Handel (62 page)

For each concert enormous musical forces were mobilized and though Burney assures us that ‘the totality of sound seemed to proceed from one voice, and one instrument', Handel can scarcely have dreamt of hearing his music performed in this steamrolling fashion. There was only one full rehearsal for every programme and the conductor, Joah Bates, sat at the keyboard behind the choir sopranos, his harpsichord connected to the organ by a chain mechanism originally devised for Handel himself at Covent Garden. The colossal orchestra mustered all the best hands in London, Cramer on the fiddle, Fischer as oboist and Cervetto as principal cello, with such vocalists as the favourite Gertrud Elizabeth Mara and the star castrato Gasparo Pacchiarotti. Choral singers came from all over England – Mr Ivitt Loulworth from Cambridge, Mr Salmon from Worcester, Mr Cheese from Manchester, and the counter-tenors featured Lord Dillon, a claimant to the earldom of Roscommon.

The sheer size of chorus and orchestra made its due impression on foreign visitors. Handel's reputation abroad already stood high, even if,
during his lifetime, there were few opportunities outside England for hearing his music. Gluck, as we have noted, was permanently influenced by Handel in his graver, more starkly dramatic vein, but it is to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven that we must turn for evidence of the significant impress made by the composer upon the central traditions of European music.

No one imbued with a full experience of Handel's manner can fail to respond to its presence as an inspiration to the Viennese masters. By a fascinating coincidence all three, though doubtless struck by early encounters with Handel's work, were seriously influenced only when their compositional respective styles had substantially matured. In the case of Haydn, indeed, the full effect was created when the composer was already seen as the doyen of contemporary musicians and after Mozart had started to reflect that Handelian absorption which runs so powerfully through his later works.

Mozart's case is perhaps the most interesting. We know that his visit to London five years after Handel's death took in such events as a concert at Ranelagh House which featured choruses from
Acis and Galatea
and
Alexander's Feast
, and ended with
Zadok the Priest
, and he may have heard
Messiah
given at Mannheim by Georg Joseph Vogler, though his letters suggest otherwise. The real coup was made during the 1780s, at the concerts given in the Vienna house of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a civil servant and amateur composer with an inordinate Handelian enthusiasm, who had already pioneered a performance by the Tonkünstler Sozietat of
Judas Maccabaeus
. At the Baron's, Mozart told his father, ‘nothing is played but Handel and Bach', and Swieten's appreciation of the young man's gifts later took the form of entrusting him with providing extra orchestrations for
Acis and Galatea
,
Messiah
,
Alexander's Feast
and the
St Cecilia Ode
, all presented in Vienna during 1789–90.

Space does not permit detailed consideration of these Mozartian adornments, but their fascination for us, both as evidence of shifts in eighteenth-century taste and of a direct and painstaking scrutiny by Mozart of some of Handel's finest music, is immense. Their subsequent acceptance in England was to prove crucial to that Victorian overhaul of the Handelian orchestra from which this most refined and discriminating of all Baroque orchestrators has only recently been allowed to recover. Long before these additions, however, Mozart had fallen under Handel's spell. Inevitably the concern was not,
as in the case of his interest in Bach, with abstract design, but much more with such issues as treatment of choral texture and that improvisatory structural freedom with which Handel makes his boldest dramatic strokes. Of this last we can hear a responsive Mozartian echo most powerfully in pieces such as the monumental C minor Adagio and Fugue (K 546), an arrangement for strings of a two-piano fugue with an introduction creating the effect of a French overture, and the two fantasias for mechanical organ K 594 and K 608. In these, as in the Suite K 399, specifically conceived in Handelian style, the appeal to Mozart of that questioning, rhapsodic quality with which Handel invests so many of his overtures is at once clear.

