In these, freed from the restrictions of the stage, he was able
to give scope to his genius for choral writing, and so to develop,
or rather revive, that art of chorus singing which is the normal
outlet for English musical talent. In 1726 Handel had become
a naturalized Englishman, and in 1733 he began his public
career as a composer of English texts by producing the second
and larger version of Esther at the King’s theatre. This was
followed early in the same year by Deborah, in which the share
of the chorus is much greater. In July he produced Athalia
at Oxford, the first work in which his characteristic double
choruses appear. The share of the chorus increases in Saul
(1738); and Israel in Egypt (also 1738) is practically entirely
a choral work, the solo movements, in spite of their fame, being
as perfunctory in character as they are few in number. It was
not unnatural that the public, who still considered Italian opera
the highest, because the most modern form of musical art,
obliged Handel at subsequent performances of this gigantic
work to insert more solos.
The Messiah was produced at Dublin on the 13th of April 1742. Samson (which Handel preferred to the Messiah) appeared at Covent Garden on the 2nd of March 1744; Belshazzar at the King’s theatre, 27th of March 1745; the Occasional Oratorio (chiefly a compilation of the earlier oratorios, but with a few important new numbers), on the 14th of February 1746 at Covent Garden, where all his later oratorios were produced; Judas Maccabaeus on the 1st of April 1747; Joshua on the 9th of March 1748; Alexander Balus on the 23rd of March 1748; Solomon on the 17th of March 1749; Susanna, spring of 1749; Theodora, a great favourite of Handel’s, who was much disappointed by its cold reception, on the 16th of March 1750; Jephtha (strictly speaking, his last work) on the 26th of February 1752, and The Triumph of Time and Truth (transcribed from Il Trionfo del tempo with the addition of many later favourite numbers), 1757. Other important works, indistinguishable in artistic form from oratorios, but on secular subjects, are Alexander’s Feast, 1736; Ode for St Cecilia’s Day (words by Dryden); L’Allegro, il pensieroso ed il moderato (the words of the third part by Jennens), 1740; Semele, 1744; Hercules, 1745; and The Choice of Hercules, 1751.
By degrees the enmity against Handel died away, though he had many troubles. In 1745 he had again become bankrupt; for, although he had no rival as a composer of choral music it was possible for his enemies to give balls and banquets on the nights of his oratorio performances. As with his first bankruptcy, so in his later years, he showed scrupulous sense of honour in discharging his debts, and he continued to work hard to the end of his life. He had not only completely recovered his financial position by the year 1750, but he must have made a good deal of money, for he then presented an organ to the Foundling Hospital, and opened it with a performance of the Messiah on the 15th of May. In 1751 his sight began to trouble him; and the autograph of Jephtha, published in facsimile by the Händelgesellschaft, shows pathetic traces of this in his handwriting,[1] and so affords a most valuable evidence of his methods of composition, all the accompaniments, recitatives, and less essential portions of the work being evidently filled in long after the rest. He underwent unsuccessful operations, one of them by the same surgeon who had operated on Bach’s eyes. There is evidence that he was able to see at intervals during his last years, but his sight practically never returned after May 1752. He continued superintending performances of his works and writing new arias for them, or inserting revised old ones, and he attended a performance of the Messiah a week before his death, which took place, according to the Public Advertiser of the 16th of April, not on Good Friday, the 13th of April, according to his own pious wish and according to common report, but on the 14th of April 1759. He was buried in Westminster Abbey; and his monument is by L. F. Roubilliac, the same sculptor who modelled the marble statue erected in 1739 in Vauxhall Gardens, where his works had been frequently performed.
Handel was a man of high character and intelligence, and his interest was not confined to his own art exclusively. He liked the society of politicians and literary men, and he was also a collector of pictures and articles of vertu. His power of work was enormous, and the Händelgesellschaft’s edition of his complete works fills one hundred volumes, forming a total bulk almost equal to the works of Bach and Beethoven together. (F. H.; D. F. T.)
No one has more successfully popularized the greatest artistic ideals than Handel; no artist is more disconcerting to critics who imagine that a great man’s mental development is easy to follow. Not even Wagner effected a greater transformation in the possibilities of dramatic music Handel as composer. than Handel effected in oratorio, yet we have seen that Handel was the very opposite of a reformer. He was not even conservative, and he hardly took the pains to ascertain what an art-form was, so long as something externally like it would convey his idea. But he never failed to convey his idea, and, if the hybrid forms in which he conveyed it had no historic influence and no typical character, they were none the less accurate in each individual case. The same aptness and the same absence of method are conspicuous in his style. The popular idea that Handel’s style is easily recognizable comes from the fact that he overshadows all his predecessors and contemporaries, except Bach, and so makes us regard typical 18th-century Italian and English style as Handelian, instead of regarding Handel’s style as typical Italian 18th-century. Nothing in music requires more minute expert knowledge than the sifting of the real peculiarities of Handel’s style from the mass of contemporary formulae which in his inspired pages he absorbed, and which in his uninspired pages absorbed him.
His easy mastery was acquired, like Mozart’s, in childhood. The later sonatas for two oboes and bass which he wrote in his eleventh year are, except in their diffuseness and an occasional slip in grammar, indistinguishable from his later works, and they show a boyish inventiveness worthy of Mozart’s work at the same age. Such early choral works, as the Dixit Dominus (1707), show the ill-regulated power of his choral writing before he assimilated Italian influences. Its practical difficulties are at least as extravagant as Bach’s, while they are not accounted for by any corresponding originality and necessity of idea; but the grandeur of the scheme and nobility of thought is already that for which Handel so often in later years found the simplest and easiest adequate means of expression that music has ever attained. His eminently practical genius soon formed his vocal style, and long before the period of his great oratorios, such works as The Birthday Ode for Queen Anne (1713) and the Utrecht Te Deum show not a trace of German extravagance. The only drawback to his practical genius was that it led him to bury perhaps half of his finest melodies, and nearly all the secular features of interest in his treatment of instruments and of the aria forms, in that deplorable limbo of vanity, the 18th-century Italian opera. It is not true, as has been alleged against him, that his operas are in no way superior to those of his contemporaries; but neither is it true that he stirred a finger to improve the condition of dramatic musical art. He was no slave to singers, as is amply testified by many anecdotes. Nor was he bound by the operatic conventions of the time. In Teseo he not only wrote an opera in five acts when custom prescribed three, but also broke a much more plausible rule in arranging that each character should have two arias in succession. He also showed a feeling for expression and style which led him to write arias of types which singers might not expect. But he never made any innovation which had the slightest bearing upon the stage-craft of opera, for he never concerned himself with any artistic question beyond the matter in hand; and the matter in hand was not to make dramatic music, or to make the story interesting or intelligible, but simply to provide a concert of between some twenty and thirty Italian arias and duets, wherein singers could display their abilities and spectators find distraction from the monotony of so large a dose of the aria form (which
- ↑ By a dramatic coincidence Handel’s blindness interrupted him during the writing of the chorus, “How dark, oh Lord, are Thy decrees, . . . all our joys to sorrow turning . . . as the night succeeds the day.”
