Handel (48 page)

No sooner was the first series, including
Acis and Galatea
, the
Cecilia Ode
and
Esther
, finished than ‘the Desire of several Persons of Quality and Distinction' thus brought about a second. Patrons had been asked to bring their coaches and sedan chairs down the street to avoid crowding and were assured that ‘as there is a good convenient Room hired as an addition to a former Place for the Footmen it is hoped that Ladies will order them to attend there till called for'. Advertisements for the printed wordbooks were tagged with ‘Price a British Six-pence', reflecting the ever-sensitive issue of the Irish coinage.

Alexander's Feast
and
Imeneo
, presented in concert performance as ‘a new Serenata called HYMEN', were offered in March and everything seemed to run smoothly, though a solitary fly in the ointment had presented itself early in the new year of 1742 in the form of an extraordinary injunction from the dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dr Jonathan Swift, to his sub-dean and chapter. The great satirist was now verging upon insanity and in the first version of his order (later much toned down) we can sense the famous
saeva indignatio
beginning almost to overpower his reason. ‘And whereas it hath been reported', he thunders, ‘that I gave a licence to certain vicars to assist at a club of fiddlers in Fishamble Street, I do hereby declare that I remember no such licence to have been ever signed or sealed by me . . . intreating my said Sub-Dean and Chapter to punish such vicars as shall ever appear there, as songsters, fiddlers, pipers, trumpeters, drummers, drum-majors, or in any sonal quality, according to the flagitious aggravations of their respective disobedience, rebellion, perfidy and ingratitude . . .' He had, in fact, granted his licence the day before, and the matter was further complicated by the fact that certain of the St Patrick's vicars choral also sang at the rival establishment of Christ Church, whose dean, Charles Cobbe, had made no objection.

All was smoothed over, however, by 27 March, when the
Dublin Journal
featured what must be one of the most famous of all musical advertisements. ‘For Relief of the Prisoners in the several Gaols, and for the Support of Mercer's Hospital in Stephen's Street, and of the Charitable Infirmary on the Inns Quay, on Monday the 12th of April, will be performed at the Musick Hall in Fishamble Street,
Mr Handel's new Grand Oratorio called the
MESSIAH
, in which the Gentlemen of the Choirs of both Cathedrals will assist, with some Concertoes on the Organ, by Mr Handell.' Tickets cost half a guinea each, with the bonus of a free rehearsal ticket. The paper reported the rehearsal on the 9th, ‘to a most Grand, Polite and crouded Audience' and noted a request for ladies to come to the first night ‘without Hoops, as it will greatly encrease the Charity, by making Room for more company'. Gentlemen were subsequently asked to appear without swords.

The first night of Handel's
Messiah
took place on Tuesday, 13 April 1742 and it need hardly be said that the work was an unqualified success. The newspapers rose to superior heights of Hibernian eloquence: ‘Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crouded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestick and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.' With his usual generosity Handel allotted his share of the proceeds (£400 from an audience of about 700) to be divided equally between the society ‘for the benefit and enlargement of poor distressed prisoners for debt in the several Marshalseas of the City of Dublin', the Charitable Infirmary and Mercer's Hospital, and all the other performers followed suit.

The singers at the first
Messiah
included Christina Maria Avolio and Mrs Maclaine, wife of an organist assistant, all of whom the composer had brought with him to Dublin, and a group of male soloists from the two cathedral choirs.
Perhaps the most interesting member of the line-up was the contralto Susanna Maria Cibber, sister of Thomas Arne and shortly to embark on a career as one of the greatest tragic actresses on the London stage. For her the visit to Ireland was a sort of artistic convalescence from a grotesque adultery case in which her husband, Theophilus Cibber, attempted to sue the man with whom he had hitherto complaisantly tolerated her affair. Her engagement with James Quin to act in Dublin in the same season as Handel's concerts must have created an atmosphere akin to that of a modern civic festival, later enhanced by the arrival of Arne himself and his wife, and of the young David Garrick, whose performance of Hamlet at the Smock Alley theatre Handel is said to have witnessed.