The Handelian stamp in the late choral works needs no further comment. Among its wealth of allusions to the composer the C Minor Mass appears, in the Hosanna, to feature a direct reference to the Concerto Grosso Opus 3 no. 3, and the experience of the oratorios was essential to the grandeur of utterance in the unforgettable discourse of the
Requiem
. A closer study deserves to be made of the operas in this context. Though
Così fan tutte
, composed soon after Mozart's
Messiah
reorchestration, is interestingly free of Handel echoes (even if, in numbers such as Fiordiligi's ‘Come scoglio', the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte appears to parody the opera seria convention reflected in such clichés as Berenice's ‘Scoglio d'immota fronte' in
Scipione
)
Don Giovanni
, presented two years earlier, shows them most potently. We cannot listen to Donna Elvira without feeling that she has somehow lost her way en route to a Handelian lyric drama. The world of ‘Ah, fuggi il traditor' and ‘Ah! chi mi dice mai' is not that of any ordinary late-Baroque prima donna but, in orchestration, rhythms and harmonies, that of a Handel heroine in the mould of Dejanira, Athalia or even Alcina. As for
Die Zauberflöte
, whether in its overture, in the final numbers of both acts or in the cantilena of Pamina's ‘Ach, ich fühl's' it is enough to echo the judgement of a modern scholar that ‘without Handel, especially the Handel of
Messiah
, it is inconceivable'.

The influence upon Haydn and Beethoven was no less powerful. Well acquainted as he was with Swieten, Haydn made his most important Handelian encounter during his first visit to England in 1791, when that year's Commemoration festival presented
Israel in Egypt
,
Saul
and
Judas Maccabaeus
.
The composer William Shield, for whom Haydn was ‘the father of modern harmony', wrote that during a journey from London to Taplow ‘ . . . I embraced the favourable opportunity of enquiring how he estimated the Chorus in Joshua “The Nations tremble at the dreadful sound”.' The reply: ‘He had long been acquainted with the music, but never knew half its powers before he heard it, and he was perfectly certain that only one inspired Author ever did, or ever would pen so sublime a composition . . .' Shield later presented Haydn with a score of
Jephtha
, which he hugely admired, and which, with so much else of Handel's, duly contributed to that distinctive vigour and directness of dramatic engagement so typical of his choral style in the last masses,
The Creation
and
The Seasons.

Altogether similar was the case of Beethoven, who, although linked with Swieten's circle in his early years, was a mature artist by the time Handel's genius made its deepest impression on him. An implied homage to the style of the oratorios hardly needs pointing out in the
Missa Solemnis
, or, more obviously, in the
Weihe des Hauses
overture, an eloquent essay in imitation, and Handelian echoes can be sensed not only in the orchestral works but in
Fidelio
and the later chamber music besides.

The older composer's appeal must in part have lain in that uncompromising treatment of musical form that so often seems to anticipate Beethoven's own approach. He respected the economy of resource in this ‘unequalled Master of all Masters'. ‘Go to him', he said, ‘and learn how, with such modest means, such great effects may be produced.' To the Archduke Rudolph he wrote: ‘I beg your Imperial Highness not to forget the works of Handel, since of a certainty they always offer the greatest nourishment to your mature musical spirit and will at the same time lead to admiration for this great man.' An English visitor heard him ‘assert very distinctly in German, “Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived.” I cannot describe to you with what pathos and I am inclined to say, with what sublimity of language, he spoke of the “Messiah” of this immortal genius. Every one of us was moved when he said, “I would uncover my head and kneel down at his tomb.”' During the last weeks of his life Beethoven received the Arnold edition of Handel's works and his pleasure in turning over the scores was that of an enthusiastic pupil. ‘Handel is the greatest and most skilful of composers: I can still learn from him,' he acknowledged, though whether his ‘There lies the truth' as he contemplated the volumes from his deathbed is apocryphal or not we can hardly be certain.

Samuel Arnold's Handel edition, which so excited Beethoven, was destined to remain incomplete and by the time a new edition of the oratorios was set on foot by Novello in the form of the famous vocal scores whose descendants are still in use, the absorption of Handel into the fabric of English musical tradition was complete. Though the process undeniably reflects that quality of universal appeal, the wonderful common touch he shares with Mozart and Verdi, we cannot blind ourselves to its lingering and nearly disastrous effect on his reputation. His overwhelming popularity with the Victorian public not only succeeded in reinventing Handel as a respectable nineteenth-century bourgeois, but allowed him to fall a victim to that snobbery which continues to hang miasmally over English appreciation of composers who are too tunefully accessible.

