The church music he composed in Rome consisted of Latin Psalm settings: Laudate pueri; Nisi Dominus; Dixit Dominus. There is furthermore a Gloria Patri for double choir and double orchestra, discovered and published in Japan, of all places, in 1930. (Whether a certain Magnificat was written by Handel or by one Erba, or whether a Te Deum is by Handel or by Urio should not worry us nearly so much as it did Chrysander and some other biographers; they are not very important works considered either way.) Some think that the first version of Laudate pueri dates from Handel’s earliest and most youthful period, while others see in Nisi Dominus and Dixit Dominus portions that antedate the Italian journey. Possibly, but it seems to us that these analysts are simply seeing the reminiscences of the German cantor’s art, which of course would not have disappeared overnight. Thus Dixit Dominus still has a cantus-firmus-like treble, but the counterpoint is definitely subordinate to the planned choral sound, and even the fourth verse, where the texture is fugal, has a new transparency. Handel has become euphony conscious, the antithesis of his Eisenach neighbor, to whom linear logic took precedence over euphony. He also begins to experiment with the splendid and rich-sounding multipart writing of the Italian Baroque, first with five-part chorus, then with eight-part double chorus. A fine Salve Regina is dated later by some, but it surely comes from the Roman period. In the first place, there was no conceivable occasion for setting such a text in England, in the second, the “mature Handel” seen here could be encountered at any period in his life after his twentieth year.
All these works are usually mentioned in passing, yet they are of crucial importance to Handel’s future career. They are not youthful essays; they show that Handel had become aware of certain stabilizing virtues in choral music, virtues he adapted to his own creed as a composer and never forswore. In this connection Dixit Dominus is the diploma of Handel’s Italian studies. There are remarkable things in the Italian oratorio-serenatas and in Agrippina, and of course the cantatas include genuine masterpieces, but Dixit Dominus has power and grandeur, the qualities we associate with the English oratorios. The choral drama is here in this astonishing piece, for Handel already knows how to lead his choral forces to cumulative heights. He did not forget the Latin church music composed in Rome; we shall meet with portions of it decades later, they fit admirably in the great historical choral dramas and the ceremonial anthems.
The final chorus in the second part of Handel’s St. John Passion, “Schlafe wohl,” is the most accomplished choral piece from his pre-Italian period. It shows a mature and well-schooled technique; moreover, as we must remind ourselves again and again, it shows acquaintance with the Italian style. Yet Jens Peter Larsen, one of the few scholars fully aware of the exceptional importance of Handel’s Latin church music composed in Italy, is fully justified when he states in his study of Messiah that the road from the choral writing in the Latin Psalms to the Hallelujah Chorus in Messiah seems short in comparison with the road traversed from “Schlafe wohl” to the Latin choruses.
IV
—1710
The Italian oratorio—Dramatic-theatrical elements—Role of the Scriptures—Carissimi—The Old Testament in the Italian oratorio—Italian works heard by Handel—La Resurrezione (1708)—Second visit to Florence—Rodrigo—Naples—Opera and church music in Naples—Composes Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo and Agrippina—Venice—Agrippina produced December 1709—Friendship with Domenico Scarlatti—Musical life in Venice—Opera—Conservatories—The late Venetian madrigal—Instrumental music—Italian musical language completely absorbed—Aspects of Handel’s decision to abandon Italy—Religious and artistic reasons—Handel leaves for Hanover
And NOW WE REACH A VARIETY OF SACRED MUSIC THAT was to become a symbol of Handel’s art, the oratorio. Today we are familiar only with the Protestant oratorio of the late Baroque. The century-old Romantic cult of Messiah in the English-speaking world and of the two Bach Passions both here and in Central Europe has established a pattern and an attitude toward the genre that converts and swallows up everything within its orbit. These three works, though quite different even among themselves, have established the “sacred oratorio” tone that is applied to every large choral work, from the 17th century to the 19th. It is no wonder, then, that the Italian oratorio of the Middle Baroque presents such a bewildering spectacle: oratorio, cantata, opera all seemingly interchangeable and practically inseparable.