Susanna was now twenty-eight and Handel was fifty-seven. His great personal fondness for her was no doubt paternal rather than romantic, but its practical effects are shown in the way he carefully shaped certain roles to suit her gifts as a musical actress. Burney tells us that ‘her voice was a thread, and her knowledge of Music very inconsiderable; yet, by a natural pathos, and perfect conception of the words, she often penetrated the heart, when others, with infinitely greater voice and skill, could only reach the ear'. Thomas Sheridan, the Irish actor-manager, wrote: ‘. . . it was not to any extraordinary powers of voice (whereof she has but a very moderate share) nor to a greater degree of skill in musick (wherein many of the Italians must be allowed to exceed her) that she owed her excellencies, but to expression only; her acknowledged superiority in which could proceed from nothing but skill in her profession.' No wonder that at a
Messiah
performance Dr Delany was so moved by her singing of ‘He was despised' that he rose from his seat among the audience crying, ‘Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee!'

The Dublin choir probably featured sixteen men and as many boys (no women) and the orchestra, led by Matthew Dubourg, consisted of a string band reinforced at certain points by oboes and bassoons, and additional parts for trumpets and drums. Apart from the leader, the players' names are unknown to us, but Handel himself was of course at the keyboard to direct the performance. He was presumably the soloist in the organ concertos included in the second
Messiah
evening on 3 June, when ‘in order to keep the Room as cool as possible, a Pane of Glass will be removed from the Top of each of the Windows – N.B. This will be the last Performance of Mr Handel's during his Stay in this Kingdom.'

Handel had written
Messiah
in less than a month, starting work on 22 August 1741, completing the outline score on 12 September and rounding off the achievement two days later. The text was prepared for him by Charles Jennens, who wrote that July to Edward Holdsworth: ‘Handel says he will do nothing next Winter, but I hope I shall perswade him to set another Scripture Collection I have made for him, & perform it for his own Benefit in Passion week. I hope he will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah . . .' The necessary persuasion may have taken place during a stay in the country: at Snitterton near the Derbyshire spa of Matlock, tradition has always maintained that Handel began work on
Messiah
at the manor house, then belonging to Jennens. However impatient the latter may sometimes have appeared in his dealings with the composer, he was a discerning librettist and one of the reasons for the oratorio's universal appeal is his skill and artistry in the selection and arrangement of the scriptural texts. More than simply a set of pious extracts taken from a wide variety of Old and New Testament sources, they are here and there discreetly rewritten by Jennens (‘I know that my Redeemer liveth', for example, is a conflation of words from the book of Job and St Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians) and laid out in such a way as to form continuous sequences grouped around three central themes, illustrated by the quotations prefixed to the complete text. Part I deals with the prophecy of Christ's coming and the nativity, Part 2 with Jesus's sacrifice for mankind and Part 3 with the Christian soul's victory over death.

This scheme, with its careful balance of openings and conclusions, and the interlocking subjects of its airs and choruses, gave Handel the perfect basis on which to construct a work whose powerful architecture gives its utterances indestructible authority. The manuscript is, as ever, vividly evocative of the actual processes of composition, blots, thumb-marks, scratchings, second thoughts and all, but though three and a half weeks is a rapid enough gestation period, it is unremarkable by Handelian standards –
Solomon
, even grander in scale, took twenty days and the first draft of
Theodora
was finished in nineteen – and anecdotes of the elderly master refusing food, weeping into the semiquavers and having angelic hallucinations are mostly pious moonshine.
Ferocious concentration and excitement there undoubtedly were, however, side by side with an unshakeable faith and an evident concept of the work in its entirety, illustrated for us by the tonal unities governing the piece.

A further consistency is afforded by the dramatic approach Handel adopts towards his material. The three parts of
Messiah
recall the three acts of an Italian opera and to see the work only as a series of disjointed meditations is to ignore its nature as a piece designed, in the best sense of the term, to entertain listeners in a concert room, and written by an operatic professional. Beyond the more obviously theatrical moments, such as the angel's appearance to the shepherds, the intense visual allusions in ‘The people that walked in darkness' and ‘Thou shalt break them', or the shattering bar's silence in the cadence of the Amen, there are innumerable reminiscences of the Haymarket and Covent Garden, in the bass rage aria ‘Why do the nations?' with its shades of Boschi and Montagnana, in the siciliano ‘How beautiful are the feet', which in another context might have been designed for Strada or Cuzzoni, or in ‘Oh death, where is thy sting?' whose duet form surely owes something to recollections of similar penultimate duets celebrating achieved felicity in
Giulio Cesare
,
Admeto
and other operas.

