GEORGE FREDERICK HANDEL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22628, 20 July 1935, Page 7

GEORGE FREDERICK HANDEL

By Rudolph E. M'Lat, B.A. In this year, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of England’s greatest composer, the thoughts of all music lovers turn to remember Handel. Remember Handel? Who, that was not born Deaf as the dead to harmony, forgets, Or can, the more than Homer of his age? asks Cowper. Of the great composers whose works are regularly performed today, Handel and Bach were the earliest. And yet it is surprising how little the amateur knows about them or their compositions. This is particularly surprising in the case of Handel, for there are few who contest the claim that he is peculiarly England’s greatest composer. In everything but the accident of his birth was Handel English. Nearly all his working life was spent in England, and in 1726 he was naturalised as an Englishman. Nearly all his notable works were written in England and to English words. Gathering up all that had gone before him in English music, he embodied it in himself and became

practically the father of English music. His affection for England is seen by the fact that his interests were not confined exclusively to his own art. He liked the society of politicians and literary men of his day, and his closest friends included such men as Pope, Feilding, Arne, and Hogarth. To-day his remains rest in the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, and it is fitting that Handel should sleep there, for he was a poet, and a great poet, who used sounds instead of words to express his glorious ideas and feelings. Coming among the English people nt a time when they had lost their taste for the best in music, he yet received from them the inspiration for his greatest works. And he gave them a noble gift in return for theirs to him, for he broke through the shell of cold, narrow sense in which the genius of our nation had become imprisoned. He did more than any other English writer of his time to free our national powers of imagination and set them working on high and glorious things. It would be a mistake to presume that Handel’s life prior to his coming to England in 1710 had little or no on his subsequent work. To his early life in Lower Saxony, he owed an excellent training in composition, and as a performer on keyed instruments, the oboe and the violin. Born of unmusical parents, he seemed at first destined for the law, for his father considered music as an undignified sort of amusement, fit only for Italian fiddlers and French buffoons! The familiar story of Handel’s nocturnal practising on the clavichord which had been smuggled into an attic in his home testifies to the young boy’s early love of music. But it was only the promptings of the Duke of SaxeWeissenfels, who had heard the boy practising on the organ on one occasion, that could persuade the reluctant father to put the boy to tuition. The father’s death brought the necessity for Handel to earn his own living, and we soon find him at Hamburg, where he found opportunity to produce two operas which were well received. But at this time all aspirants to musical fame made a pilgrimage to Italy, and at the age of 21 Handel set off thither. The value of this sojourn in Italy cannot be overestimated. As yet, his work, though bold and majestic, was rugged as might be the work of ay German of somewhat severe type. The Italians taught him two things. He acquired the smooth vocal style which hereafter characterised his work, together with the grace of a refined, melodious power. His earlier choral works show the ill-regulated power of his choral writing before he assimilated Italian influences. Yet they show a grandeur of scheme and nobility of thought for which from now on Handel found the simplest and easiest adequate means of expression that music has ever attained. In Italy Handel produced two operas and two oratorios, which provided material used again later in greater works with little or no alteration. Besides these larger works, there are several choral and solo cantatas which show in their extravagant vocal difficulty how radical was the change which Handel’s Italian experience so rapidly effeete'd in his methods. Handel’s success in Italy established his fame, and the Elector of Hanover made him his Kappelmeister. Almost immediately (in in the winter of 1710) we find Handel going, on leave of absence, on his first visit to England. A second visit in 1712 decided him to settle in England. When Handel came to England, Purcell had been dead for 15 years, Arne, the composer of “Rule Britannia! ” was only just born, and the few good men who were composing were devoted entirely to minor forms like the anthem, the glee and the madrigal. Opera was in a low state and one work actually contained a part for a pig. The time was therefore ripe for the genius of Handel. He came as a composer of Italian opera, and earned his first success at the Haymarket with “ Rinaldo.” From then on till 1741, a period of 30 years, Handel wrote and produced some 40 operas, in spite of two bankruptcies with operatic ventures. During this period we must consider Handel’s artistic conscience as that of an easy-going opportunist, of he would never have continued so long to work in a field that gave so little scope for his genius. But the public wanted operas, and at all events he could supply better operas with greater rapidity and ease than any three other living 'composers working together. Yet none of these operas can be°said to survive to-day, except in two or three detached arias from each opera; arias which reveal their essential qualities far better in isolation than when performed in groups of between 20 and 30 on the stage, as interruptions to the action of a classical drama to which nobody paid the slightest attention. It is, of course, in the oratorio that Handel is chiefly remembered to-day, and it is by this form at least that Handel in is the people’s composer. Such he j must remain so long as oratorio holds its place with the public. When then | the question arose how a musical entertainment possessing dramatic expression could be managed in Lent without protests from the Bishop of London, Handelian oratorio came into being as a 1 matter of course. Handel’s artistic j sense seized upon the natural possibilities which arose as soon as the music was transferred from the

stage to concert platform, And his first English oratorio, "Esther,” beautifully shows the transition. Handel’s scheme of oratorio is operatic in Its origin, and hence the chorus becomes a means of dramatic expression as opposed to dramatic action. But in choral music Handel made no more innovation than he made in the arias of his operas. There was not the necessity. The ordinary choral resources of the time had perfect expressive possibilities where there were no actors to keep waiting, and where no dresses and scenery need distract the attention of the listener. When, too, ordinary decorum demanded a reverent attitude on the part of the audience, then the man of genius could find such a scope for his real sense of dramatic fitness as would make his work immortal.

The genius of Handel in the realm of oratorio lies in the nobility and breadth of his conception and execution; so much so that “ Israel in Egypt ” when first performed in 1739, was not a great success, due largely to the fact that the chorus singing of Handel’s time was quite unequal to a work so gigantic In its conception. But with the success of the “ Messiah ” in Dublin in 1742 Handel stood approved ns the greatest composer of tho greatest oratorio ever written. Back in London, the master was soon at work again on oratorio, and by 1751, when his eyesight was beginning to fail him, he had completed 22 in all—the great “ Judas Maccabaeus,” “ Samson,” “ Jephtha,” and others less known to-day. By a dramatic coincidence, Handel’s blindness interrupted him during the writing, in “Jephtha.” of the chorus: “ How dark, oh Lord, are Thy decrees. All our joys to sorrow turning, as the night succeeds the day.” Three unsuccessful operations ended in Handel’s total blindness, and on Good Friday, 1759, the spirit fled. There never has been a time when Handel has been over-rated, except in so far as other composers have been neglected. But he has suffered much from pious misrepresentation and from too great attention to externals that arc misleading. Much of Handel’s art lies buried beneath the “ mammoth ” performances such as are given regularly nt the Handel festivals at the Crystal Palace, London; and the provision of “ additional accompaniments,” begun, unfortunately, by Mozart and continued by nineteenth-century musicians of every degree of ability and refinement, had had its damaging effect upon the unity of style of Handel’s works. In spite of these things and others, Handel will never cease to be revered and loved as one of the greatest of composers. His style has suited the English nation better than any other, owing to its directness and vigour and robustness; and also, no doubt, because the nation has always had a great love of choral music. The spirit of his work has been carried on in our time by men like Elgar and Granville Bantock. “Go to him,” said Beethoven, “ and learn to produce great effects with little means,” And if we may not agree with Beethoven that he is the unapproachable master of all masters, yet his position as a writer of choral music will always be unassailable.