Handel (44 page)

Political and religious agenda find their way into Jennens's libretto for Handel, whether in the subtexts of
Saul
and
Belshazzar
or via the emphasis placed in
Messiah
on the mystery of the Eucharist, central as this was to nonjuring theology. Though in
Saul
David's outrage at the killing of ‘the anointed of the Lord' echoes condemnation of the death of King Charles I in 1649 at the behest of his parliamentarian captors, the Jewish monarch himself is perhaps also an avatar, however unlikely, of Sir Robert Walpole, whom opposition propaganda sought to portray as a tyrant defying the rule of law.
Belshazzar
, meanwhile, enshrines in the figure of Cyrus the concept, promoted by opposition politicians and pamphleteers,
of ‘the Patriot King' ruling in the name of popular liberties and his country's good. The literary and dramatic qualities of both oratorios reveal a superior gift on Jennens's part for thinking scenically and creating, throughout successive episodes, the kind of theatrical impetus likely to kindle the imagination of his favourite composer.

Saul
remains without equal among the oratorios for the colour and variety of its incidents. As well as the King's jealous harrying of David, the narrative encompasses the romantic interest of the hero's relationships with Saul's daughters Merab and Michal, his friendship with Jonathan, the Macbeth-like consultation with the Witch of Endor, and the warfare between Israelites and Philistines. Yet Jennens prevents the drama from degenerating into a mere succession of crowded tableaux by using the dispassionate reflections of the chorus to offset the key moments of the story and by throwing the character of Saul himself into appropriate relief. It is emphatically his story rather than David's, even if his share in it is couched predominantly in recitative and arioso forms, as opposed to full-scale aria. This last feature relates directly to an understanding of the essentially incomplete nature of Saul's personal achievement, originally determined at the moment when he faltered at killing King Agag of the Amalekites and Samuel declared that ‘the Lord hath rent the kingdom of Israel from thee this day, and hath given it to a neighbour of thine that is better than thou'.

Jennens and Handel seem to have appreciated the tragic flaws of envy and self-loathing intrinsic to such a character, though, as with all early eighteenth-century forays into the territory of classical drama, the atmosphere of
Saul
as a whole owes less to Euripides than to Racine. The King's
hamartia
is pointedly contrasted throughout with the unsullied excellence of David who, though his relationship with Michal purges him of absolute priggishness, cannot be allowed to usurp Saul's dramatic prominence by being made the centre of too much sympathetic interest. This is further underlined by the vocal allocations: Saul is a darkly brooding bass of Verdian intensity, while David's countertenor reflects Handel's enduring associations of the timbre with youthful dignity, grace and kingly virtues.

It was a more stirring and colourful libretto than any he had ever set before or was to set again, and he matched it with music of extraordinary conviction and authority, whose abundance is overwhelming in a way unmatched by any other dramatic work in the European music of the period, with the same inclusive grandeur and assurance of gesture as are found in
Die Zauberflöte
,
Aida
and
Die Meistersinger.
It is almost impossible to write calmly of so monumental an achievement. The scale of the overture alone, an expansive four-movement symphony based on a trio sonata, is enough to indicate the overall generosity of concept in the oratorio, and the choruses, whether in the glitter and revelry of the opening Epinicion, the relentlessly probing ‘Envy, eldest born of Hell', ruminating fretfully above its ground bass, or the extended elegy over the dead of Mount Gilboa which crowns the work, consolidate upon what had been brought about in
Athalia
and prefigure the expressive sublimities of
Israel in Egypt
. Hardly a single one of the airs is without some individuality of design or instrumentation; they veer from the simple purity of David's ‘Oh Lord, whose mercies numberless' or Jonathan's ‘Sin not, oh King' to Merab's Pergolesian ‘My soul rejects the thought' and the spectacularly mangled middle section of Saul's ‘A Serpent in my bosom warm'd', where, after a mere three bars, the aria suddenly breaks off in a descending double octave as the King hurls his spear at his erstwhile protégé.

