George Frederick Handel: 1685-1885

THE early spring of 1685, two centuries ago, brought into the world two unsurpassed musicians. Bountiful indeed was the good genius of humanity in giving birth that year to both a Handel and a John Sebastian Bach ! One was born on the 23d of February, the other on the 21st of March. Their names are always coupled, like twin planets of the greatest magnitude, although they never met each other in this world. It was fit that so significant a bicentennial anniversary should be celebrated, as it has been and yet will be, in many musical centres, by the most adequate performance which our modern means permit of some of their great creations, as well as by words of reminder and, however feeble, exposition of their great claims on the gratitude of Christendom at large.

Our theme at present shall be Handel; on his monument we hang our humble wreath.

Unlike his great contemporary, who was the consummate flower of a widespread family of six generations of musicians, Handel owed nothing of his genius or his musical instinct to his parentage. His father, a respectable barber-surgeon in that quaint old city of Halle on the Saal, then no longer the princely residence it had been, was indifferent to music, and strenuously set himself against what proved to be the boy’s resistless bent and destiny. He would have had him eminent in what he deemed the more respectable profession of the law. Every instrument, every tempting facility for practice, was tabooed in that house. Not even did he allow the child to listen to the siren, lest the idle passion should absorb him, and unfit him for things practical. But Nature was in earnest. Her instinct in the boy could not be baulked. The predisposed imagination can nourish itself on very few and slender opportunities. Music can no more be kept from the born musician than thought from the free mind. He had heard a clavichord, and he had influence enough with a domestic to get a rickety old instrument, with muffled tones, secreted in a garret, where, “ under the storks’ nests,” he practiced, out of hearing, in the night, while others slept. Wide awake was he to every chance snatch of melody, or magic chord, which the tiny fingers found in their rumblings over the strange keyboard. He soon worked his way into the secret of the matter, so that he really knew what he had discovered for himself. By the time he was seven years old, he was master of the instrument. How quickly he found a chance to show this well-earned passport where it could open a way for him into the heaven of a musician’s life is matter of common anecdote. Forbidden to accompany his father on a visit to a son by a former marriage, who was valet-de-chambre to the neighboring Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels, the boy ran forward down the road, waylaid the carriage, and so wrought upon the paternal feelings that he was taken in. ’T was a small thing, — the going or the staying : but genius felt its hour; it acted in the nick of time, and by this stroke it won the future. Allowed to stroll about in the chambers of the palace, feasting himself to heart’s content with trying all the clavichords and harpsichords he came across, he managed to get at the organ after chapel service. The Duke’s attention was arrested by something pleasing and original in the crude and faulty voluntary of the boy of seven. He sent for the father, and with much difficulty prevailed upon him to renounce the legal hobby, and let Nature have her way.

The boy is taken home, triumphant. And now begins the schooling, — in the school of his own nature’s choice. The lessons, under the judicious teaching of Zachau, the Halle organist, a manysided, excellent musician, are all taken con amore. Elementary practice, harmony and counterpoint, musical form and structure, are appetizing meat and drink to him, just what he craves, and have for him the zest which most boys find in play. In due time he is initiated into the fascinating mazes of the subtly involved, thought-tasking fugue, the indispensable Greek and Latin (as it were) of the regular musical education in that day ; the secret of all true artistic, vital form in music; its perfect type of one in many, of law in freedom ; in whose complicated web those old German composers were perfectly at home, and expressed themselves as easily and freely as they talked in their native language. With many of them, of course, it was a commonplace, conventional, pedantic music, and had not much to say, and so their works, enormous in mere quantity, are forgotten ; with a few, like Bach and our hero, it rose to inspiration, and will live. With this strong, eager, healthy boy, possessed by such clearheaded genius, the practice kept pace with the lesson ; as fast as he learned the alphabet, almost, he would compose. For two years Zachau confined him to no favorite model, but in a truly catholic spirit set before him works of distinguished organ-writers of all schools, German and Italian, letting him choose for himself. Of course he knew his pupil, knew he would choose for himself, at any rate, and that so sound an appetite could well be trusted. Meanwhile, other studies, Latin certainly, were not neglected. From the age of ten, for three years, he made motets, or “ cantatas,” and we read incredulously that some hundreds of these were written one a week, and sung in the cathedral service, of which all trace is lost. Why should such pupil exercises be preserved ? Doubtless they were slight affairs, revealing promise; but all the hundreds of them could not have contained the meat there is in one of the masterly cantatas written for weekly service during six years of Bach’s riper period, — works of genius, which the musical world has only now begun to fathom, and find rich, incalculable reward. It would be interesting to know just what other examples of what other masters, besides his own teacher, served to stimulate the boy’s productive talent; whether, for instance, any fruits fell to his lips from the many branches and offshoots of the great Bach family tree, under whose shade John Sebastian was growing up.

