The man who returned to London after ten months’ absence was an altogether changed creative artist. In a letter to Jennens written shortly after his return, Handel reflected on the rumors that had him taking up opera anew. “The report that the Direction of the Opera next winter is committed to my Care, is groundless.... Whether I shall do some thing in the Oratorio way (as several of my friends desire) I can not determine as yet.” But it was not long before Handel “determined” that “the Oratorio way” should be his for the rest of his life. The decision was not a direct consequence of the great success obtained in Dublin by Messiah, though his self-assurance and determination were certainly greatly helped by the months of glory enjoyed in Ireland and the corresponding rest from malicious intrigue.
The history of Messiah following its warm reception in Dublin is rather peculiar. As we have related above, London heard it three times in 1743 and twice in 1745 and then it rested until 1749. Though after the yearly Foundling Hospital performances it gradually gained in esteem, even at the end of the century, after the monster commemoration performances, at a time when both the work and its composer had been beatified, there were still voices denouncing Messiah as blasphemous. In the second third of the 19th century, a distant successor of Dr. Gibson in the see of London would not permit Messiah in Westminster Abbey, though by that time the oratorio had become a religious landmark in the English-speaking world, seemingly as immune from criticism as the articles of faith. Handel was aware of the unique nature of Messiah and never intended to duplicate it. “One might have expected Messiah to have been the starting point for a new tradition,” says Larsen, “but this did not happen,” and Myers perceptively observes that “Messiah embodied all Handel’s methods and typifies none.” We must ask, then, what is the meaning of “the Oratorio way”?
XIV
The oratorio since the Romantic era—Religious-moral-didactic conceptions —English views of the Old Testament—Comparison of English and German oratorio—The historical-scriptural drama—Handel and the Old Testament—Classifications of the Handelian oratorio—Its constituent strains—Classical antiquity—The Augustan Age and classicism—Classical dramatic tradition in England—Greek drama as reflected in Handel’s oratorio—Attic drama and English Bible—Racine reintroduces chorus—The Handelian oratorio and the Old Testament—English conceptions of the role of the Old Testament in Christianity—Oratorio vis-à-vis stage and church—Handehan oratorio as music drama
IF “SACRED” MUSIC IN GENERAL OCCUPIES AN IMMENSE CHAPTER in the history of music, one of its forms, the oratorio, fills a sizable subchapter by itself. In the English-speaking world the oratorio form is dominated by Handel, though not by Handel the composer of a score of oratorios but by Handel the composer of Messiah, or, more precisely, of what Messiah has become. (In Central Europe the “Bach style” is the frame into which all choral works are fitted.) So, in the English-speaking world, performances of any oratorio of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries have been so closely bound to the Messiah ideal that stylistic differences largely disappear; Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Haydn’s Creation, and Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius all are presented in pseudo-Baroque style, unctuous and heavy, serving up grandiloquent sentimental-religious tableaux. When hearing The Seasons performed in this manner we are reminded of certain German and English translations of Dante, which gave this most Catholic of poets a distinctly “reformed” countenance.
Serious composers were aware of the dismal decline of the oratorio in the second half of the 18th century. Most of what was produced by the official purveyors of “sacred” music and by other composers who still felt called upon to continue the tradition was but a play with old forms. Indeed, the oratorio became a l‘art pour l’art enthusiasm for old sounds and techniques and artistic mannerisms; the content was lost and only melancholy reminiscences played a tired game. Even Mendelssohn’s fine Elijah, whose choruses breathe a certain Handelian splendor, is badly marred by the archaic recitatives—the oratorio had become a pseudo-religious genre, as it never was with Handel. Its spirit could no longer inspire a discerning composer, for it was artificially surrounded by severe restrictions, artistically at odds with the times, which were imposed by popular taste upon both composer and audience. This explains why for such a long time most major composers gave a wide berth to the genre.
