The sense of missed opportunity – of what might have been – is most pronounced in the case of English Restoration music-drama. In Italy, as we have seen, once opera had gone public, commercial pressures effectively derailed any organic development of the original form; in France, centralised political power dictated the agenda of opera; and in Germany, debilitating warfare lopped off the shoots of operatic enterprise. But in England, three key elements, which would have allowed a successful transplant of the Italian form, were already in place: a long musical Elizabethan and Jacobean tradition of plays rich with interpolated music, a promising precedent for integrating music with dramatic spectacle in the shape of the English court masque; and, after years of Puritan austerity, a dam of theatrical activity ready to burst. Added to this was the emergence of one of the handful of seventeenth-century musicians to warrant the term genius: Henry Purcell. Yet, just at the moment when it looked as though English opera might establish itself after all – though more by accident than design – Purcell was not involved.
Passing from Schütz to the much younger Purcell, one is struck by the greater harmonic licence and astringency in the tonal language of the Englishman – those ‘uncouth and antiquated’ traits and harmonic ‘crudities’ that so upset Charles Burney later on, but that constitute so much of Purcell’s appeal to other musicians. It is like watching two highly skilled craftsmen at their workbench, each equally adept and at ease working in his own vernacular style. Both were intent on exploring the musical gestures and rhetoric that grow spontaneously out of the text to be set, while avoiding the distraction of an excess of pictorial effects in the interests of overall form, neither willing to cheapen the desired impact of their words and music by submitting them to the caprices of theatrical performance. Yet, where with Schütz one sees somebody writing to keep up his courage in the maelstrom of a debilitating war, with Purcell one senses a different perspective: a generally lighter spirit reacting to the austerity and moral earnestness of the puritanical Interregnum and now free to express, or to ‘act out’, the extremes of penitential grief, righteous wrath or divine transport.z
Purcell had shown theatrical flair – the ability to encapsulate a mood, to mesh music with words with amazing skill – as early as the Latin motet Jehovah, quam multi sunt hostes (Jehovah, how many are mine enemies) or his monologue Mad Bess. One turns with high expectations to the court odes he composed for the birthdays and homecomings of the royal family or to those that mark St Cecilia’s Day. Here, in these panegyrics, there is musical exuberance, brilliant choral writing, evidence of tonal planning and ingenuity aplenty, and brave attempts to overcome clumsy, platitudinous verse; but his music flatters to deceive and cannot disguise that these are essentially pièces d’occasion. They are false scents – like looking for examples of embryonic opera in Bach’s secular cantatas, his drammi per musica that, despite their title, invariably turn out to be less ‘operatic’ than some of his church cantatas. Purcell excelled in what Dryden defined as ‘a kind of tuneful pronunciation, more musical than common speech, and less than song’.22 Where his celebrated works like Dido and Aeneas, The Fairy Queen and King Arthur reveal what Purcell’s contemporaries meant by his ‘genius for expressing the energy of the English language’,23 it is not in them that we find the revolution of seventeenth-century music on display.aa
One of Purcell’s most intensely dramatic works had absolutely nothing to do with the English stage. Faced with an opportunity to write a piece to celebrate King William’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, Purcell chose to set words that, at a superficial glance, jarred horribly with the occasion and overall mood of relief that the country must have been feeling at this latest defeat of the menace of resurgent Catholicism. With religious and political feeling running so high all through the seventeenth century in England, it is not surprising that scriptural parallels were sought for the heroes and bogeymen of the day. Hugely promising in this respect, and able to lend itself to different interpretations, is the scene in the Book of Samuel where King Saul, out of favour with Jehovah and poised to do battle with the Philistines, enlists the services of a witch to raise up his old mentor Samuel.bb Saul and the Witch of Endor has been variously described as biblical dialogue, church cantata, mini-oratorio, dramatic scena or conversational piece for three characters. Certainly it was a genre Purcell had neither tried before nor was ever to attempt again, and intriguingly it reveals common features with two of the ‘mutant’ examples already discussed: with Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa (see footnote on this page) it shares a triptych form, the core of the scena being framed by choruses for three voices; and with Schütz’s Saul, Saul, an intensely dramatic encapsulation of a single moment in biblical history.