Before the age of twelve he had outlearned his master and exhausted the musical resources of his native place. But it was not until the summer of 1703, when he was eighteen years old, and when his father was dead, that, with characteristic energy and quick decision, always seizing just the food his genius craved, and always at the providential time, he turned his steps toward Hamburg, then the most flourishing centre of the German (half Italian) opera. His Hamburg adventures are known chiefly through the garrulous memorabilia and criticisms of Matheson, his friend and rival there, a composer of some note, a man of much learning and great vanity, who boasted of having written as many books (ponderous ones, too, some of them) as he had lived years. The superior specific gravity of such a character as Handel seems to have attracted him to itself, and to have made him, half unwillingly, his satellite and eulogist. We need but hint the well-known anecdotes : how the novice was at once received into the opera orchestra as ripieno violin, and, indulging a dry humor, began with feigning unusual ignorance, making the most serious laugh, while looking very grave himself; how he suddenly revealed himself, when called upon, in the absence of the man who commonly presided at the harpsichord, to take his place ; what friendly contests for preëminence on keyed instruments he had with Matheson, leaving it a drawn game, — he being acknowledged first upon the organ, and his rival on the harpsichord ; how they traveled together to Lübeck in friendly competition for a vacant post of organist ; how they composed together double fugues upon the way, — in the mind, of course, it could not be in writing (da mente, not da penna) ; how Handel’s organ performance excited the admiration of all hearers, even of Buxtehude, the greatest organist of his time, whom Bach also went far to hear, and who was the one about to vacate his post; and how both candidates retreated faster than they came, on learning of one slight condition attached to the office, namely, that the accepted one should take a wife, to he nominated by his employers. Matheson remarks that in those days Handel composed interminable arias and cantatas, which wanted taste and even sinned against harmony ; and that his organplaying, clever as he was in the working of fugue themes, left much to be desired in point of melody, a fault which he was in a good school to remedy, those Hamburg operas, and constant intercourse with their accomplished composer and conductor, Keiser, — dieser galante Componist, as Matheson calls him. About this time Handel composed his smaller Passion oratorio, in structure similar to the incomparably greater creations of Bach in that kind, though lacking, probably avoiding, the important element of the Lutheran choral, the worshiping people’s melody, of which of course he had imbibed the inspiration from his cradle, but which the operatic prejudice of Hamburg rigidly excluded ; nevertheless, a remarkable production for a boy, as any one may see, now that the score is published in the German Händel-Gesellschaft’s noble edition of all Handel’s works.

When Keiser, a poor economist, became so embarrassed that he had to flee from Hamburg, Handel succeeded him as conductor at the harpsichord. The orchestral accompaniment of that time, we must remember, was a meagre affair compared with the massive and multifarious instrumentation with which the feeblest opera composer nowadays may cover up his poverty of thought. For a youth of nineteen to preside over such an orchestra was no miracle. Yet we can imagine that the future master was already in this way gradually learning the consummate art with which he afterwards filled out (that is his own word, ausgefüllt: see autograph of his Messiah), at harpsichord or organ, from his own mind, upon the instant, the halfhinted instrumentation of so large a part of all his oratorios as well as operas ; supplying for the time being for himself what Mozart, Mosel, Mendelssohn, above all Robert Franz, have since been drawing from his figured basses, adapting for modern instruments (this more in the case of Bach), and writing out for us so that our modern orchestras may read.

The “ German ” operas, which Handel had to conduct in the Hamburg theatre, by Keiser, Matheson, Telemann, and others, were founded on the Italian type which sprang up with the Renaissance in Florence in the year 1600, and which in the mean time had received some development in Italy, some national coloring in France, and had in England, through Purcell, Lock, etc., recovered from the blight of Puritanism for a while, whereas in Germany the terrible Thirty Years’ War had trampled down whatever germs had been imported thither. German opera began in Hamburg. It lacked the all-important element of the Italian parlando, or recitative, for which the rugged German dialect was not thought pliable enough, so that its place was supplied, as it is even now in pieces like Fidelio and Der Freyschütz, by spoken dialogue. For the rest, each opera consisted of an interminable string of arias for the various characters, with an occasional duet, but never any trio, quartet, or concerted piece, and nothing like a chorus, except when the dramatis personœ united their voices in a few measures, ceremonially, before the curtain fell. The orchestra contributed slight overtures, after the Lulli pattern (which Handel later sometimes expanded into preludes of more consequence, with several movements), bits of interlude and ballet, and the thinnest and most incomplete accompaniments for voices.