The irony of this state of affairs is that not only the biblical Handel of Messiah and Israel in Egypt but the Handel of the classical Hercules is clad in ecclesiastical robes, and so, for that matter, is the gentle, genre-painting Haydn. Since these works refuse to reveal their greatness under such restrictions, they are not understood and are seldom performed. The oratorio has become no longer a musico-dramatic genre but a problem in the psychology and sociology of art. We are prone to see in the biblical figures dramatized by Handel spiritual athletes, but even if we realize that they are men and women who struggle, suffer, love, and kill, we are inhibited by finding them in a matrix long since appropriated for preconceived religious purposes. Yet somehow we feel that perhaps these figures might be ourselves at an earlier time, or that these strange, stiff creatures are our long-forgotten and still scarcely remembered brothers. It is this vague feeling of kinship upon which the understanding—and revival—of Handel should be based, for the men and women in the oratorios can be brought back to life if we can see them as human beings, if we can remove the fixed bliss from their faces and the unctuousness from their voices. It is monumental nonsense to have the biblical protagonists stand in concert halls in stained-glass attitudes, in white tie and tails or in modish evening dresses, backed by a chorus gowned in church vestments, and all affecting that diluted Tudor English which is conventionally decreed to have been spoken in all periods from 1066 to Dr. Johnson.
The oratorio is looked upon as a form dealing with abstract, though codified and hallowed, ideas, and with ideal experiences far removed from actual life; the public does not see, or expect to see, in them immediate, tremendous forces close to life. The Victorians who first made Handel widely available to the public by publishing his scores in large popular editions sought and found only one mood in the oratorios, the “religious,” and found it in every utterance, or, failing to find it, resorted to shameless falsification. Musicians, editors, clergymen, and historians all shared in this activity. They made the Handelian world a very tight and narrow one, every little liberty of action and thought becoming suspect, and if their suspicion was confirmed by the text, or by the musical treatment of it, or if the text admitted any interpretation that ran counter to their own bigoted and prudish beliefs, they did not hesitate to modify it. It is only detail and torso that this conception gives us, for it silences the drama itself. There is no such thing as purely religious drama, any more than there is purely esthetic drama. Tampering with the original texts of Handel’s oratorios falsified the dramatic perspective and made symbolic what was not so intended. Handel wanted to represent relationships between men, background and circumstances being accessory and fortuitous.
Perhaps the most important consideration is that these oratorios are altogether independent of the church and do not require its assistance in any form. The Handelian oratorio is not church music, not even religious music. Newburgh Hamilton, in the preface to Samson, described the oratorio as a music drama in which “the Solemnity of Church-Musick is agreeably united with the most pleasing Airs of the Stage.” Jens Peter Larsen, though he leans toward the “sacred music” concept, states unequivocally (Handel’s Messiah, p. 94) that the Handelian oratorio “is not church music; it is, like opera of the time, music for entertainment.” To the Victorians, and, through their legacy, to our modern public, the human figures in the stories are only puppets who are being driven by the word of God either to find the true way or to perish because they worship foreign gods. With this religious connotation everything that the composer’s imagination conceived as visible and audible disappears; for the direct sensuous perception is turned into
an indirect intellectual one. The individual work of art becomes schematicized, a category with a priori values, separated from its creator’s imagined world; the historical drama is turned into religious oblation. This religious-moral-didactic concept of the Age of Propriety is still so strong that it invades even scholarly musical literature. Kretzschmar voiced the consensus when he stated that Handel’s intention in his oratorios was to represent the promulgation of Christianity. This was the view of a society that desired to be instructed, whose interests were predominantly ethical, and that expected art to be, if not subordinate, at all events directed to some earnest purpose.