This all-embracing quality is typical of Handel and
Messiah
represents to perfection that stylistic synthesis of which much has been said earlier in this book. For example, other Italian strains than those of opera are recalled in the symphony (originally twenty-one bars, which Handel subsequently shortened to eleven) introducing the shepherds and in ‘He shall feed his flock': both consciously allude to the music of the
pifferari
(the symphony is entitled
Pifa
), the mountain bagpipers from the Abbruzzi he would have heard in Rome. ‘He shall feed his flock' has indeed some curious melodic parallels with that best-known of Italian Christmas songs ‘Tu scendi dalle stelle', a
pifferaro
signature tune. Elsewhere in
Messiah
we hear echoes of German chorale in the Hallelujah chorus, where snatches of
Wachet auf
seem to be quoted in ‘The kingdom of this world' and ‘And he shall reign for ever and ever'.

What has always ensured the work's unchallenged supremacy in the English choral repertoire is a certain not always easily definable Englishness in the character of Handel's melody and word setting. Two of the most famous airs, ‘He was despised' and ‘The trumpet shall sound',
follow the approved da capo model to which the audience would have been accustomed but from which he himself was starting very gradually to draw away, yet even here the rhythms of the language and the flexible quality of the text decree a greater lucidity and directness than he had ever contrived to produce before, even in the Funeral Anthem or
Israel in Egypt
. The best illustration of this is surely the sublime ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth', whose power defies analysis because its music is in a sense invisible, a clear current of unforced expressiveness supported on the sketchiest of basses. ‘Its effect', as one writer on
Messiah
remarks, ‘rests primarily on Handel's particular speech, the fusion in his arias of the almost instrumental melody of classical Italian bel canto with a speaking declamatory style bred up in England.'

This is the kind of transcendent immediacy that not even the dreariest performance of
Messiah
can kill, yet, as Handel's sketchbooks show, these ‘great effects by simple means' were often arrived at through a series of calculated experiments. Nor was he satisfied with the work as it stood: fresh performers during successive London seasons meant serious modifications to several numbers. ‘But who may abide', for instance, has no fewer than six versions, the original short form for bass, with no change of tempo at ‘for he is like a refiner's fire', the same a tone higher for the tenor Thomas Lowe, three forms of the version written for the castrato Gaetano Guadagni, and as a recitative used in the first Dublin performance.

The fact is that no definitive text of
Messiah
exists, though a close study of Handel's original manuscript, of his conducting score with its various revisions, insertions and alterations, and of the Foundling Hospital copy, is able to give us a clearer outline of what the composer himself would have expected to hear than is offered by traditional modes of performance dating from the vast Handel Commemoration festivals at the close of the eighteenth century. It is difficult to imagine a general return to this elephantine manner, with its massed choirs, orchestration thickened with flutes, clarinets and additional brass, and its inordinately slow tempi; the contemporary practice, favouring small forces, crisp rhythms and a respect of what is taken to have been an authentic performing style, will now, perhaps, be with us for ever.

Yet
Messiah
's resilience is such that, like Shakespeare's plays, it has taken a place among those works which every epoch moulds to its own fancies and desires.
Too much has sometimes been made of Handel the populist, the poor man's Bach, the glib melody maker for the vulgar enthusiast, but there is no denying that it was precisely this factor, of the art that conceals art, of the spontaneity that encloses an inexhaustible musical intelligence, which has guaranteed
Messiah
's survival as one of the most popular pieces of music ever created. Ironically, as we shall see, it has been this same quality that has made the composer the victim of that cultural snobbery which so often surrounds the appreciation of art.
Messiah
gave Handel to the world: whether the world has always treated either the master or his work very well in recompense is still a questionable point.