It was after a performance of one of Matheson’s operas of this kind, his Cleopatra, that the famous duel with rapiers occurred between him and Handel, when the Muses saved their favorite son’s life, almost by miracle, for the great work they had in store for him. Then came Handel’s own first opera, Almira (1705). It was after the same pattern, but had a freshness and a variety of characteristic musical ideas and melodies, all fitted to the sentiments and situations of the several persons with so much tact and truth of feeling that the work was hailed at once with admiration. The score contains fifteen Italian and forty German arias ! also a brief overture for string quartet, a ballet, chaconne, entrée, giga, rigaudon, and two sarabands, one of which reappeared afterwards in his Rinaldo as the aria, so popular to-day in concert rooms, “ Lascia ch’io pianga.” (Handel made no scruple of using over and over again, in new combinations, whatever he had written, when nothing else would fit the case so well, at any rate so easily.)

Then came (1706) his flight into Italy, whither he sped with the sure instinct of the bee which knows where honey waits for it. A contrapuntist almost from the cradle, to the manner born, possessing too a marvelous gift of melody by nature, he was now to learn in Forence, where the opera began, the art of recitative, and to acquire a new command over the mysterious powers and qualities of the human voice. He was in Italy, the land of art and heaven of every young artist’s dreams. But he gave there as good as he received, both in dramatic and religious composition. His first Italian opera, Rodrigo, delighted the natives and drew rich presents from the Tuscan Duke. Early in 1708 he reached Venice, and there produced Agrippina, which had a run of twentyseven nights. Thence he went to Rome, where he was warmly welcomed by the Cardinal Ottoboni, and where he enjoyed the acquaintance of those two great musicians, Alessandro Scarlatti and Corelli. In Rome he composed La Resurrezione and the Triumph of Time, in half-oratorio, half-cantata, fashion, soon followed by the first cast of the charming pastoral of Acis and Galatea. This tour in Italy was a triumphal progress. The enthusiastic children of the South could not render homage enough to the Caro Sassone, the new star from the North. It was not the first time that their own tuneful art had received quickening influence and lessons from the North ; even Palestrina had been the pupil of Claude Goudimel ; Willaert had planted counterpoint in Venice; and the Flemish masters taught the Italians the great art of polyphonic writing, which the Italians in their turn made more melodious and juicy. It seemed to be an easy thing for this strong, sure, fortunate young Saxon to turn out an opera (“ as good as they made them ” in those days) at short notice, or astonish the crowd by his extempore effusions on the organ. The organ was the golden key which opened the way everywhere, so that he could let his genius bask and mellow in the sunny influence of that genial land of song. He evidently was thinking more of his own culture, his own preparation, than of too cheap immediate fame. His triumphs were but incidental to his one great end; he took them as they came, but did not compromise his art to win them.

In 1710 he left Italy, and, after a visit to his mother in Halle, went to Hanover, where his style received some finishing graces from Steffani, who soon resigned to him his place of kapellmeister to the Elector, afterwards the first George of England. He had free leave of absence to complete his Lehrjahre, and having heard so much of England, where Purcell, England’s greatest genius in music, had died only fifteen years before; where Lawes and Matthew Lock, with Purcell, had started some few shoots of opera, after the long Puritan “ winter of their discontent; ” where Buononcini was at work already with Italian singers; and where the grave, majestic style (albeit formal, a descent from Palestrina) of the Elizabethan church composers, together with the learned and more juicy English school of madrigalists, still held their high prestige, — he was moved to try his fortunes there. To London he went in the early winter of that year. He sought a broader, more rewarding field for his productive talent. He was destined there to be a teacher far more than a learner. Some hints, no doubt, he caught from Purcell and the Elizabethan masters, more in the way of adapting himself, in form and style, to the requirements of the English Church, than because an art so masterly, so full of genius, as his own had aught of beauty, or expression, or effect to learn of them. What he unlearned there was, alas, the choral!

