The “perfect” knowledge of the métier is much more in evidence in Handel’s early instrumental music. The six trio sonatas for two oboes and basso continuo in Vol. 27 of the old Handel edition are generally dated as the earliest of Handel’s extant compositions; Chrysander assigns them to his eleventh year. Many years later when Handel was the much-admired London composer, they were discovered in Germany by Lord Polwarth, who purchased them and brought them to London. The statement quoted on page 12 (“I used to write like the devil in those days”) is supposed to have been made when Lord Polwarth showed the old manuscript to Handel. It is known that Handel was very fond of the oboe, and so was Zachow, whose way with wind instruments was far more modern than contemporary usage in Germany. Both of them acquired their taste for the instrument from Michael Hyntzsch and his son, Johann Georg, who introduced the oboe in Halle. One of Zachow’s trio sonatas for flute, bassoon, and basso continuo is available; it is a very fine work and makes us regret the more that this is the only piece of chamber music preserved from his output. So the circumstances favor Chrysander’s dating; the only thing that contradicts it is the music itself, and on the basis of the score it is impossible to accept Chrysander’s assumption. These are very good compositions, showing a maturity that no eleven-year-old child ever possessed. No autograph is known, but the copy brought to England bears the date 1700. Some of the other chamber music pieces, assigned to the Hamburg period (in Vol. 48), supposedly composed by the twenty-year-old Handel, would then represent an incomprehensible regression. Whatever the situation, and assuming that 1700 is the correct date on the copy (which I have not seen) and that the sonatas were not reworked at a later date, always a possibility with Handel, these are remarkable works that show thorough acquaintance with the distilled sonata style of the Corelli school. Handel’s typically active and sensitive bass line is there, and the pathos of the slow movement is pervasive. But what would be most disconcerting—if these works were indeed composed by an eleven-year-old—is the concentration, the formal security, and the cleanness of the texture.
A collection of chamber music brought out in Amsterdam in 1724 as Handel’s Opus 1 contains much superb music along with routine stuff, but of course these compositions do not represent his first published work; in fact, this disorderly cupboard contains works thrown into it for at least a couple of decades. Every once in a while Handel would reach into it and pull out a piece for use elsewhere and in a different medium; it is quite impossible here for us to single out the early works. As we shall see later, some of these sonatas represent Baroque chamber music at its best.
[6]
LIKE ALMOST ALL composers in the Saxon-Thuringian cultural area, Handel grew up in the humble surroundings of the organ bench and choir loft. Among his contemporaries there were other gifted musicians, but their talents were of a different nature, and they were ready to retire before a stronger god. These were the cantors, born professionals to whom music was bread and office. The German cantor, organist, and conductor was a hard-working, honest, well-trained musician and public servant, not as a rule interested in worldly affairs. His entire education was practical, tradition-bound, and he took great pride in his knowledge of the métier. Throughout his life Handel retained this characteristic German command of the métier. To the cantors, a work of art could not be merely the result of spontaneous eruption, and to these fine musicians the Romantic ideal of the “God-given artist” who is an untutored genius would have been inconceivable. They observed severe “rules” and condemned all eccentrics who offended the discipline of the craft. What they expected of the creative artist was the presentation of something original within the accepted style and with known ingredients, the principal one of which was the chorale.
This was the Zeitgeist, which was considered binding and which certainly permeated the organ loft in the cathedral where Handel was scheduled to take up permanent residence; it should have been in his bones. But the Zeitgeist is not an absolute, extra-human force; it is formed by men, by their ideas about the sense and value of life. Life itself is independent of what in any given time is thought of it; life is the origin, not the result, of the Zeitgeist. No modern historian would concede that an artist can be rooted outside the Zeitgeist, but we cannot insist on the axiom that his time must be his measure. It is often the exact opposite, that man gives dimension to his times.