Years later Leichtentritt still echoes the traditional view that “Handel drew from his memory and confident Protestant faith the powerful religious feeling which made possible the oratorios.” Since he counts Semele and Hercules among the oratorios, this is a curious surrender to a dated and untenable popular belief. Friedrich Blume, in his fine monograph Die Evangelisehe Kirchenmusik (1931), was among the first to take an unequivocal stand, declaring that Handel’s oratorios have nothing to do with sacred music, a judgment supported by all the evidence, if such evidence is used with scholarly detachment. In Handel, a Symposium , Basil Lam puts this idea very neatly: “The oratorios are historical dramas and have acquired an adventitious sanctity for which they were not designed.” With Winton Dean’s monumental work on the Handelian oratorio, the whole question should be considered settled, but it is not, and even some very able scholars are still misled by the biblical exterior. Jens Peter Larsen, author of the distinguished essay, Handel’s Messiah, speaking of Saul says that “there is a clear tendency for character drawing to become the central dramatic feature at the cost of the main idea of heroic-biblical drama.” The first part of this statement correctly presents the essence of Handel’s whole concept of the music drama, the second part negates it. Later Larsen excuses Handel’s wandering from what is seen as the true type: “This does not imply that the principle of oratorio had been wholly abandoned.” But what is this principle but an arbitrary post-Handelian construction? The eminent Danish musicologist is not alone in holding this view, the thesis leading him to conclusions that are difficult to accept. He considers the oratorios after Messiah “somewhat stereotyped,” and consequently sees Israel in Egypt, Messiah, and Saul “more typical of Handel’s characteristics and power” than the great works that followed.
Handel himself felt the limitations of the genre better than anyone else. He was unwilling to confine his creative power to religious exposition; he wished to bestow it on love and loyalty, happiness and sorrow, crime and punishment. Except in some numbers in Messiah, there is nowhere a truly religious, let alone a Christian, message in these oratorios, nowhere a Christian thesis advanced or defended. The biblical texts and the frequent mentioning of the Lord do not change the preoccupation with human matters and sentiments. Handel was not a theological poet like Milton, in whose works the role of the Deity is so overpowering that it crushes mere men. In spite of their biblical setting, Handel’s dramas come from life, they are dramas in the actual theatrical sense. In this music there is no preaching, but the free play of the imagination; the humanizing forces are not decorative by-products of Holy Writ nor are they the staffage of a cultivated and elevated “moral entertainment.” And there is in the Handelian oratorio a vital strain coming from classical antiquity. Handel’s public for some time refused to follow him; contemporary English religious opinion, in fact, saw near-blasphemy in his oratorios. It did not approve of the employment of the Word of God for dramatic purposes, fearing that the Old Testament would lose in religious and ethical meaning when translated from sacred to secular use.
It is impossible to appreciate these figures, who bear Hebrew names but act like men from the Attic drama, from a religious-moral view, as has been done for generations. Handel the dramatist was concerned with men, how they stand up under the impact of fateful conflicts. If it were at all imaginable that a composer should express nothing subjective, that he should give us merely a musical accompaniment to biblical themes, which alone supply the work’s strength and purpose, then the composer would become an inhuman automation. The art of the Handelian oratorio is an eminently theatrical one, and once the public becomes accustomed to the idea, when it learns to appreciate Handel’s true intentions, these works, universally held to be the antithesis of the lyric stage, will exert their full dramatic force. Following the Handel opera renaissance in Germany in the 1920s, scenic productions of his oratorios became popular there. The cultic theatre those performances represented completely missed the spirit and nature of these works. So long as the oratorios are hedged with a “sacred” character, they cannot be directly experienced as music drama nor compared with other music, because appreciation of their merits is unconsciously biased by their presentation as quasi church music.
There can be no question that originally the oratorio was considered a sort of opera. We have seen that Handel’s Resurrezione was staged in Rome, that the very first of his English oratorios, Esther, called a masque, was written to be staged and acted. The aristocratic patrons of opera, used to the virtuoso singing of the Italian opera troupes, found the oratorio dull and uninteresting. They did not object to the “theatrical quality” of the new musical form; on the contrary, they objected because they did not find enough of it, for without scenery and acting they could not imagine drama. It was another matter with the Puritan-descended guardians of English morals, whether High or Low Church; Bishop Gibson’s edict against Esther gave a proper weapon to the zealots. It is noteworthy, though, that even thereafter a “story,” that is, a dramatic plot, was expected in the oratorio, and some of Handel’s finest works in this genre were not successful because they had no clear-cut heroes and villains. The oratorio libretto had to be dramatic, otherwise it was a failure, which might contain single numbers that Handel could shift to dramatically more advantageous positions in other oratorios. Handel demanded, especially after Messiah, that his librettists provide him with a theatrically effective text, and if they did not, he himself took a hand in the shaping of the libretto. Victor Schoelcher, Handel’s first able modern biographer (The Life of Handel, London, 1857), saw clearly that these oratorios are music dramas, and deplored that even in his time staged performances were prohibited. (A century has since passed, but there is still validity in his description of a listener at a concert performance of a dramatic oratorio—like a blind man at the opera.) But even a century before the French Schoelcher, Englishmen were aware of the oratorio’s theatrical quality. In 1763 the author of An Exarnination of the Oratorios which have been performed this Season at Covent Garden Theatre states that “an Oratorio if acted becomes immediately an Opera.” Being a good Englishman, however, he rejoices that an oratorio is “unincumbered with the absurdity of a dramatic exhibition.”