We have so far merely glanced at what may be called the forming period of Handel as an artist, — the period during which he gravitated toward other more developed if not stronger minds, and hung awhile by turns within their tuneful spheres, until his own fresh, receptive genius had become impregnated, so far as was good for him, by theirs. We have now reached the time when, by this visit to England, at the age of twenty-five, he detached himself, and moved off in an independent orbit of his own, beginning a new life. With nothing more to learn from German or Italian models, since he had already measured himself with the best of them, unless it were that young Sebastian Bach, he had now to work out what was in him, with his genius for his law. So far we taste the blithe air of a morning worthy to precede so full a day.

Imagine, then, the welcome he received in England, to which soil the Italian opera had just been transplanted. Facile princeps he would show himself in that, and from the start, with his Rinaldo, founded upon Tasso’s poem. It was at once admired beyond any opera the London world had heard, and long continued famous, despite the ridicule of Addison and Steele. After a year, faithful to the Elector, he returned to Hanover, where he busied himself with instrumental works and much Italian Chamber music, including the vocal duets, recently edited with fit accompaniment by Franz. He was soon off again for England (1712), where he reappeared at the Queen’s Theatre with two new operas, II Pastor Fido and Teseo. These were soon followed by the Te Deum and Jubilate, which he composed for Queen Anne after the Peace of Utrecht. In such demand was he that this time he forgot to return. When the Elector succeeded to the British throne, Handel had forfeited his friendship. All know the story of his Water Music (a serenade, or Suite of several pieces, for a large band of instruments, played in a boat in the wake of a royal procession on the Thames), by which he charmed the monarch’s favor back.

Soon he wrote his larger Passion music. Then came the fruitful period (1717-20) of his residence at the palace of the magnificent Duke of Chandos, who had the finest chapel in the kingdom, and wanted the first organist, of course, for his mäestro di capella. There he conducted evening concerts, composed organ concertos and other instrumental music, but chiefly anthems, motets, and whatever service - music was required. The most important were the Chandos Anthems, which, with later anthems, fill three volumes of the Werke under the title of Psalms. The word anthem is unknown in Germany, and these works are in essentially the same form with the Psalms of Mendelssohn. Had Bach written them, they would have been called Cantatas ; for in them we find overtures, arias, choruses, — but not the Lutheran chorals, on which Bach always builds. The anthems are about eighteen in number. Very noble choruses occur in them, especially in those composed long after the Chandos period for royal weddings, coronations, and the like. Frequently a chorus is borrowed from one of his own earlier works ; thus the anthem for the Foundling Hospital concludes with the Hallelujah Chorus from the Messiah.

Here begins one of the two great periods and phases of Handel’s unremitting, long life-work. In 1720 the Royal Academy of Music was founded for the performance of Italian operas. Handel was called from his retirement to be not only composer in chief, but at the same time impresario and conductor of the whole. Buononcini and Ariosti were associated with him. How he ruled the opera for many years, composing one or two fresh operas every year, and always drawing crowds ; how, with strong will and unfailing tact, he dealt with all the impediments and annoyances of an enterprise so vast and multifarious, we have no room to tell. This opera stood about ten years. The quarrels of the rival song queens, Cuzzoni and Faustina, which divided the fashionable world into factions, amounting sometimes to a total suspension of intercourse between noble families ; a standing disagreement, too, which Handel had with the singer Senesino, whose showy style took with the fashionable, but went against the better judgment of the master, who would not compose for him such arias as he liked to sing, and finally refused to have anything more to do with the theatre unless Senesino were dismissed, — these troubles with the enormous expenses brought the business to an end. Meanwhile, Handel had raised a formidable opposition on the part of the nobility. The operatic strife was turned into “ political capital : ” the Whigs supported Senesino, the Tories Handel. He was forced to carry on the work by his own unaided strength. The nobility got up a rival opera ; and many of them even purposely contrived to have their great social assemblies fall on the nights of Handel’s operas. If conciliatory overtures were made to him, his pride refused all compromise.