Handel, with all his love for the organ, refused to continue the cantor’s art and was altogether free of the latter’s inherited mentality. He did not want to be a musician learned in the ways of the strenger Satz. He did not want to address the intellect within the accepted frames of cantata, chorale, and fugue, but to appeal to the senses and the imagination; he wanted the hearer’s soul to vibrate with his. In Handel’s time German music still harbored a good deal of the “Gothic”; its architecture was severe yet insisted on the arbitrary juxtaposition of details that, though well worked out and well understood, can be very strange to us. The contours are firm, the invention magnificent, and order reigns everywhere, but the elements are often disparate, for they are, to use the very graphic term of the period, gearbeitet, that is, tooled and toiled over.
Handel desired to become a free and independent artist, something unheard of in Germany, but familiar to the travelling Italians whom he first encountered in Berlin. Once more he wanted to convince himself of the rightness of his decision. When he eventually did arrive in Hamburg he set out within a month with his new friend, Mattheson, to visit Buxtehude in Lübeck. The aged master wanted to retire and the coveted position at St. Mary’s was available to the right bidder. It is perhaps easy to explain Handel’s refusal to apply for the position: the future master of the magnificent organ was required to take unto himself the old organist’s daughter as his wife; Buxtehude had married Franz Tunder’s daughter, and this arrangement was a traditional procedure of succession. The human dowry that went with the deal was a dozen years older than Handel, and though Georg Händel the elder founded his solid existence under exactly such circumstances when he married a surgeon’s widow ten years his senior, and inherited the departed surgeon’s practice, the son flatly refused. So did Mattheson, and so would Sebastian Bach, who was also to inspect the “job.” But that in itself does not tell the full story. There was in Handel an eagerness that could not tolerate such a restricted future. His original gifts, the quality of his mind, predestined him for a more strenuous and adventurous life.
The decision to change his course and go to Hamburg went much deeper than the problems of a musical career. The many large and small, more or less independent German states, kingdoms, electorates, and principalities lived in eternal intrigue and compromise. On one hand they wanted to preserve their independence, on the other they had to reconcile this with the concept of the Empire. Shadowy as the latter was, it was nevertheless a potential reality, though in the first half of the 18th century the relationship of the individual states within its boundaries was altogether chaotic. Able politicians such as Agostino Steffani, the prelate-ambassador-composer, could carry out diplomatic coups of astounding consequences with relative ease. The picture was really incredible in its colorful—and disorderly—magnitude. There were the marches of the Holy Roman Empire, which “included” such distant domains as the proud young kingdom of Prussia or, at the other end, Naples and later Tuscany. The maintenance of the Italian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Hungarian territories saddled the Viennese Imperial headquarters with tasks that inevitably weakened its hold on the western provinces, especially those that were predominantly Protestant. However, the Viennese politicians, well trained in the art of patriarchal absolutism and highly cultivated men of the Enlightenment, knew that if princes and electors were left to enjoy their privileges they would not meddle unduly in the affairs of the Empire. Since the political sagacity and savoir-faire of the Germans was notoriously of a low order—Goethe still bewails it—their understanding for this type of statecraft, which was already centuries old in other parts of Europe,
was practically nil.
How well Handel appraised this situation is of course pure conjecture, and I shall not attempt to make an estimate, but that he, a student of Thomasius, was occupied with it is beyond doubt. This was part of the “great search,” and at least one aspect of Handel’s politico-social thought is clear: he did not want to be restricted to one class, and he realized that in the Germany of his day he could not escape this. Culture flourished only in the higher strata of society, to which he was not admitted except as a paid performer. And yet Handel was born a “gentleman.” It would be irrelevant to say this of a Constable or a Sir Christopher Wren, but in the case of a musician coming from the social milieu of the German cantor it is of considerable importance. Opera, which became Handel’s chief concern for decades, and in a way was his chief concern throughout his life, had, and still has, a social connotation to Germans and Englishmen entirely different from that of church music. The 18th-century term “polite art” fits opera admirably. What Handel craved was personal freedom to raise himself out of his provincial milieu to a life of culture. What he understood by this may be difficult to analyze, but when nothing of the sense of social inferiority so characteristic of the early 18th-century German artisan remains, then something is achieved that the German biographers who bracket Handel with Bach fail to appreciate. Handel was as unaffected by the prejudices of the higher society he frequented in England as he was by upstart envies—he was a free man. The first step in acquiring this freedom from constricting social inhibitions was migration to a “free city,” to the quasi-republic of Hamburg.