The short solo cantata was the operatic composer’s training ground. It became so popular that with the spread of the “solo opera” (the “commercial” opera houses in Venice having abandoned the chorus for reasons of economy), Carissimi’s magnificent choral art had to give way. This sacred music became the counterpart of the sentimental-romantic Baroque painting of a Guido Reni or a Carlo Dolci, and was not without influence in Germany. Buxtehude, Johann Christoph Bach, Johann Michael Bach, and others show it unmistakably, but there was also the great German sentinel, the chorale, which kept them within bounds—at least temporarily. By the time we reach Graun (1755) the restraint is gone; the chorale is little more than a poorly harmonized and perfunctory reminder of the glorious past of Lutheran music.
Because of the exceptional importance of the oratorio in Handel’s lifework, we should delve somewhat into its history, for while there is no comparison and little connection between the English oratorio created by Handel and the Italian oratorio he learned to know while in that country, he gained from it impressions that, as we have said, stayed with him for the rest of his life. But before doing this, an important postulate must be made without which the gradual development and transformation of this music cannot be clarified: what constitutes “sacred music” as opposed to liturgical music is not a theological, not even an artistic, but a sociological determination, altogether dependent on the surroundings, the milieu in which it is expressed. And even liturgical music proper is vastly dependent on socio-artistic factors.
[2]
ALL THREE churches we are concerned with in this study, the Lutheran in Germany, the Catholic in Italy, and the Anglican in England, were state churches in the sense that all of them had temporal powers, which in many instances tended to dominate the religious. In all cases there was a distinct desire on the part of religious persons, especially the less affluent and socially inferior, for emotional fulfillment beyond what they received within the formal church. In Italy this began with St. Francis of Assisi, gaining momentum, as we have seen, with the popular movement of the laudesi. How tenacious this movement was is well illustrated by the fact that some of the Compagnie de’ laudesi, to be found in every Italian city from the Middle Ages onward, survived as late as the 19th century. In conformity with the prevailing tendency all over Europe, in the latter part of the 16th century the laudi assumed a pietistic character —the Counter-Reformation had strong pietist leanings—especially in St. Philip Neri’s circle. As is well known, it was from the music of the gatherings in the oratory of his church that the oratorio derived its name. The simple services of devotion soon established a relationship with the higher realms of art music, the culminating point being reached with Animuc-cia’s and Palestrina’s spiritual madrigals. However, the connection between the popular and the artistic is even more apparent in music where the simple declamation in lessons or litanies, dear to the people, were set by the greatest composers. Thus the famous litanies sung during processions in Loreto, the Litaniae Lauretanae, were set in a simple choral style by Palestrina and others. As can be seen, the almost mythical princeps musicae, Palestrina, does appear in this Italian music wherever we probe into it.
From here to the oratorio proper there is only one step, but that step also coincides with the birth of the seconda prattica, the new musical style of the early Baroque, and the main body of this sacred music gradually turns altogether to the secular sources of the new dramatic-monodic movement. Paralleling this gradual shift towards the secular was an even earlier shift from Latin to the vernacular. The first Petrucci print of laudi (1508) contains sixty-six
numbers, of which fifty-one are in the vernacular. Almost all of its composers are known as frottola composers, that is, secular masters, and, indeed, the resemblance to the simple, uncomplicated frottola, with its homophony and love of the chordal, is manifest. It is noteworthy that the treble part in these compositions is always the leader, for essentially these are harmonized melodies.