With a giant’s vigor he made head against the tide, until he had lost all his earnings and become sick in body and in mind. At last one arm was paralyzed. He was induced to leave cares and labors, and go over to Aix-la-Chapelle to recruit himself. He made summary work of that cure. He sat thrice the usual time over the vapor baths. In three days he was exciting crowds to rapture, as he played, “ like an angel just descended,” on the organ of the neighboring church ; and in six weeks he was again in England, and composing operas. This was in 1736. He struggled on a few years more, but all in vain ; the day had passed! The whole tide bore down against him, even the popular taste itself. In truth, the opera was but a fashion, and was not sincerely loved in England. And he was working against himself, — against his own deeper nature, his own real destiny. The barren sentimentalities and trivialities and cheap sensationalism of that old Italian opera were no true field for him; nor was he born, like Gluck and Mozart, to glorify the peculiar genius of dramatic music. He was reserved for even nobler work. His quarrel with the singers was, in fact, a quarrel with the opera itself. He discovered it while he had yet strength left to turn the sickening experience to account. He sank in opera, to rise in oratorio.

So closed those thirty years of up-hill labor, mostly opera-making, interspersed with many works in other kinds, which also have their immortality. These include some for instruments, some for church service, several of his first essays in oratorio ; also those secular cantatas, almost oratorios in magnitude and ever-fascinating charm, like Acis and Galatea, L’Allegro ed il Pensieroso, and Alexander’s Feast.

Of his personal history in those opera years there could not be much to tell. Yet if a readable story could be made out of the private life of a great musician, we surely should have had one out of Handel’s life in England. It was the age of Addison and Steele and Pope, — the age of personal anecdote, ephemeral essays, memoirs, piquant gossip of all kinds. Yet one soon exhausts the little anecdotes which are preserved of so conspicuous a personage as Handel. The life of such a man is in his music. His glees and glooms, his dreams and adventures, are all in the realm of tones. Absorbed in this, the superficial, bustling life around him did not cleave to him. His relation to the world of facts and deeds and persons was only accidental contact. That was not his world. His social affections were not strong, although he was not heartless, but generous, kindly, full of charity. Music was wife and child and friend to him. Love passages figure very slightly in the record of his life. Yet he had put many pairs of lovers on the stage, and furnished them with melodies exquisitely true to all the pathos and the tenderness, the pangs and joys and yearnings and conflicting passions, of all sorts of characters in love. If he was thrice engaged, — once in Italy, twice in England, in the last instance to a very wealthy lady, who made it a condition that he should give up his art, — it seems to have cost him no great struggle to renounce. (Think of Bach, twice married, who had twenty children, accomplishing an equally vast amount of equally immortal work !)

During those thirty years our hero had produced nearly fifty operas. He had reigned absolute monarch in England’s music throughout half the time: and then he let no opposition drive him from his ground ; it was the ground itself which sank under him. It was the divine genius itself letting him down upon the solid rock where he should stand forever, working from that centre about which all conflicting, superficial interests revolve. He had been a long time in fully finding himself out; the very glow of healthy action and creation made him careless of the field he worked in. Much of the pure ore of his sterling genius long lay buried in the dusty folios of his forgotten operas in the Royal Library; we know it now that we have most of them before us in the clear and noble print of the Händel-Gesellschaft. Rich mine, that, with all its rubbish ; and busily they are beginning now to work it! The imperishable part, the inspired melodies and recitatives scattered through those scores, will soon be separated from the rest; the part which belongs to Handel and eternity will be washed out clean and bright from what belonged merely to the day of George II. and the opera of fashion, and be added to the classics of the art. One reason, even were there no other, must always prevent these operas coming to performance again as wholes; and that is, the exceedingly thin, half-sketched, imperfect instrumentation handed down to us in the timesaving, hasty notation of these scores. Much do we owe to-day, therefore, to the zeal and insight, the thoroughly sympathetic acquaintance with Handel’s genius and method (for he himself filled out his harmony presiding at the keyboard), shown in the exquisite pianoforte accompaniment elaborated from the scores of several dozen of the finest arias by men like Robert Franz and Otto Dresel.

