After an artistic lifetime spent in the world of Italian opera, he realized that, aside from the English public’s hostility to this foreign importation, the conventions of Venetian-Neapolitan opera, though descended from classical sources, did not permit the monumental-heroic scale. Yet the transition from opera to oratorio was not so startling as the proponents of the “conversion theory” see it, for while the exteriors of these works are different, their method of composition is fundamentally the same. In the oratorio, however, Handel was largely freed from the rules governing the opera, from the stereotyped handling of the subsidiary actions and episodes, and the sudden unmotivated turns created by the deus ex machina. As a result, his scenes could broaden into epic sketches, then, suddenly halted, condense into sharply dramatic pictures.
What was altogether new was the role of the chorus in the drama; in its concinnity and its grandeur it is no longer the turba of the German Passion but is akin to the choral ode of the Greeks, for these choruses usually stand in some precisely planned relation to the principal figures. A chorus such as the “Jealousy” chorus in Hercules or “O fatal consequence” in Saul, in its inexorable and all-embracing power, is truly Sophoclean; it summarizes and comments on the tragedy with sombre and at times fearful intensity. “Grandeur” must be interpreted in this Hellenic sense, which was what Handel had in mind when he requested in one of his letters to Jennens a change in the libretto: the conclusion seemed to him “not grand enough.” At times the chorus, like the parodos, the first choral passage in classical tragedy, enters right after the prologos, or moves from place to place (peripateia), or addresses the public in the manner of the parabasis of Aristophanes. There are also instances resembling the kommos, the Greek lament in which the principal alternates with the chorus. Of particular relevance is the position of the arias, which, unlike the pattern in the operas, are at times introduced between two choric songs—the epeisodion of the classic drama. Only the exodos is treated differently. In the classical drama this is the part following the last song of the chorus, but, because of the nature of the music drama, Handel likes to end with the chorus itself.
With this role of the chorus the Handelian oratorio leaves the romanticized classicism of the opera to enter the orbit of the true classical drama. And this Handel owed to Racine, who stated in the prefaces of his two late dramas that he used the chorus in the tradition of the ancient Greek theatre. It was in Esther, which Rolland called “one of the greatest tragedies in the old style written since the Grecian period,” that Handel first made contact with the living spirit of classical tragedy, and this encounter, though not immediately, became eventually decisive for the future development of his creative imagination.
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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF Racine and the classical theatre for the Handelian oratorio is clear; but that of the Old Testament we have not yet examined with sufficient critical insight; it has an importance over and above the historical conditions that steered Handel toward it. More precisely, over and above the historical factors giving rise to the English oratorio there must be something in the content of the scriptural subject, in its message, in its values, that transcends the original conditions as transmitted from Racine to Handel. There may be some point in returning to the genesis of the Handelian oratorio, for in history each thing depends on something else.
The genesis was by no means so sudden as it may have appeared in the discussion of Esther and Athalia. In those two oratorios Handel was setting to music stories from the Old Testament taken from Racine’s plays by the same titles. In a Catholic country like France the Old Testament as a whole had something of an exotic air. Only the Huguenots were devoted to the Psalms. Their translation into verse and their musical settings represent a unique feature of the Reformation in Latin countries. In England, on the contrary, the Old Testament was not only the pervading source of religious thought, but was liable to political-social interpretations, for the relation to the Deity in the Old Testament is a national one. But are form and content in these oratorios compatible? Can they be intellectually reconciled? The formative principle, we are told again and again, is an essentially Christian world view. But within the stylized drama Handel turns almost exclusively to the dramatis personae giving us their essence and their character as completely as permitted by the illusion of life. This illusion of life is not, however, imparted by Scripture, by revelation; it comes from the inner life of the drama. The use of scriptural language may have the effect of intensifying the pathos of the drama, but that is only through an assumed attitude. Similarly, seeing a universal story in a scriptural setting inclines us to attribute to the work a spirituality it in no wise possesses. But though a biblical drama may have a religious connotation, the drama itself must be expressed through the souls of the acting human characters; the uniqueness of the conflict, its sole relevance to a given occasion in a given drama, excludes any other approach. The material of the drama is social, involving relationships between men, and the first requirement here is a stage—there is no true drama without a stage. Every drama that does not grow from the spirit of the theatre, or at least from a theatrically conceived and inspired milieu, is prey to the rhetorical or the didactic. Drama requires a certain sensuous culture, the expressive motions of the human body, the beauty of the human voice, even pomp and ornament. Nor is the theatre in itself enough, for it does not exist without a public, and that public usually represents a certain dominant class of society whose economic, political, and other beliefs and circumstances, the tempo and rhythm of whose way of life, give birth to the manifestations, even the forms, of its culture. As we have remarked above, Handel’s operas—like Racine’s dramas—were written for an aristocratic public, but the oratorios were addressed to the English people, and that people was, said John Richard Green, “the people of a book, and that book was the Bible.”