The work's most memorable moment constitutes a sequence that ought to be basic material in any study of dramatic music and which (though its subject had drawn thrilling responses from both Charpentier and Purcell) is without rivals or precedents in Baroque lyric drama. Saul's desperate recourse to the Witch of Endor and the ghost of Samuel caught at Handel's compassionate imagination to produce a scene which, as well as being eerie and baleful, reaches out to invoke our pity for the King in the agonized accompagnato recitative ‘Wretch that I am', his aching loneliness best summarized in the heart-stabbing trill on the dotted quaver F for the violins in Saul's first address to Samuel. The Witch summons the dead prophet in a weird invocation whose grotesquerie is effected by laying a four-beat string figure across an irregular bass, interleaved with sustained oboe and bassoon chords, the whole piece measured in 3/4. These grisly bassoons, the Grecian ghosts from
Alexander's Feast
, introduce Samuel himself, a basso profondo inexorable and remote, with whom Saul is destined to plead in vain and whose final pronouncement, closing all with shattering abruptness, is:

Jennens, whose admiration for Handel's genius was tempered with a nagging desire to offer his own suggestions for its artistic refinement, criticized his use of a carillon for the Israelite rejoicings over Saul's thousands and David's ten thousands and his purchase of ‘an organ of £500 price . . . he has bespoke of one Moss of Barnet. This organ, he says, is so constructed that as he sits at it he has a better command of his performers than he used to have, and he is highly delighted to think with what exactness his Oratorio will be performed by the help of this organ; so that for the future instead of beating time at his oratorios, he is to sit at the organ all the time with his back to the Audience.' Jennens dismissed both instruments as Handel's ‘maggots' but each contributed to that opulence of orchestration which the composer lavished upon the work. To show off the organ he threw in a concertante movement in the middle of Act II: the carillon, flourishing a little tune of marvellous banality for the Israelite women, enhances our sense of embarrassment as the enraged Saul writhes at the gleeful plaudits for David. Elsewhere in the score there are parts for two flutes, a harp, two trumpets, three trombones in both choral and instrumental numbers, besides the basic orchestra of oboes, bassoons and strings. At certain points, notably during the final chorus, the noise must have been even louder than that produced in the
Deborah
performances.

Saul
, aided by ‘general Applause by a numerous and splendid Audience' when the royal family attended the second night, met with a modest success before going on to become an established favourite among the dramatic oratorios, given six subsequent revivals by Handel himself. Lord Wentworth, pondering the composer's bold instrumental effects and the indifferent quality of the cast, was sceptical of its fate: ‘I hear Mr Handell has borrow'd of the Duke of Argylle a pair of the largest kettledrums in the Tower, so to be sure it will be most excessive noisy with a bad set of singers; I doubt it will not retrieve his former losses.'

It did not, neither did a solitary revival of
Il Trionfo del Tempo
nor a proposal by Walsh to publish the Opus 5 trios by subscription, which met with no takers. ‘Nothing shews the Worth of a People more,
than their Taste for Publick Diversions,' observed one member of ‘a crowded Audience of the first Quality of a Nation', signing himself ‘R.W.', at the third performance of the new oratorio
Israel in Egypt
. But he grossly overestimated the enthusiasm: more to the point was Lord Shaftesbury's comment, made many years later, that Handel's season failed owing to ‘his Singers in general not being Capital, nor the Town come into a relish of this Species of Musick'.

The first-night audience for
Israel in Egypt
, on 4 April 1739, must indeed have been baffled by the overall character of the work presented to them. In its original form the oratorio consisted of three sections, beginning with the Funeral Anthem, adapted by the thrifty Handel as ‘Lamentations of the Israelites for the death of Joseph', continuing with the sequence of plague choruses and ending with the Song of Moses from Exodus 15. The words of the second and third parts, making up the piece as we know it today, may have been selected by Jennens, but it is as likely that Handel, who piqued himself on his knowledge of scripture, prepared his own text and that the genesis of the work, as Dean and Streatfeild suggest, was probably an anthem, from which the composer developed the notion of a full-scale oratorio.

In any event the piece was choral to the almost total exclusion of solo numbers. There are four airs, two duets and some patches of recitative for tenor, whose relationship to the work was obviously based on that of a narrating Evangelist in a German passion. This last point is as significant as the inclusion of the Funeral Anthem, for what ‘the Town' was actually hearing and noticeably failing to relish was a consolidation upon the achievement of the earlier work in exploiting the dramatic and evocative potential of the chorus, and a strengthening of those links with European sacred music renewed in
The Ways of Zion Do Mourn.