What were those operas, and what was the secret of their attraction in their day ? Doubtless they were the very best that day afforded in London or any city of the world. They were the creation, and under the immediate personal conductorship, of the greatest musician who had ever yet occupied himself in that field of art. The magnetism of his presence went a great way. As lyrical dramas they found their subjects in the usual heroes of classical mythology, history, and romance : Theseus and Medea, Cæsar, Tamerlane, Tasso’s Armida and Rinaldo, Alexander, Scipio, etc. Only the principals appear and sing. Each opera consists of a long string of solo arias, now and then a duet, no concerted pieces, never any chorus, except before the falling of the curtain, when the dramatis personæ draw up in a row before the audience and make their bow, as it were, in a dozen or more measures of very simple harmony ; just as our actors do, in their way, after a comedy at the theatre, with their hands upon their hearts, and, Pray, dear Public, come again! For orchestra alone, seldom more than the quartet of strings, they contain a brief overture (expanded into several movements in some of Handel’s later operas) and occasional bits of symphony, commonly in ancient dance forms. The accompaniments to the voice are of the thinnest: sometimes nothing but a single violin, with which an oboe runs in unison ; sometimes two violin and oboe parts ; rarely a viola, or any middle part; now and then, for martial pomp and splendor, the crisp, crackling trumpets, — one, two, three ; or horns, or bassoons ; besides the basso continuo, or figured bass. Often we find noted down, to keep the voice in countenance, nothing but a violin or flute, warbling the same melody note for note! Or it may be nothing but a bass, sometimes not even figured ; letting the poor melody run naked, as it were, in merciless relief, as by an electric light, against a long dark wall of bass ! What was indispensable for complete, even decent, harmony the conductor at his clavichord knew how to contribute on the instant. Such art had the musicians of that day : who shall match them now ?

As for the arias themselves, the melodies as well as the recitatives, they are of wonderful variety and beauty, and were interpreted by very famous singers ; that alone would draw the fashionable crowd. These arias are always characteristic ; each person is recognizable by his or her own intrinsic melody, more truly than by any literal Wagnerian tag, or Leit-motive. Thus the Armida in Rinaldo, the Medea in Teseo, and the Melissa in Amadigi (Amadis de Gaul) are three sorceresses, queenly and terrible ; yet the musical presentment of one does not repeat itself in the others. Nor throughout the whole vast range of melodies is there much monotony, except what lies in the formal cut and color of the age. In Admeto, the pure, devoted, tender melody of Alcestis, who sacrifices her life for her husband, and the bluff, hearty, generous voice of Hercules, who redeems her from the shades, each in its way is full of life and truth. That opera suggests a parallel with the Orpheus and Eurydice of Gluck (1764). In each the husband mourns a wife; in each there is a descent to hell, a Cerberus tamed by music, and a charming of the lost one back to light. The overture of Admeto and the bits of symphony and ballet, especially those preluding to hell’s gloom and terrors, could have served Gluck for models; only he had the resources of a more modern orchestra at his command. In Alessandro, where we have Alexander the Great and the two captive queens, the rivals in his love, we have a remarkable instance of the consummate tact with which Handel managed his mutually jealous prirna donnas, assigning to Cuzzoni and Faustina a precisely equal amount and style and quality of song : to each a florid and bravura piece; to each a tender, sentimental cantabile, or an air of rage, despair, or pity. If one sings a duet with the conqueror, the other sings one also.

It would be interesting to review even cursorily this whole list of operas; but it would require a twelvemonth and a book. Suffice it here to say, in general, that these operatic arias seem to surpass in freshness, in variety, in charm of spontaneity, as well as in brevity and conciseness, not a few of the more elaborate, formal, and somewhat conventional arias in his oratorios, sublime and tender as so many of them are, yet bound to more or less of a certain conventionalism by their Bible texts and by the “ sacredness ” expected of them. The opera airs have naturally more of the freedom and elastic spring of youth ; Handel was not tired when he conceived them. Some of them, no doubt, he dashed off on the spur of the moment, currente calamo, perfunctorily, almost automatically, so completely had that style of composition become to him like an unstudied native language. It must not be forgotten that stage machinery and spectacle, magic transformation scenes, etc., played a pretty large part in those performances. After a while, too, party rivalries helped fill the houses, sowing, in such hot-house and ephemeral successes, only seeds of sure decay and ruin.

We have now reached the last, the ripest, the greatest period of Handel. It remains to think of him, if but for a moment, as he wrought from that commanding height whence he has made his power and genius, above all his lofty theme, most deeply, widely, permanently felt. He has gone down amid the vanities, intrigues, and disappointments of Italian opera, to reappear upon the mount of oratorio, where his face shall shine like that of Moses, and his great words be thundered forth, amid lightnings, in massive choruses, the most impressive, unmistakable in meaning, unalterable in the perfection of their art, vivid in their swift scene-painting, inexhaustible in their variety of expression, from the most pastoral and tender to the most holy and sublime, that have ever been written, though equaled, with a difference, it may be, by some of Bach,

As we have seen, he had already brought out several oratorios amid his other work : among them Esther, Deborah, and more recently his stupendous Israel in Egypt. These were performed in the theatres during the season of Lent, when operas were forbidden. As they required no expensive scenery and decorations, he could not do better than thus utilize the time with these experiments ; exercising himself in a new and grander art-form, which was a blending of his old solid contrapuntal church style with the melodic and dramatic art he had acquired from the Italians, and feeling the public pulse awhile before addressing himself entirely to the growing English taste for oratorio, — that is, for a new kind of sacred (biblical) musicdrama, which, as it went on widening and deepening in scope, became also epical.