Like Shakespeare and other great dramatists, Handel took any known story and plot in which a usable idea was present, then proceeded to work it out for the theatre. His dramatic and humanistic ideal was strongly influenced by his English environment, which in a way imposed certain limitations upon him. At times the result of this influence appears as a manner, which must be accepted and to which the listener must get accustomed. Handel’s is an attitude that acquires significance when the premises are understood. Since dramas based on historical events count on the historical sympathies of the public, this often limits the composers’ choice of subject to the country in which those events took place. The same limitation applies to English biblical dramas because of the particular place the Old Testament occupies in English Protestantism. The English concept of the Old Testament is, to the non-Briton, a rather perplexing mixture of the cult of great men, ethical and moral precepts, historically defined categorical order, socio-economic and juridical philosophy, all somehow linked with Christianity. There was, of course, the magnificent King James translation that made the Bible virtually English; there was, too, a sense of identification with the Old Testame
nt that made it almost national history, as antiquity is to the Italians. Handel paid a high price for his fidelity to this national ideal, for aside from Messiah few of his other oratorios became popular in the world at large, and some of the finest are known only to musicologists.
The biblical theme was a tradition obligatory to all Protestant composers. The Germans used it for prayer, contrition, and thanksgiving; familiar texts were invoked constantly but without any particular relevance to the problems of the present. Unlike the British, they preferred to celebrate the New Testament, they preferred Jesus to Jehovah, because in Germany Lutheran orthodoxy had to supply a substitute for a national instinct that was slow in forming and that afforded no substance for a national art as it did in England. The great gestures of kings, war lords, high priests, and powerful matriarchs, so prominent in the Handelian oratorio, are absent in the German cantata and oratorio. In the German works the fundamental approach is not one of identification with the dramatis personae but one of a strong congregational consciousness.
The historical subject limits the artist because the known data and the known characters reduce his freedom. If he remains absolutely faithful to the original, artistic quality may suffer; if he takes too much liberty with his material, historical truth may suffer. But the prestige of historical material is great, especially if it is scriptural, and it possesses a good deal of attraction. The figures did exist; they are accepted even before the artist develops them; when Saul or Solomon or Joshua appeared, Handel’s audience recognized them as lifelong acquaintances. Moreover, these biblical figures lived in animated times, took part in tremendous events, wielded great power, and their lives and actions influenced whole nations. In them the conditions of life and its passions are projected larger than lifesize. What is the life and death of an ordinary man compared to theirs? But the historical or scriptural subject has its serious pitfalls, chief among them the problem of characterizing larger-than-life public figures —kings, high priests, generals—as individuals. They must act the roles history has assigned to them, and the artist will want to shape their character in conformity with their historical role, but historical acts often have a coldness that even the power of a great artist cannot change into living warmth. Their faults and their virtues are equally oversized and somewhat monotonous, and are, moreover, of a generalized type difficult to make convincing in dramatization. In the historical drama patriotism may call forth undue rhetoric, which kills the drama, while in the biblical drama the moral-religious attitude can be benumbing, especially since it is a priori. The threads of a historical drama come together from every direction and are spun before the birth of the hero, continuing throughout the piece: elaborate kinships, old grievances, ambitions, plans for revenge or conquest. The artist does not see in them a synthesis, yet the greatness, the power, the pathos of tremendous conflicts in the historical drama compensate for its many weaknesses.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 49