Then there was the question of religious orthodoxy. To Handel’s active, imperious nature religion was not a mystical concept but one that rested on rational consciousness, a theism based on the harmony of the universe, a universe that, however, emphatically included the secular kingdom on earth. He must have been familiar with the tenets, poetry, and songs of Pietism, for at Halle University the disciples of Philip Jakob Spener, the founder of Pietism, were strongly entrenched. Spener’s Pia Desiderata (1675) became the literary beacon of the movement, which was almost immediately opposed by orthodox Lutheranism. Spener himself was a staunch believer in the articles of Lutheran faith, and there is nothing in this man’s character of the extreme sentimentality later associated with Pietism. It was the disciples who distorted Spener’s aims and methods, and though its exaggerated phase came after Handel had left Germany, he did not want any part of Pietism. The Pietists, like Calvin, differed sharply with Luther on the role of music in worship, and in this Spener agreed with them. Elaborate music was not welcome in the church; only simple songs with equally simple organ accompaniment were considered churchly and proper. This led to a prodigious output of such songs, though these were intended mainly for domestic religious devotions rather than for church use. To Handel, who was not only a confirmed Lutheran but by nature and artistic instinct devoted to elaborate ritual, all this must have been anathema.
It is quite apparent that at an early age Handel showed an independent mind when it came to religion, and we shall see that this independence was pointedly asserted a few years later in Italy when it was tested from an entirely different quarter. Handel believed more deeply than any of his German colleagues of the time not only in eternal law, eternal values, and eternal being, but in change, development, and progress. His was a consciously unmetaphysical concept of life and therefore markedly different from that of the typical German. He firmly believed that life’s problems are capable of being resolved without recourse to metaphysics. An earnest and convinced Christian he remained all his life but henceforth largely without denominational and cultic restrictions.
The aggregate of these ideas, forces, and developments steered Handel away from collective Christian prayer towards the accents that can be found only in the individual—and that meant dramatic music, opera. An early incentive must have come from Telemann, on the occasion of his stopover in Halle in 1701. It is significant that the principal subject of their discussions and in their correspondence was melody, its construction, use, and application. In his autobiographical sketch for Mattheson’s Ehrenpforte, Telemann names Steffani as his model; therefore the Italian master who influenced so many German composers must have been brought to Handel’s attention at an early date. But it is inconceivable that he did not hear an occasional opera performance in Weissenfels, and of course Zachow early inculcated in him a love for the dramatic. All this was beckoning in Hamburg, the famous operatic center of Germany. So we see that what is called an “aimless quest to find fortune” was in reality a step dictated by inexorable logic. The psalmist comes much closer to the truth: “He rejoiceth like a giant in running his course.”
II
1703-1706
Hamburg—Music in Hamburg—Handet arrives in 1703—Friendship with Mattheson—Handet joins opera orchestra—Keiser, his influence on Handel—First attempt at opera, Almira (1705)—Handel-Keiser relationship—Altercation and reconciliation with Mattheson—Debaeie of Nero—Handel resigns from Hamburg opera—Composes St. John Passion—State of oratorio-Passion in Germany—The Passion in Handel’s life work—Handel leaves for Italy
HAMBURG, THE NORTH GERMAN METROPOLIS OF COMMERCE, was an old seat of culture. Independent and rich, and spared most of the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, it was a unique city-state, international and progressive, though ruled by a hard-headed plutocracy (the quotations from the Hamburg stock exchange were distributed in church even during services!). An early convert to Protestantism and little touched by the Counter-Reformation, Hamburg developed a distinct intellectual life of its own. While the political situation there was tense during Handel’s stay (1703-1706), the burghers hotly contesting the autocratic power of the Senate made up of the very wealthy, the city’s musical life was not affected. Her well-to-do citizenry was cultivated and very fond of music. Because of far-flung commercial relations and the habit of engaging well-paid foreign artists who brought with them Netherlandish, English, Venetian, and all manner of other music, Hamburg was in the forefront of modern tendencies, and soon after the opening of the 17th century concerted music made its appearance in her principal churches.