We need not say much of the oratorios, since it is by these that Handel is best known, — best of all by the Messiah, which is at once Passion music and Redemption, the sins and sorrows of our race and the immortal hope. This is truly a great epic. Why describe it, when it has been described and analyzed, and all its beauty, pathos, and sublimity exposed, a hundred times ? What can we tell of it that is not known already to all serious music-lovers; that is, what of its power and meaning ? — while for the historical facts and anecdotes attending its production it is enough to refer to Dr. Burney, and such biographers as Main waring, Schoelcher, and particularly Rockstro. Some regard it as the crowning product of all musical art and genius, as the fixed star shining at the very pinnacle of the universal tone-cathedral. (Bach’s St. Matthew Passion was not known when this was claimed unhesitatingly.) A wonder about it is that it was begun and finished in the short space of twenty-one days. Such intense and lightning-like rapidity of execution is easily credited by any one who looks through the facsimile of the original manuscript, in Handel’s resolute, bold hand, with hasty jottings and erasures, and such blurs and smutches as suggest a desperate hurry. But, although it was noted down in three weeks, it is but reasonable to take for granted that it had been shaping itself in Handel’s mind for many months before. We know that Mozart’s compositions were always clear and complete in his mind before they went on paper. The Messiah was coldly received in London. He took it to Dublin, appealing to the unsophisticated hearts of Ireland with music so unlike that of their Roman masses. There it was sung repeatedly to crowds full of enthusiasm; and after that it never failed to command eager audiences in England, even when his other oratorios rang out in empty houses.

Israel in Egypt is the oratorio which most frequently disputes the palm with the Messiah. Perhaps in sustained grandeur and sublimity it is the greater of the two : one vast mountain chain of massive double choruses, with soft green vales of melody between. These choruses deal with miracle in the boldest style. They smite with lightning force, revealing scenes of awe and splendor ; describe darkness palpable, that may be felt; portray the plagues of Egypt, from mean annoyances of flies to vast elemental forces and upheavals, and up to moral, spiritual terrors ; the crossing of the Red Sea, Miriam’s song of triumph, fire and hail running along the ground, and whatever images can lift the imagination from the commonplace to what is superhuman and sublime. Equally imposing are its outpourings of faith, humiliation, awe, before the holy presence, in a more grave and churchlike style. Judas Maccabæus, with airs and choruses full of heroic, patriotic fire, its great hymns of a nation’s lamentation, and Samson perhaps, stand next in popular appreciation. But he has left us nearly twenty more, which, if not quite such perfect wholes, yet teem with wonderful inspirations both for single voice and chorus. Solomon, with its exquisite Nightingale Chorus and its chain of choruses descriptive of the passions, has had some hearings here in Boston, where also Saul and Joshua and his latest, Jephtha, have been partly given once or twice. But Deborah, Belshazzar, Theodora (a favorite with its composer), Susanna, Esther, etc., are sealed books to us ; and so are those works in oratorio form with mythological or secular subjects, like Semele and Hercules, so-called oratorios, which contain some of the most original and striking instances of Handel’s genius. And why sealed ? Simply because the scores, as handed down to us, still need some Mozart, Mendelssohn, or Robert Franz to fill out and complete the harmony from the mere sketch, which never could have contented Handel, and which, as we have said before, he was in the habit of completing for himself as he presided at the organ. In view of this it does indeed look strange to see Mr. Rockstro, in the last paragraph of his excellent biography, anticipating the Bicentennial Handel Festival, express the earnest hope that, “ on this occasion, at least, the works selected for performance may be given with the original instrumentation ” ! The suggestion, one would think, were quite enough to start the old colossus from his grave, and bring him stalking down into the midst of such an orchestra with heavier footfall than the statue in Don Juan, and in greater wrath than that in which he awed refractory song-queens to submission.

