‘Purcell's'
Tempest
music) and Gottfried Finger, who had done so much to promote new instrumental styles among English players, in a competition for setting Congreve's
The Judgment of Paris
. Two hundred guineas was divided among the competitors,
Weldon being the winner, Eccles runner-up, Daniel Purcell third and Finger a disgruntled fourth, who promptly left England in justifiable chagrin. It was Eccles who provided the earliest setting of Congreve's
Semele
, later to be treated more elaborately by Handel. Though it may have been planned as an inaugural spectacle at the opening of the Queen's Theatre, Haymarket, in 1705, the composer did not complete it till two years later and it was never performed.
^*(g)

Linked with the world of court and theatre music was the more obviously social pleasure of the various concert clubs. Following the lead given by promoters like John Banister, with his curtained music gallery in a large room opposite the back gate of the Temple, the vogue for convivial meetings at which the players were a mixture of well-known professionals and talented amateurs quickly became an established feature of London life. Many of the concerts took place at taverns, such as the Angel and Crown in Whitechapel, the Devil near Temple Bar and the Castle in Paternoster Row. Such was the enthusiasm that several private individuals threw open their doors for music meetings, including the printer William Caslon, whose houses in Ironmonger Row and Chiswell Street were the venue of the ‘Lunatics', so called because their concerts took place on the Thursdays nearest the full moon, allowing everyone to walk home in safety. ‘In the intervals of the performance the guests refreshed themselves at a sideboard, which was amply furnished; and when it was over, sitting down to a bottle of wine, and a decanter of excellent ale, of Mr Caslon's own brewing, they concluded the evening's entertainment with a song or two of Purcell's sung to the harpsichord, or a few catches, and about twelve retired.'

The most remarkable of all these regular meetings were those taking place in the house of Thomas Britton ‘the musical small-coal man' in Aylesbury Street, off Clerkenwell Green. Encouraged by that Royalist Methuselah Sir Roger L'Estrange, ‘a very musical gentleman, and who had a tolerable perfection on the bass viol', Britton, who dealt in coal from the ground floor, turned the upper storey into a concert room notoriously long and narrow,
and reached by some rickety stairs. In a tiny and highly effervescent artistic community like that of eighteenth-century London, Britton's meetings, featuring the finest musical hands in the city, attracted a glittering patronage: among others, ‘a lady of the first rank in this kingdom, the Duchess of Queensberry, now living, one of the most celebrated beauties of her time, may yet remember that in the pleasure which she manifested at hearing Mr Britton's concert, she seemed to have forgotten the difficulty with which she ascended the steps that led to it'. Handel himself is said to have taken part in Britton's concerts and among the performers were several who became his friends. The poet and critic John Hughes, who had supplied him with English cantata texts, played in the band and so did Henry Needler, civil servant and violinist, instrumental in popularizing Corelli's concertos in England. The great fiddle virtuoso Matthew Dubourg, who was to lead the orchestra at the first performance of
Messiah
, made his solo debut in Britton's concert room, a small boy standing on a joint stool.

Not far away, within the City itself, music of a different kind was offered. The new cathedral of St Paul's, still incomplete and the centre of heated controversy between the various parties involved in the rebuilding, boasted a splendid organ, and Handel, attending evensong, used to stay behind to play on it himself. Afterwards he and the choir lay vicars would adjourn to the nearby Queen's Arms in St Paul's Churchyard, a tavern which, like so many others in London, maintained a harpsichord for its patrons. ‘It happened one afternoon, when they were thus met together, Mr Weeley, a gentleman of the choir, came in and informed them that Mr Mattheson's lessons were then to be had at Mr Meares's shop; upon which Mr Handel ordered them immediately to be sent for, and upon their being brought, played them all over without rising from the instrument' – a moment of very Handelian impetuosity.

Richard Brind, the cathedral organist, was a performer of no great distinction, but he had several talented pupils, among them Maurice Greene, who acted as Handel's bellows blower and introduced him to several of the leading choristers. The alto Richard Elford, originally from Lincoln, was later praised by Croft as ‘fit to be imitated by all that come after him, he being in a peculiar Manner eminent for giving such a due Energy and proper Emphasis to the Words of his Musick, as rendered it serviceable to the great end of its Institution'.
His fellow alto Francis Hughes had begun his singing career at Drury Lane in
Arsinoe
and
Camilla
before joining the St Paul's choir. Together with the bass Samuel Weeley, they would take prominent roles in several of Handel's earliest choral works written to English texts.

All three choristers took part in the ode
Eternal Source of Light Divine
, composed for Queen Anne's forty-eighth birthday on 6 February 1713. Lovers of English Baroque music will be familiar with the great series of odes produced by Henry Purcell for similar occasions in the reigns of earlier Stuart monarchs. The custom, allowed to die only during the latter part of the eighteenth century, produced, amid much that was trivial and sycophantic, some splendidly imaginative solutions to the problem of having annually to reassure the monarch that his or her existence was a thing to be treasured by mortals and by gods. The effect of these pieces is somewhat like the work of contemporary fresco painters such as Thornhill, Verrio and Laguerre, splashy, overblown and surreal in their degrees of flattery.

Queen Anne's birthday odes had mostly been supplied by John Eccles, their texts generally provided by the poet laureate Nahum Tate, best known as writer of the excellent libretto for
Dido and Aeneas.
Before Handel's the last ode had been provided for 1711: there had been no 1712 ode, perhaps because the Queen was too busy on her birthday welcoming her cousin Eugene of Savoy. No one knows why Handel should have been selected for the unique contribution of 1713. The Queen had all her family's love of music and, given Handel's rising popularity among her courtiers, may have wanted something of his for herself. His recommendation might also, like the
Silla
commission four months later, have had faintly political overtones.

Tate was not asked for the ode that year. According to Charles Jennens, arranger of
Messiah
's text, the author of the seven stanzas, each ending:

was Ambrose Philips, author of the successful tragedy
The Distrest Mother
, of a series of pallid neo-Spenserian pastorals and of that truly ineffable line ‘O Property, thou goddess English-born!'. A zealous Whig in the Addison circle,
he seems rather an odd candidate for making a triumphant Tory proclamation of the virtues of a peace with France. The style of the piece is exactly what we should expect from a jobbing hack, which in this case Philips was. The birds are called upon to pay ‘their winged homage', the beasts, in a singular fling of impiety, are made to renounce their natural instincts, Envy conceals her head, blasted faction glides away, and united nations combine to convey to distant climes the news that ‘Anna's actions are divine'.