Towards the middle of the century, the cantor of the Johanneum, and hence the music director of the city’s five principal churches (for the Johanneum was the Hamburg counterpart of Leipzig’s Thomasschule), was Thomas Selle (1599-1663), an able and progressive musician whose St. John Passion (1643) was the first such work to use large choral movements. There were many other distinguished musicians engaged in church music. Christoph Bernhard (1627-1692), a disciple of Schütz and Carissimi, held the cantorship at St. James’s from 1664 to 1674, and in nearby Lübeck was Buxtehude. The city had magnificent organs, built by the great North German organ builder, Arp Schnitger. They were new when Handel arrived, and he did not lose time in getting acquainted with them. The Hamburg organists had been famous since the early Baroque. There was the Praetorius clan, as well as Heinrich Scheidemann (d. 1663), an outstanding composer and teacher of Jan Adams Reinken; Matthias Weckmann (1619-1674), fine keyboard and very expressive vocal composer; and others. Most of these able musicians were natives of the city and products, directly or indirectly, of Sweelinck’s school. The tradition continued with Jan Adams Reinken (1623-1722), who bridges three generations and was so admired by Bach, and with the brilliant, original, and highly imaginative Vincent Lübeck (1654-1740). Lübeck was organist at St. Nicholas’s from 1702 to his death and so was in Hamburg when Handel was there. Whether Handel met him and Reinken cannot be proved, but it stands to reason that he must have known them; he was too fond of organ playing and too interested in other men’s music, always, to ignore such prominent and original masters. Hamburg was musically so eminent and positions there were so desirable that Schütz sent his pupils to the city. In his old age he would have liked to retire there himself.
Nor were Hamburg cantors ill-disposed toward secular music—even opera. In 1660 the Collegium Musicum w
as founded and weekly concerts were offered. And Hamburg was full of song. Pastor Johann Rist, the leading poet of the North, gathered around him composers who have become known as members of the Hamburg Song School. There were a large number of municipal musicians (Ratsmusikanten), often employed for private festivities, and they too were abreast of the times. English influence from across the narrow seas was ever present. William Brade (1560-1630), celebrated English violist and composer, joined the municipal musicians in 1608 and became their director in 1613. After holding various other positions, he returned to Hamburg and died there in 1630. His instrumental suites served as models for the North German style; both Schein and Scheidt are indebted to him. Nikolaus Adam Strungk (1640-1700), a violin virtuoso, organist, and good composer (also represented in Handel’s notebook), was the director of municipal music in 1678.
Finally, Hamburg was the most important seat of early German opera from the foundation of its lyric theatre in 1678. The Hamburg bourgeoisie was fond of the theatre in all its forms, and being socially a democracy of sorts, the stage, both non-musical and lyric, was a popular institution, accessible and catering to all. As a matter of fact the opera was called “public and popular opera theatre.” The clergy did not look upon this with favor and tried to suppress the “opera theatre” which, to tell the truth, attracted all kinds of ruffians and ladies of easy virtue. Sir Newman Flower also finds it abhorrent, but neither he nor the good pastors could have stopped opera, and as time passed a more liberal Hamburg divine, Heinrich Elmenhorst, admitted that opera is permissible to Christians as one of those “intermediate things.” His liberality was perhaps somewhat colored by the fact that he was a librettist.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 4