Whenever the great music of that age is spoken of, — the learned, contrapuntal, polyphonic age, — the names of Bach and Handel are almost always coupled as its greatest representatives, although they differ quite essentially. Bach, in his sacred works, motets, cantatas, passions, always builds upon the Lutheran choral, the Protestant plainsong of the people ; or rather, he develops all his forms and combinations out of chorals, at first simply introduced and harmonized, as from so many pregnant germs of beauty and of meaning almost inexhaustible. Handel, cradled in the same German music and religion, who must have drunk in the choral with his mother’s milk, makes hardly any use of it in all his oratorios and compositions for the church. This is not so strange when we consider : (1.) The contrasted individualities of the men. Handel loved to stand forth and prophesy before the world. His genius courted popularity. Nobly as he wrote, he still wrote for effect. He was a man of the world, and fond of coming to the footlights. His oratorios, as well as his operas, still held as by an umbilical cord to the theatre. Bach stayed quietly at home, an artist purely for religion and for art. He wooed the shade ; an equally prodigious worker and creator in his way, and even happier in his work. He has been called a mystic in his music, only by much searching to be found out. But he is not mystical; he is very clear when once you have the key to him, and that key lies as much in your own soul as in any technical analysis. The word which describes his characteristic better is the German word Innigkeit, or inwardness, or from-within-ness. (2.) The difference in their outward lives, resulting very largely from their difference of nature. Handel’s roving, enterprising, and ambitious spirit took him off to Italy, and then to England, where he became almost an Englishman, and where he had to accommodate his sacred style and form to the traditions of the English service, so widely different from the Lutheran. Those thirty years of public operatic labor made the whole bent and habit of his being unexchangeable with that of Bach, who stayed at home, musing and brooding by his own peaceful fireside, under the shadow of the old Thomaskirche ; warming into life the seed-germs of the people’s chorals in wonderful cantatas, each being sung only once, for every Sunday’s service. What Handel forfeited in turning from the choral he gained, perhaps, in his own way by the contracting of a style more positive, more sharply outlined and concise, more sure of popular, immediate effect. All that he does tells unmistakably ; it goes straight to the mark. Those voice parts stamp themselves in every singer’s mind, so that, once learned, he never can forget them. It seems as if every note were set there by an absolute divine decree, so fitly that you cannot conceive it otherwise. One thinks of him as the founder of the Hallelujah Chorus; as if such majestic piles were built up for all ages out of solid blocks of adamant. He builded better than he knew! ” we might exclaim, if we were speaking of another man than Handel. The sure and solid laying down of pregnant themes, the rich development and mighty onsweep of the mingling and pursuing voices, the great climaxes and great silences, moments of eternity, where the whole rushing broad Niagara of sound is arrested on the brink of the precipice before the final plunge, — all this seems something more than human art, something that sprang whole and perfect out of Eternity’s unfathomable womb. Let us here remark, in passing, what a sure instinct always governed Handel in the choice of the most fit, expressive, telling, and resounding words for these great uses. What other composer ever had such poets ?

Like Bach and other great composers, Handel became blind some years before his death, in 1759. Still he presided at the organ in his oratorio performances; and furthermore, between the parts he improvised an organ voluntary, or concerto. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, where stands the full-length statue of him by Roubilliac, and where the first centennial anniversary of his birth, so glowingly described by Dr. Burney, gave the first impulse to the grand musical festivals of modern times.

Everything about the man was generous and noble. His mind and character showed colossal proportions, like his frame; calm and strong and cheerful, like his open, placid countenance. If he had not strong social affections, it was not that he had no heart; for who has better known and spoken to the human heart than he ? Two faults only have been found in him. He ate largely : so did Homer’s heroes. He swore, “ like our army in Flanders.” This was a conventionalism, so far as it was profane (not deemed profane in Continental usage, and blasphemous only in England) ; a necessary safety-valve, so far as it was violent. We may pardon this one honest weakness; it was his rude, stammering way of showing himself in earnest at a crisis. The stream by its own impetuosity sometimes clogs itself up, and must break a way through as it can; then it flows on smoothly again. But even in his anger there was more of humor than of malice.

What a benefactor he has been in many ways to generations after him ! How many public charities have been aided, built up, by his oratorios ! What strength and faith and comfort thousands of weary souls have drawn from his awakening choruses, and his sweet, searching, tender melodies! But how much he has bequeathed to humanity, opening, indeed, springs of living water, we can know only as we enter into deeper and deeper acquaintance with his music; and that is the only true way to know him. His greatness passes now unquestioned in the world. Naturally and calmly he took his place among the first of men, compelling them to recognize a kind of greatness they had never understood before.

J. S. Dwight.