Christianity absorbed both Judaic and Hellenic elements and throughout history they alternated in prominence. The strong impact of the Judaic was felt mainly in the principles of revealed law, while the rich Hellenic elements furnished a source for esthetics. The Greek world was the cradle of beauty to all ages, and it retained this role within Christianity. The Renaissance heard Moses’s voice in Plato and sought David’s words from the sybil’s mouth. Perhaps the most brilliant synthesis was the work of Michelangelo, who not only succeeded in coupling the figures of the Old Testament with those of ancient mythology but in a miraculous way could unite the primitive force of the former with the freshness and charm of the Greeks.
In England, Milton also linked the Muses of Mount Sinai with those of Mount Helicon, and in general English Protestants were well disposed towards this union. But Protestantism evinced a certain hostility towards the ideal of beauty, which it tended to equate with popery. The English Protestants shared with their continental brethren a desire to “cleanse” Christianity of the beauties of “paganism,” but their approach to the problem was quite different and uniquely their own. Hellenism exerted a powerful attraction on them. Its spirit of human self-sufficiency found a congenial expression in the polity and philosophy of the Englishman, upon whom, apparently, the sea had much the same effect that the “city” had upon the Greek, encouraging independence and self-centered isolation from the rest of the world. But this was curiously felt and communicated in a Hebraic spirit, satisfying the interests of a civilization that had become particularly aware of history.
The English not only equated their history with that of the Hebrews, but there were numerous attempts to show kinship between classical antiquity and the Hebrew world, the fusion of which they felt produced not so much Christianity in general as English Protestantism in particular. They were wary of linking classical antiquity with the New Testament, according primacy to the Old Testament not only over the New but even over ancient Hellas. Latin civilization was synonymous with Catholicism, a view of life with which the English did not sympathize. Only once did Handel transgress the limitations imposed by this concept, in
Messiah; he never again returned to the New Testament.
The Old Testament and Greek drama are considered mutually exclusive, two extremes—but are they? Both grew from mythological-religious sources, and the passions visited on their human figures were symbolized by deity. The liberty of the dramatis personae in both to make choices and decisions is more or less restricted by fate or divine commands. There is, indeed, a certain kinship between the two sources; for instance, in the profound difference that separates them, even in their external manifestations, from Christian spirituality. Greek drama was living mythology, the Old Testament living history, both originating from the imagination of the people.95 Even the arrangement of the Greek theatre was different from the stage produced by the Roman-Christian West. The ancient Greeks sliced from lush green hillsides the magnificently curving tremendous stone benches of their theatres; the lapping waves of the sea marked the pace for the slow measured unfolding of their tragedies. The Romans cut up the great boulders and sent the blocks to the cities to be built into amphitheatres, the tragedy eventually turning into the circus. True, in the Handelian drama the protagonists do not wear masks and they no longer announce through a voice pipe, in solemn, stentorian tones, the decisions fate has made for kings and heroes. But there is a new voice pipe, more powerful than any the Greeks may have had: the polyphonic chorus. For what we hear is no longer speech, but music, beautifully articulated, powerful, massive, and gentle. Yet many of the echoes do come from the Ionian Sea.
As has been said before, in the new English music drama called oratorio, Handel’s problem was to attain the monumentality of the Greek drama without losing human values. This meant that a distance had to be found from which a great event could be seen as containing a whole complex of life. The representation of the Gospels, which he tried in his youth, could only be done in lofty general terms, excluding the personal and psychological elements, the essence of the Handelian drama. Christ appears—to the dramatist—in an unapproachable seclusion. For a long time Handel had thought he found the necessary distance in formal opera, but though emotion and character are often powerfully represented there even through the conventional forms, what was needed was to amplify this ardent dramatic lyricism to epic proportions. This is what he proceeded to do by marrying Greek drama with Old Testament history, adding to the biblical story the schooled humanist’s art, the simplicity and directness of the true classical spirit.
Thus he came to create true drama of a Sophoclean tone with biblical themes. Belshazzar exudes the spirit of Greek drama, and, though taken from the Book of Daniel, it received important additions from Herodotus and Xenophon. Or, to mention another example, Jephtha also strongly suggests the Attic drama, and its choruses are unimaginable without their Greek antecedents. What made the blend successful was not only the fantastic frame of the tremendous biblical stories, but all the materials of life from which this fantasy was built, and all the life that it represents: of the composer, of his nation, of his time. The reign of Saul or Solomon does not date these oratorios and does not limit them to an ascertainable historical period; these works present human characters under certain conditions. But the conditions, the manner, that is, the concepts, ideas, and reactions of the protagonists and of the people—the chorus—have their roots in ascertainable English social usage. It is in this setting, physical and spiritual, that Handel the oratorio composer must be apprehended; for the center of gravity of his oratorio is for the most part immovably fixed in England and its people, and most of its great strength, as well as certain weaknesses, springs from that remarkable fact.