The early Christian Church adopted the Hebrew custom of reading from the Scriptures during services, the singing of the Psalms forming part of the primitive liturgy. Many of the Jewish lessons were, of course, soon replaced by selections from the New Testament, but a Psalm, usually shortened to a verse or two, continued to be used as the Introit. These lessons were originally a very simple form of the chant where the principal role of the music was to facilitate articulation and enhance the expressive recitation of the text. There were no melodies, only certain musical formulas centered around a given pitch, but the melodic element soon grew in importance, as did a tendency towards dramatization. Extra-biblical elements appear in the form of refrains and exclamations, and they were also used to “introduce” the Gospel itself in the quasi dialogue between reader and congregation. Eventually all this followed the general trend in music as polyphony gained in acceptance; on the other hand, the other inevitable trend, the theatrical, led to the liturgical play. The scriptural lessons, then, gave rise to a large motet literature which in the Lutheran rite was liturgical and leads directly to the “dialogues” of Scheidt and Schütz—that is, to the German cantata. In Italy the development was quite different, for the pantomimic element almost immediately accompanied the musical development. The visual-theatrical sense of the Italian is so strong that sooner or later it takes hold of every genre. The laudi too were first dialogued, then dramatized. These dramatized laudi were called devozioni, and later rappresentazioni, and most of them were sung, often after Mass, in the church.
The modem term “liturgical play” (or “drama”) is nevertheless not a very accurate one, because while the musical material may have come from liturgical sources, the play itself was altogether nonliturgical even if the language was Latin. Moreover, plays in the vernacular, if they had a “sacred” subject, were also placed under this classification. The distinction should not worry us, however, for we are mainly interested in the appearance of the dramatic-theatrical element as it bears on the rise of the oratorio. As we shall see, confusing classifications accompany the Handelian oratorio to this day.
Before proceeding with the dramatized lessons, a word must be said about a famous musico-historical landmark that can easily cause confusion. Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo (1602), long considered the “first” oratorio, does not really belong in this category. Though produced at St. Philip Neri’s oratory, it is clearly a sacred opera: it was indeed “produced”—staged with costumes and dances —as were many similar works. Cavalieri’s allegorical rappresentazione should not therefore be considered a point of departure for the history of the oratorio but should be regarded as a branch of early Roman opera. The 17th-century historians do not mention Cavalieri among the founders of the oratorio; Doni simply refers to this celebrated work as “a monk’s comedy.”
While the liturgical play was known and practiced all over the Christian world, it is in Italy that we find the first traces of an element we recognize as particularly characteristic of the oratorio: the testo, or narrator —the Evangelist in Bach’s Passions. The subjects of these plays were prevailingly from the New Testament, though in the second half of the 17th century, for reasons we shall discuss presently, plays based on the Old Testament are more frequent. The Old Testament subjects were regarded as prefigurations of the events in the New Testament and usually ended with a Magnificat or Te Deum.
We must now turn to the very important question of the role of the Scriptures in all this music, a question that we shall find once more entwined with the history of the Handelian oratorio in England. This is the more necessary to investigate because of the repeated attempts that have been made to connect the English with the Italian oratorio.
“The Bible, and the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants,” whereas St. Augustine had stated emphatically “I should not believe the Gospel except on the authority of the Catholic Church.” The Catholic Church has always considered herself the divinely appointed custodian and interpreter of Holy Writ, never permitting “private interpretation”; moreover, the Church has always held that Holy Scripture alone is insufficient to equip the faithful with a sure knowledge of faith and morals. Indeed, the history of the Catholic Church’s attitude toward the Bible was for a long time virtually a negative one as regards its use by laymen. In earlier times it was considered that reading the Bible in the vernacular without ecclesiastical counsel and supervision was “dangerous” for persons not trained in doctrine (Innocent III), while during the century of the Reformation the Holy See (Pius IV) held that the Old Testament may be read by learned and pious men in the vernacular, but for the New Testament permission from the pastor was required. One of the serious offenses of the Jansenists was their emphasis on the necessity of reading the Bible unaided by ecclesiastical supervision, and Catholic authorities still insist that scriptural reading be restricted to texts annotated by approved scholars, in an edition sanctioned by the Church. It was only at the turn of this century, when Dom Guéranger and his devoted monks began their noble work for a revival of the liturgy, that a new interest in the Bible arose among Catholics. Indeed, the Catholic Church always made selective use of the Bible, in the case of the Old Testament a highly selective use, usually balanced by juxtaposition with passages from the New, for liturgical purposes. It is in the light of these historical facts that we must weigh the oratorios, especially the Old Testament oratorios, that Handel heard in Italy.