Purcell himself encapsulates the conversion of Saul as a solo declamatory song; here, in the Witch of Endor, he deliberately sets up an interplay between three contrasted voices.cc Like the other works in genere rappresentativo in this chapter, this work of Purcell’s needs no staging to help it achieve its dramatic impact. It opens with an eerie chromatic chanting by the three voices: ‘In guilty night, and hid in false disguise, / Forsaken Saul to Endor comes and cries.’ The music is evocative and chilling, with Purcell intent on squeezing every last drop of pathos from the words. He has adapted Italian seconda prattica technique to his inimitable way of setting English words to music, thus creating a brilliant hybridisation. Listening to this music in Westminster Abbey, King William III would surely have understood Purcell’s subtext – that, like David, with Saul in his power, refusing ‘to stretch forth his hand against the Lord’s anointed’, he had overruled his advisers and decided to spare James, his own father-in-law, so as not to have the ex-king’s blood on his hands.24 In the ten-bar epilogue, Purcell starts out with the same chromatic ground bass that underpins Dido’s ‘Lament’:dd not just the most celebrated of Purcell’s grounds, but itself a by-product of Monteverdian ostinato, and a paradigm of so much seventeenth-century pathos-ridden music. Through its extreme concision, its emphasis on witchcraft, and its historic, histrionic characterisation and implied gesticulation, this little work by Purcell channels the full force unleashed by the discovery of ‘opera’ in the 1600s and sums up his refusal, and that of a select body of other composers, to be tied down by the conventions or constraints of opera-theatre. It is in moments like these that one recognises that Monteverdi’s true heirs were not his immediate Venetian successors,25 but Schütz, Charpentier and Purcell.
Connected to these gradual shifts in the patterned organisation of public commercial opera were changes in the nature of music itself in the course of the seventeenth century. By the time our Class of ’85 had attained their majority, it now existed in a hugely expanded world that had begun to be been opened up by sea-faring merchants and charted by cartographers, in which a city like Amsterdam, for example, had become ‘an inventory of the possible’, storing ‘all the commodities and curiosities one could wish for’.26 While its citizens needed little imaginative effort to see their path to instant riches, for artists and writers realism was the key to such acquisition by other means. Music had shown that it could now articulate, reflect and project a sense of an established secular order – hence allowing the absolutist polemics of Lully’s court operas – and yet also be the mouthpiece of a radical sense of often beleaguered individuality. By 1700 music had developed techniques capable of dividing and ordering time and of holding the attention of its listeners in ways that would have been impossible a century earlier. Thanks to the lead given by Monteverdi and the other monodists in Italy, by the metaphysical poets and lute-song writers in England and by the religious composers of the war years in Germany, musical discourse had now expanded to the point where it allowed composers to penetrate to pre-linguistic regions of the psyche as well as to give powerful and nuanced expression to the whole gamut of human passions – and, as we have seen, in unexpectedly different ways, formats and contexts. In particular, the experimental dramatic music we have been d
iscussing was beginning to open up new ways of listening and a new type of consciousness, whereby differing components of musical experience and the memory of them had the potential to collide, interact and infect one another in a ‘dialectic in time’.ee This would soon be momentously realised in the ‘sound dramas’ of Bach, in which, for example, we will encounter arias assigned not as in opera to characters in a fictitious drama but to proxies for different kinds of human beings going through different types of crisis. Having set before us displays of human turmoil and postulated a path of redemption, Bach then draws all the strands together by means of sung chorales that take us into a cultural present in ways that opera never could.