We have only to look at the pages of the
Musical Times
to see how greedily they lapped him up. The
ne plus ultra
of orgiastic Handel worship was reached in the huge Crystal Palace festivals, which began in 1857. Among the earliest audience was the diarist Charles Greville, by now an elderly survivor from a more raffish and romantic age of political gerrymandering and scandals in high life. Despite ‘the beauty of the locale, with the vast crowds assembled in it', he found ‘the wonderful assembly of 2000 vocal and 500 instrumental performers did not produce musical effects so agreeable and so perfect as the smaller number in the smaller space of Exeter Hall', referring to the concerts given there by the Sacred Harmonic Society. His Regency good taste, however, was not shared by clamorous enthusiasts of the age of the crinoline, the three-decker novel and the Great Western, and big was beautiful at Sydenham, where the triennial festivals thundered onwards into the twentieth century. At the 1862 festival the
Musical Times
praised ‘the decorations . . . in excellent taste. The neutral tone of the prevailing colour, relieved by the poly-chromic medallions and arabesques which define the outline; the band that lines the interior, upon which is recorded the works of Handel; the pictorial centrepiece supplied by the stupendous and elaborately-embellished organ, and the thick foreground of plants and flowers make up a tableau of magnificence, the effect of which is astonishing.' As for the public,
‘the ladies, without having strictly attended to the direction as to wearing white or light dresses, were sufficiently mindful of effect to produce a goodly display of every colour in the rainbow. Among the audience the white neckcloths of the clergy were most observable, even bishops might have been seen in the crowd . . .'

Singers were expected to conform to the tone of the occasion. The paper rapped Adelina Patti smartly over the knuckles for performing in the manner of ‘one who nightly wins the most enthusiastic demonstrations of approval from the audience at the Royal Italian Opera', but added that ‘we have little doubt that she may eventually achieve a name as great in sacred as she has already done in secular music'. By implication Handel thus became the composer for those who either could not afford or else chose to shun the sophistications of aristocratic entertainment. No wonder the reviewer of the 1880 festival was moved to say: ‘As to the good arising from the Handel Festival there can be no doubt. It displays, and also confirms, the public allegiance to a master absolutely blameless in the character and tendency of his works. Simple, massive, strong, and yet tender, Handel stands like some example of pure Doric architecture which, by the force and beauty of its outline, corrects all others.' Ten years later the whole thing had well and truly become ‘the great Handelian solemnity'.

In nineteenth-century Germany the composer was the object of an altogether more discriminating interest and the study of his works which had so enriched Beethoven and Schubert in Vienna was equally profitable elsewhere to Liszt, Schumann and Brahms, each of whom acknowledged a sincere admiration. Liszt indeed, in an article in the
Weimarische Zeitung
in 1850, wrote, ‘Handel seems to our epigonic generation like one of the giants of the past. In his life he stands out as one of the most energetic and sublime figures known to the history of art, strong, free, unyielding in his pursuit of an exalted goal; even when he seems to be defeated in the struggle against his own epoch, his mighty spirit rises up to gain fresh victories. Such a character inspires his music besides . . . its spontaneity and simplicity is what ensures, for Handel's works, especially his oratorios, a permanent and potent influence.'

Wagner, hearing the
Cecilia Ode
in Vienna in 1875, was ‘affected to the highest degree by various strokes of genius in the composition itself' and though Cosima later noted of the oratorios: ‘astonished at their banality; no depth,
no Christianity, a proper Jehovah worship,' her diaries show her husband's none too grudging respect for Handel, whose works he would play through enthusiastically at the piano. ‘At supper he maintains that Handel must surely have composed
God save the King
: “the fellow was a scoundrel, but a genius as well”.' The words apply equally well to Wagner himself.

Germany's ultimate tribute to its vagabond son came in the form of what is still the only complete edition of Handel's works, edited by Friedrich Chrysander, and published in ninety-three volumes between 1858 and 1902. ‘Complete' is of course a relative term: much additional music composed for various operas and oratorios was omitted, certain of the instrumental works were reordered in a manner calculated to create lasting confusion, and the significance of Handel's first drafts and experimental sketches, such as those in the Fitzwilliam manuscripts, was apparently ignored. The composer's polyglot indications of tempo, dynamics and instrumentation, in which French, German, Italian, English and Latin figure arbitrarily together, were tidied up, and editorial presumption decreed in several instances that what Handel originally intended should be set aside for what instead appealed to Chrysander's notions of common sense. Worst sin of all was a general disregard of the autograph manuscripts in preference to the albeit valuable evidence of the conducting scores eventually acquired by the Hamburg Staatsbibliothek.