Handel (45 page)

A comparable firmness of design controls Part II, framing its paeans of triumph between the two colossal C major outbursts of Moses and Miriam, scored for double choir, three trombones, two trumpets, wind, strings and timpani. Monotony in the praise of God,
of a sort which all too easily clouds works like
Joshua
and
The Occasional Oratorio
, is avoided here by the continuing flexibility with which Handel manipulates his forces. Nowhere is this better shown than in the sequence dovetailing the serene ‘The depths have covered them' with ‘Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious', a farouche war dance, blending in its turn with the ascetic fugato of ‘Thou sentest forth thy wrath' and the whirling rhythms of ‘And with the blast of thy nostrils'. The key, however, to the significance of the whole work, as an essay in interpreting the relationship between man and God, comes not at moments like these, but in ‘The people shall hear'. This is arguably the finest chorus he ever wrote, its sombre evocations of fear ushered in by those dotted quaver patterns forming one of his favourite rhythmic foundations, and sweeping us into a series of amply developed episodes, as the dark mass of jagged chords dissolves on the words ‘all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away' and the three a capella bars ‘they shall be as still as a stone' introduce the sinewy harmonies illustrating the Israelites' wanderings through their regained land.

Israel in Egypt
is in every sense Handel's most allusive work, a piece in which he takes stock of an entire musical heritage and at several points consciously recalls the voices and idioms of the past. As in
Saul
, the feeling of archaic grandeur is emphasized by the use, in various numbers, of three trombones, whose timbre immediately recalls the musical world of Schütz and Monteverdi, and fugues like ‘And I will exalt him' and ‘And the earth swallowed them', each with a heavy chordal introduction, carry us back even further, towards Hassler and the Gabrielis. The thematically independent orchestral ritornellos ending ‘And with the blast' and the Plague of Flies are a device more familiar in the context of early Venetian opera. Such recollections are hardly accidental, since the oratorio draws heavily for its melodic and structural material on the work of various seventeenth-century composers, including Alessandro Stradella, Johann Kaspar Kerll and the Milanese choirmaster Dionigi Erba, but Handel's transmutations of the borrowed material have their own interest and contribute towards the unique discourse of the piece as a whole.

Indifferent to the ground-breaking
Israel in Egypt
, the London public was similarly unenthusiastic about
Giove in Argo
, a pasticcio knocked up, according to Handel himself, in four days, using material from several of his operas as well as numbers from
Acis and Galatea
and
Parnasso in Festa
.
The composer added half a dozen new airs and a chorus, allowing a visiting soprano, Costanza Posterla, to include two arias by the Neapolitan composer Francesco Araja. The King's Theatre season closed prematurely in the first week of May 1739. We know little or nothing of Handel's activities during the summer, though no doubt he paid a visit or two to country friends like Sir Wyndham Knatchbull, James Harris or Lord Shaftesbury, and perhaps made a trip to Bath or Tunbridge for his health. By late September he was back at work, fortified the following month by canny John Walsh's new royal copyright. ‘Whereas
George Frederick Handel
, of the Parish of
St George the Martyr Hanover Square
, in our County of
Middlesex
, Esq; hath humbly represented unto Us, that he hath with great Labour and Expence composed several Works consisting of Vocal and Instrumental Musick, and hath authorised and appointed
John Walsh
of the Parish of
St Mary le Strand
, in our said County of Middlesex, to print and publish the same; and hath therefore humbly besought us to grant Our Royal Privilege and Licence to the said
John Walsh
for the sole Engraving, Printing and Publishing the said Works for the Term of Fourteen Years; We being willing to give all due Encouragement to Works of this Nature, are graciously pleased to condescend to his Request . . .'