Of course it is not known, nor would it be possible to establish, just how much of the music discussed here was really known to our ’85ers. These mutant types may have remained hidden from them, or only vaguely figured in their musical awareness. Yet, when it came to career trajectories and opportunities to build on the achievements of the previous century, our ‘85ers as individual composers were spoilt for choice. Take the conventional route – Italian opera as it had been adapted, say, in Hamburg in 1700 – and you could end up a Mattheson or a Telemann, composing music of a softly focused geniality heading towards the galant style of the mid to late eighteenth century. Pick up the salient features of opera seria (notably the basic da capo aria/recitative division) and, intrinsically compromised as a vehicle for continuously unfolding music-drama though it was, you could make a brilliant success of it, as Handel was poised to do. He would buck the trend by means of a series of superbly crafted opera seria, whose chief glories lie in the way that he penetrates to the recesses of his characters’ minds. Later in life Handel would come to realise that the presence and active participation of a chorus was helpful, perhaps even essential, to his expressive aims; the result – the matchless dramatic oratorios and masques he wrote in English for the Protestant English between 1735 and 1752.ff
On the other hand, you could adapt its Lullian, Gallicised structure into a vessel for the transmission of sung drama in almost through-composed form, as Rameau would eventually do, setting the door ajar, first, to the ‘reforms’ of Gluck and then to that first great Mozartian synthesis of music, drama and action, Idomeneo (1781). Adopt it in the modern Neumeister form applied to church cantatas, as Bach was soon to do, and it could lead initially to a diminished fluidity and naturalness of form. For Bach, this was superficially a rejection of much of what he had inherited from the composers within his family circle, from Schütz and back from him to Monteverdi – but it also allowed him to embrace fresh compositional challenges and to open doors leading to new, unthinkably fruitful dramatic opportunities.
As we shall see, a strong thread running through Bach’s creative life – parallel to that of Handel and less obviously of Rameau – is his coming to terms with these seemingly opposed manifestations of music-drama and his finding new ways to extend its range, while staying essentially true to the spirit which informed its birth in the early 1600s. Aged eighteen to twenty, these three had the goods to reinvent Baroque music-drama. One might in the end prefer the ‘sound’, the style or the solutions of one, but one can hardly deny the genius of the other two. What will make their music-drama so potent – so much more potent than contemporary opera seria – is their ability to internalise and then dramatise the situation of the individual believer, spectator or hearer. Bach will soon have the answer to Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel’s rhetorical observation: ‘I do not know why operas alone should have the privilege of squeezing tears from us; why is that not true in the church?’27 With never an opera to his name, Bach will be the one to work his way towards uncovering and releasing a dramatic potency in music beyond the reach of any of his peers, the leading opera composers of his day; and, as it turns out, beyond that of any composer until Mozart. For back in 1703, of the Field of ’85, no one spotted the eventual winner.
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a Professor of Rhetoric at the Royal University of Naples, Vico also maintained that the first means of human expression was singing – a startling anthropological claim, later to gain endorsement, with relevance to the founding fathers of opera and their belief that music could bring historic or allegorical characters to life through its convincing powers of expression (Scienza nuova (1725), 1.2.lix).
b Remarkably, in his three autobiographies Telemann mentions no teachers other than the cantor in Magdeburg, though he was evidently encouraged to teach himself by headmasters in Zellerfeld and Hildesheim. How he came to model his style on that of Steffani, Rosenmüller and Caldara, no one has so far been able to explain, beyond the fact that ‘modelling’ was an ingrained feature of educational method at the time.
c Beneath the surface of this rivalry were the seeds of a dispute over the role of university students and other supernumeraries taking part in the musical liturgy of the Leipzig churches, plugging the gaps left by the undermanned professionals and the Thomaner as part of a complex barter system which spelt future trouble for Kuhnau’s successor, J. S. Bach (see Chapter 8).