However much he may have misread the audience's interest in the piece, ‘R.W.' was intelligent enough to appreciate its singular nature, encapsulated in ‘the Sublimity of the great Musical Poet's Imagination', and sensitive also to the special problems presented by
Israel in Egypt
to Georgian Protestant theatregoers. Admittedly, success was hardly guaranteed by the apparent inadequacy of the choir, ‘the many of his
Vocal Instruments
, which fall so vastly short in being able to do due Justice to what they are to perform', and the enormous length of the original work (Handel tried it with a couple of new organ concertos on 7 April and in a cut-down version on the 10th with Italian airs for Francesina) probably discouraged several listeners. But the main difficulty was one which,
in various forms, has bedevilled Handel oratorio ever since, namely that singularly deep-rooted reaction against the use of the Bible for entertainment purposes.

He had come across it first in Italy, when Pope Clement had censured Prince Ruspoli for allowing Durastanti to take part in the première of
La Resurrezione
, and later in London, when Bishop Gibson had discouraged staged oratorio, and though he was never confronted with an absolute hostility from the public en masse there was a continuing barrage of criticism, often from the most unexpected sources, some of which must have reached his ears. We shall take note of these audience reactions in their proper place, but it is worth noting here that disapproval had already started building up during the
Esther
and
Athalia
performances in 1733. James Bramston's satire
The Man of Taste
cynically decreed that:

while Thomas Newcomb's Juvenalian
The Manners of the Age
asked:

Thus we can detect a defensive note in ‘R.W.'s' claim that ‘the Theatre on this occasion, ought to be enter'd with more Solemnity than a Church; inasmuch as the Entertainment you go to is really in itself the noblest Adoration and Homage paid to the Deity that ever was in one. So sublime an Act of Devotion as this
Representation
carries in it . . . would consecrate even Hell itself.' An anonymous correspondent in the
London Evening Post
suggested that the fate of
Israel in Egypt
was in question from the start, owing merely to its title, let alone to the text itself.

The oratorio, by its very nature, seems to sit awkwardly among Handel's other works in the same genre. There are political resonances here, in the implicit allusion to eighteenth-century Britain's concept of itself as a modern Israel shaking off the chains of despotism and slavery, but these are kept at arm's length by the non-dramatic nature of the text. The arias are either unremarkable or in one case, through no fault of Handel's, purely inept. Even the duet for basses, ‘The Lord is a man of war', descends into prolixity. Unbalanced and more than slightly obsessive in the nature of its artistic achievement, the work pushes to unimagined limits that epic experimentation with the oratorio medium that began in its immediate forerunner
Saul
. Nobody had written anything quite like
Israel in Egypt
before and its singularity, both in form and expression, placed it beyond the intellectual grasp of Handel's contemporaries, for whom he was seldom inclined to revive it.

Choral writing in any age has rarely achieved such a pitch of dramatic intensity. So dedicated was Handel to the fullest possible exploitation of his medium that he cast the majority of choruses in eight parts, thereby heightening effects of mass and contrast. The ten plagues of Egypt were scarcely promising material for him (potentially the most bathetic moment in his entire oeuvre is afforded by an alto aria complete with hopping violins, which deals with the frogs and the cattle murrain, and requires the soloist to repeat the words ‘blotches and blains') yet out of these he fashioned an audacious sequence of descriptive choruses, imposing a tonal unity by a predominance of flat keys (G minor, B flat, E flat) and a return at the close of Part I to the C minor of the opening. A gawky, stooping chromatic fugue subject, rather like the ‘royal theme' of Bach's
Musical Offering
, conveys the Egyptians' disgust at drinking the blood-laced Nile water, shimmering demisemiquavers portray the buzzing flies, the storms of hail and fire begin with the first pattering drops as the downpour gets under way, the darkness fragments the vocal lines in spectral semi-breves before they bind once again in the slashing, percussive ‘He smote all the first-born of Egypt' and the Israelites are ‘led forth like sheep' in a radiant pastoral complete with drones and pipes.