November ushered in the hardest winter England had known for a decade, the worst, some claimed, in living memory. The Thames, above and below London Bridge, became choked with pack-ice and the river was full of stranded ships, wrecked lighters and wherries and the sinister flotsam of corpses of those who had drowned while trying to save cargoes or guide their vessels through the floes. The ducks left St James's Park and people dropped dead of cold in the streets. In the new year the river froze over entirely and during the ensuing frost fair a Mr Cunningham of Fulham galloped a horse along the ice to Hammersmith and back again in three quarters of an hour for a twenty-guinea wager. But of course all this can have been nothing new for the Princess Sherbatoff, ‘Spouse to the
Russian
Minister Plenipotentiary', who ‘appears at Court in a
Russian
Habit,
viz.
a Robe of Ermine and Furr, with a Sable Tippet, being the
Winter
Dress of that Country'.

Advertisements for Handel's new season included the assurance that ‘Particular Preparations are making to keep the House warm;
and the Passage from the Fields to the House will be cover'd for better Conveniency'. He had left the Haymarket, or had not been asked to return owing to his recent box office failures, and now hired Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre from John Rich. Rich managed it in tandem with his newer enterprise at Covent Garden, and the actors and dancers in his company were sometimes expected to take part in performances at both theatres on the same night. Handsomely restored in 1714, its stage lighting enhanced by the use of looking glasses and with a
trompe-l'oeil
design over the pit showing ‘Shakespeare, Johnson, &c . . . in conference with Betterton', its seating capacity of approximately 1,400 was more or less equivalent to Covent Garden's.

The opening concert, featuring
Alexander's Feast
and two of Handel's new string concertos, took place on 22 November, St Cecilia's Day, and began appropriately with a freshly composed setting of Dryden's
A Song for St Cecilia's Day
, intended, no doubt, as a kind of illustrative pendant similar to those created for the longer work at its first performance by
Cecilia, volgi uno sguardo
and the
Alexander's Feast Concerto
. In attempting Dryden's poem Handel must have been aware, as with
Alexander's Feast
, that he was tackling a modern classic, accorded the highest contemporary regard as a formative influence upon the writers of the age. The interest of each composition would have lain less obviously in his music alone than in the marriage of his talents to Dryden's admired achievement. Not for nothing would Charles Avison, one of his sterner critics, later compare the two. ‘Mr Handel is in Music', he wrote ‘what his own Dryden was in Poetry; nervous, exalted and harmonious; but voluminous, and, consequently, not always correct. Their Abilities equal to every Thing; their Execution frequently inferior. Born with Genius capable of soaring the boldest Flights; they have sometimes, to suit the vitiated Taste of the Age they lived in, descended to the lowest.'

The poem is a gift to the imaginative composer and Handel ignores none of its hints or nuances. Apart from the more obvious illustrations, the soft complaining flute, the trumpet's loud clangour, the sacred organ, solo cello divisions for Jubal striking the corded shell, and A major strings for ‘sharp violins', he is at pains to bring out in subtler ways the all-pervading, god-given power of music which the ode asserts. The structure of the opening recitative and chorus imitates Dryden's vision of harmony resolving chaos and finding its ultimate fulfilment in the image of man himself.
In the closing ‘Grand Chorus' Handel includes, as a kind of professional signature, a striking harmonic flourish in which modulation becomes a positive
coup de théâtre.
To heighten the dramatic element even further, the soloists (in the first performance those redoubtable Handelians Beard and Francesina) take on the role of evangelist narrator and angelic visionary, the soprano tessitura kept ethereally high, perhaps taking its cue from ‘Sing ye to the Lord' in
Israel in Egypt
. Once again inspiration for several of the ode's numbers lies in a work by another composer, in this case Gottlieb Muffat's
Componimenti Musicali
, a set of brilliant and learned harpsichord suites by the son of the great Georg Muffat, so influential in introducing German musicians to the French court style in his instrumental suites and concertos.

War fever, quite as strong as the cold weather, gripped London and must have diverted much popular attention from Lincoln's Inn Fields concerts. Fury at Spain's failure to honour the financial terms of the Treaty of Madrid, made some eighteen years previously, was incensed still further by her high-handed behaviour towards the English merchants and their ships, and vulgar patriotic sabre-rattling was stirred up by Lord Gage's angry remonstrance to the House of Lords in July and by Captain Jenkins's production of a shrivelled human ear, said to be his own, as a proof of Spanish atrocity. The War of Jenkins's Ear began in earnest during the autumn and the dashing exploits of the aptly named Nicholas Haddock, commanding the Mediterranean fleet, monopolized everybody's interest. A disgusted friend wrote to Horace Walpole: ‘Plays we have none, or damned ones. Handel has had a concerto this winter. No opera, no nothing. All for war and Admiral Haddock.'