d It used to be thought that Mattheson’s music was destroyed in the bombing raids in Hamburg during the Second World War, and that in any case his operas were likely to have been a pale shadow of those by Reinhard Keiser – works that were given sometimes in the vernacular, some in Italian, and others in a curious hybrid made up of German recitative and Italian arias. However, a revival in Boston during 2005 of Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow (1710), recovered along with others of his operas from Moscow and St Petersburg, seems to have made a marginally more positive impression of his gifts as an opera composer.
e Krieger (1649–1725) had studied in Venice with Johann Rosenmüller for a couple of years in the 1670s. He went on to compose eighteen operas to German texts and over 2,000 church cantatas, of which only seventy-six are extant, but enough to provide a measure of his influence on the young Handel.
f Elsewhere Mattheson expressed his belief in the intrinsic worth of opera: ‘A good opera-theatre is nothing less than an academy of the fine arts – architecture, perspective, painting, machinery, dancing, acting, ethics, history, poetry and especially music – where all together are at once conjoined and continually experimented with anew for the pleasure and edification of distinguished and intelligent audiences. However, without such a well-planned nursery like opera … the best as well as the worst music must finally become spoilt and become extinct. Indeed even in the church it will no longer have an enduring place. The downfall of opera causes the downfall of the very essence of music.’ Almost as an afterthought Mattheson added, ‘Operas are the academies of music, as concerts are its grammar schools, but in the church is found its true calling, and in heaven its eternal place, yes, so to speak, its place and voice’ (Die neueste Untersuchung der Singspiele (1744), pp.103–4).
g It would be reasonable to assume that they all shared an acceptance of the sustaining utility of the passions, or ‘affections’, in ‘strengthening and prolonging thoughts in the soul … which otherwise might easily be erased from it’ (Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme (1649)).
h This was the description given to it (die krumme Operen Schlange) by Joachim Gerstenbüttel, an ultra-conservative and musical director of Hamburg’s five major churches (see F. Krummacher, Die Choralbearbeitung in der protestanischer Figuralmusik zwischen Praetorius und Bach (1978), p. 199). Operas, according to Bach’s future colleague in Leipzig, Johann Christoph Gottsched, ‘pour out their poison through lascivious verse, soft tones, and indecent movements of the operatic heroes and their “goddesses” ’ (Philip Marshall Mitchell, Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766): Harbinger of German Classicism (1995), p. 37). It is a recurrent theme in Bach historiography. Spitta refers to opera as ‘a foreign growth on German soil, rich in foliage but barren in fruit’. He writes disparagingly of ‘these gaudy and uninspiring phantasmagoria’ and contrasts opera composers with ‘a number of vigorous and highly endowed artists, who would have laughed to scorn existenc
e itself if they had been desired to fritter their talents for nothing better than the trivial amusement of a heartless crowd’ (The Life of Bach, Clara Bell and J. A. Fuller Maitland (trs.) (1899 edn.), Vol. I, p. 467). Assumption of the same high moral ground persists in more recent treatments, including that of Malcolm Boyd in attributing Thuringia’s (and, by implication, Bach’s) ‘resistance to opera’ to its ‘strong Lutheran tradition’ (M. Boyd, Bach (1983), p. 27). From that it is a short step to the recurrent warnings by German historians that German culture should remain untainted by foreign influence.
i The name ‘Behm’ appears from Easter 1694 to Shrove Tuesday 1695 in the debt register of the opera’s leaseholder Jakob Kremberg (W. Schulze, Die Quellen der Hamburger Oper 1678–1738 (1938), p. 158) before becoming organist of the Johanniskirche in Lüneburg in Aug. 1698.
j Indeed, according to Mattheson, Keiser was the first – along with himself, naturally – to adopt ‘the oratorical and rational manner in fitting music to words’. C. P. E. Bach later on considered that in ‘the beauty, novelty, expression, and mind-pleasing qualities of his melody’ Keiser was a match for Handel, and he placed Keiser on a shortlist of ten composers whom his father in his last years ‘esteemed highly’ (NBR, pp. 400, 403).
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 18