Oratorio, Passion, and historia are just as difficult to unravel as oratorio, cantata, and opera. The Easter historiae and Passions are far more numerous than the Christmas oratorios and Resurrection historiae, because the dramatic motif was stronger. Their connections with the medieval spiritual play are obvious, even though the historical evolution has not yet been sufficiently investigated. To the Lutherans the historia, i.e. the musical setting of the Gospel, acquired a deep theological-liturgical significance, but even with them it was from the very beginning a dramatic “reading.” They were quite conscious of its specifically Protestant nature, for as early as 1565 we find Joachim à Burck entitling his work Die deutsche Passion. Though the term itself is of theological-liturgical origin, from the 16th century onward the biblical historiae did not serve purely cultic purposes; the dramatic intent, the exploitation of the dramatic content, is almost immediately present. With the advent of opera the dramatic treatment—recitative opposed to chorus, and so on—grew rapidly in importance, and under humanistic influence its secularization was well under way by the time Schütz brought to Germany the new Italian style. By the middle of the century the Roman “chorus opera” and the oratorio are practically indistinguishable. However, after Carissimi the importance of the chorus declined, precisely because the oratorio was so closely patterned after the opera; thus while in Germany the chorus remained the dominant element in Passion and cantata, in Italy the leadership passed to the solo parts. The ratio of choruses to arias that Handel used in his later oratorios was the exact opposite of that in the species he encountered in Italy. Still, Carissimi’s music was not forgotten and it left an indelible impression on Handel.
It is with Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1694) that we reach the true oratorio. While Schütz created from the impressions gained at home and in Italy his severely magnificent mixed style, Carissimi reached for the popular, the public-conquering cantata, to express in it what was most characteristic of his day. Mattheson called him the creator of the modern cantata. Carissimi divorced music from the last vestiges of the older churchly technique, distilled the aria form, made the dull recitative attractive and expressive, thus altogether turning his back on the Florentine
tradition. This earnest musician, whose Latin prosody was a marvel of musical diction and who often brilliantly exploited his ability in word painting, could be uproariously funny. In his Requiem jocosum (!) he takes the old chanson text that Lasso once made famous, Quant mon mari vient de dehors, and then sets under the piquant text (“pots and pans are thrown at me,” etc.) a solemn Requiem aeternam. Clearly, far from espousing antiquarianism, Carissimi offered a unified, transparent, and rounded form based on “popular” melodies. He was modern, bold, and secure, a kindred soul to Handel.
And now a seemingly new and curious tone appears in Catholic and classical Italy: the Old Testament oratorio, with dramatically agitated choruses that were part of the dramatis personae, indeed at times assuming the role of chief protagonist. Carissimi sets to music the Latin version of the Old Testament; Jephtha, Solomon, Jonah, Balthasar, and so on, with their dramatic splendor became the perfect musical counterpart of that new Catholic spirit which created the Jesuit style of architecture. In fact Carissimi was attached to the Jesuit Collegium Germanicum for, though initially opposed to music, by the 17th century the Society of Jesus, with its sure instinct for success, was an ardent supporter both of church music and the theatre, including the musical stage. The College was one of the best places in Rome for music; it always had good organists and excellent resident composers, from Victoria to Carissimi and Pitoni. Carissimi, their illustrious master of music, was so highly regarded that after his death Clement X forbade the sale or even the loan of his manuscripts. Unfortunately, in the 18th century, when the Jesuit order was suspended, everything was stolen and the manuscripts disappeared.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 11