11

During that troubled autumn of 1739 Handel had been at work on a series of twelve string concerti grossi, his Opus 6, ten of which were to be given their premières during the forthcoming season. With typically feverish energy he completed the entire set in the space of one month, beginning number 1 in G on 29 September and dating the last, subsequently issued as number 11, 30 October, Walsh having already proposed a subscription for ‘
Twelve Grand Concerto's
, in Seven Parts, for four Violins, a Tenor, a Violoncello, with a Thorough-Bass for the Harpsichord. Compos'd by Mr Handel'. Publication was held over, for obvious reasons, until near the season's close, and a hundred subscribers, including most of the royal family (King George and the Waleses were significantly absent), Jennens, Tyers, Rich and a host of country music societies, among them the ‘Ladies Concert in Lincoln', took 122 copies.

It was no more than a respectable subscription list – there were fewer takers than for
Arminio
or
Giustino
two years earlier, for instance – and any hopes on Handel's part for a spectacular commercial success must inevitably have been disappointed. Yet the concertos made their mark, appealing as they must to the already well-established English taste for the sort of music that emphasized ensemble playing and orchestral groups rather than exhibition solo performance.

Unlike the organ concertos, the concerti grossi were heirs to a solid tradition, but it would be wrong to suppose that there is anything especially traditional in Handel's approach to composing them or that they mark a
terminus ad quem
in the history of English instrumental music. Though it is true that the framework of these pieces is on the lines provided earlier in the century by Giuseppe Torelli and Arcangelo Corelli as ‘the model of grand concertos for a numerous band' and sedulously followed by writers for the English market,
they are far less specifically Corellian than those of the popular London concert violinists such as Geminiani, Pietro Castrucci and Festing, at whose recently published sets Handel seems to have had a glance before embarking on his own. Nor did Opus 6 stop this particular style dead in its tracks. Far from doing so, it inspired a crop of respectable imitations among English masters, Stanley, Avison, Alcock and others, as well as being followed up in the succeeding years of the decade by collections from Locatelli, Geminiani and Sammartini.

Handel would have been well aware of the continental penchant for the newer three-movement Venetian layout so brilliantly developed by Vivaldi, yet something more than a mere wish to please the Lincoln ladies or the ‘Monday Night Musical Society at ye Globe Tavern' must have inspired his choice of the Corellian model, in which a variety of movements in differing tempi and styles, mingling the idioms of church and stage, allowed him the free exercise of his mercurial genius. For the success of Opus 6, which stands beside Bach's Brandenburgs and Vivaldi's great string sets at the summit of all achievement in the Baroque concerto genre, lies in the remarkable consistency of its refusal to compromise with received ideas of ‘correctness' and ‘kinds' in musical form. Both the consistency and the refusal are fundamentally Handelian. Rather than imitate Corelli, Albinoni, Georg Muffat or Telemann, he absorbs the characteristic manner of each, mixing it with his own virtuoso treatment of the various forms and styles.

None of the twelve repeats the pattern of another or seeks, in refurbishing ideas from the operas, oratorios and keyboard pieces, merely to capitalize on the success of an already valid formula. Number 5, for example, bases three of its six movements on the overture to the
Ode for St Cecilia's Day
, but here Handel, seldom content to let his concepts gather moss, tacks on a theatrical two-and-a-half-bar flourish to the opening and makes certain other small but subtle alterations to the plan of the other two, almost as if to say ‘you only
thought
you had heard these before'. He uses them, what is more, as a frame within which to present three fresh pieces, a delightful presto, like a little air in a Neapolitan opera buffa, a B minor largo, a sobering hand upon earlier jauntiness, with interlocking voices hankering for a resolution, and a robust Vivaldian allegro poised upon a vigorous bass line.