The Old Testament offered natural themes for Handel, but these were not religious themes. His biblical learning was considerable, but to the composer, the Old Testament, which fascinated him endlessly, was not revelation but a complex of concrete, sensuous appearances and events that he made his own. These settings are not expressions of biblical faith but dramatizations, the projections of character. With all his earnest devotion Handel was a dramatist with a strong Dionysian streak; to him the biblical figures were not historical-mythological models but men, present, valid, and usable by a dramatist at all times and under all conditions. This Old Testament is ancient and modern at the same time; modern, because in Handel’s setting everything historical, everything that comes from the past, is cast anew in the present by his dramatic force. In the hands of most composers, the biblical story becomes subject matter—in Handel’s it is life; others do not really know what is dramatically living in it, for few of them feel altogether free to regard the scriptural text with the critical eyes of the dramatist. To Handel it made for creativity, it aroused and enhanced his perception of life. He saw in the heroes of the Old Testament not what they were thousands of years ago but what they became thousands of years later; they are visions and creatures of his own. He is a later brother of the great figures of ancient Israel, an English brother, who recognizes the kinship. His Old Testament characters speak like inhabitants of the biblical country, and yet they constantly betray their 18th-century English citizenship. It makes sense, for to the English Protestant the Old Testament was inextricably associated with the ideals, the national and political aims of his country. These ideals became reality for Handel, and he represented them on a heroic scale.
It makes sense, yet it is this very matter that is at the bottom of the process that has led to the misrepresentation enveloping Handel’s person and life work. We have quoted the German writer who said that Bach and Handel were “Christ’s singers.” Another says, “Bach and Handel became the singers of Christendom, this is their final and decisive importance; in an indissoluble embrace they unite the Old with the New Testament.” Still another person of standing, a German divine, praises Bach and Handel for their artistic achievements “which rest on divine inspiration and which is the continuation of Luther’s work”! From this point on the arguments cease to be orderly and are lost in hazy reasoning in which theology, musicology, and German and English local patriotism are thrown together in a tangle of speculations difficult to analyze or even to follow. The writers could not help seeing the preponderance of Old Testament texts in Handel’s works, as they could not miss the preponderance of the New in Bach’s; but this is explained by the simple expedient of declaring Handel to be “the musician of promised salvation,” and as such naturally attracted to the Old Testament. In this way they come to the conclusion that Handel’s aim was identical with Bach’s; “at the summit both meet in solemn worship of God and the praise of Christ as the Redeemer of the world.” There is a curious contradiction here, a sweeping ignorance and denial of historical and even theological facts that surely calls for explanation.
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NOTHING is more difficult to determine than the real force of conviction with which a creed is actually and individually held. Christianity in Handel’s England was preached more earnestly than it was practiced, and professed more stoutly than it was believed, but a decent—if formal—respect for the observances of the Church had for a long time been imposed by social sanction. The 18th-century Church in England was well-mannered and decorous but highly political and certainly deficient in its spirituality. Religion was widely taken for granted; to be a member of the Church was just another act of man in society. Yet, though the Church of England may at that period have become somnolent as a Christian institution, and though the philosophers were busy, in England as in France, undermining the foundations of religion, the masses firmly held to faith in the hereafter.
Their emphasis, however, was on the earthly present. The Englishman was convinced that there should be an ultimate value in the things of the world. He found no support for this view in the New Testament, whereas in the Old the prophetic genius of the Jews was profoundly “this-sided.” The prophets did not preach a theoretical but an eminently practical monotheism that was attractive to the English. Handel’s Englishmen admired and fully accepted the Jewish Old Testament concept of collective action, whose symbol was a king leading his
people by virtue of a covenant executed under the auspices of a Deity who would not tolerate oppression and injustice. This concept was the blueprint for constitutionalism. The institution of the monarchy, the concentration of military as well as civil power in the King (as is clear from Pentateuchal legislation), shows a startling resemblance to British institutions. The legal system, the revolutionary concept of social justice described in Deuteronomy with its judicial sessions held in public, the witnesses, their examination, all was eminently congenial to the British mind. They could read in the Old Testament about commerce, territorial expansion, competitive nationalism, and political autonomy, subjects with which their own existence was closely bound up. All these things were relevant to the social and political problems of their day.
As we examine the English Protestants’ relationship to the Bible we discover that theirs was a very particular view among Christian denominations in the Handelian era, and what is most striking is the exceptional role the Old Testament played in their conception of Christianity. Their acceptance of the principles of the Sermon on the Mount was not an unconditional but a selective one to suit political and economic aims and conditions. At the same time, their ever-present historical sense made them turn to the Old Testament rather than the New. The English love their institutions not with mystical fervor or mere local patriotism, as do some other peoples, but with an intelligent and steadfast loyalty to principles. Their attitude tends to the hortatory and rhetorical; their national solutions must have a moral foundation.96 This rhetoric of the English is not mental gymnastics and the pathos of words, as with the Latins, nor sentimental-metaphysical as with the Germans; it originated from a moral necessity, it is the voice of conscience, the spokesman for national morality. The concreteness of its language furthers the concreteness of its thought.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 52
