The difficulty many writers have found in explaining the
subject of Handel’s “plagiarisms” is not entirely accounted
for by mere lack of these considerations; but the grossest confusion
of ideas as to the difference between cases in point prevails
to this day, and many discussions which have been raised in
regard to the ethical aspect of the question are frankly absurd.[1]
It has been argued, for instance, that great injustice was done
to Buononcini over his unfortunate affair with the prize madrigal,
while his great rival was allowed the credit of Israel in Egypt,
which contains a considerable number of entire choruses (besides
hosts of themes) by earlier Italian and German writers. But
the very idea of Handelian oratorio is that of some three hours
of music, religious or secular, arranged, like opera, in the form of
a colossal entertainment, and with high dramatic and emotional
interest imparted to it, if not by the telling of a story, at all
events by the nature and development of the subject. It seems,
moreover, to be entirely overlooked that the age was an age of
pasticcios. Nothing was more common than the organization
of some such solemn entertainment by the skilful grouping of
favourite pieces. Handel himself never revived one of his
oratorios without inserting in it favourite pieces from his other
works as well as several new numbers; and the story is well
known that the turning point in Gluck’s career was his perception
of the true possibilities of dramatic music from the failure of a
pasticcio in which he had reset some rather definitely expressive
music to situations for which it was not originally designed.
The success of an oratorio was due to the appropriateness of its
contrasts, together of course with the mastery of its detail,
whether that detail were new or old; and there are many
gradations between a réchauffé of an early work like The Triumph
of Time and Truth, or a pasticcio with a few original numbers
like the Occasional Oratorio, and such works as Samson, which
was entirely new except that the “Dead March” first written
for it was immediately replaced by the more famous one imported
from Saul. That the idea of the pasticcio was extremely familiar
to the age is shown by the practice of announcing an oratorio
as “new and original,” a term which would obviously be meaningless
if it were as much a matter of course as it is at the present
day, and which, if used at all, must obviously so apply to the
whole work without forbidding the composer from gratifying
the public with the reproduction of one or two favourite arias.
But of course the question of originality becomes more serious
when the imported numbers are not the composer’s own. And
here it is very noticeable that Handel derived no credit, either
with his own public or with us, from whole movements that are
not of his own designing. In Israel in Egypt, the choruses
“Egypt was glad when they departed,” “And I will exalt Him,”
“Thou sentest forth Thy Wrath” and “The Earth swallowed
them,” are without exception the most colourless and
unattractive pieces of severe counterpoint to be found among
Handel’s works; and it is very difficult to fathom his motive in
copying them from obscure pieces by Erba and Kaspar Kerl,
unless it be that he wished to train his audiences to a better
understanding of a polyphonic style. He certainly felt that
the greatest possibilities of music lay in the higher choral polyphony,
and so in Israel in Egypt he designed a work consisting
almost entirely of choruses, and may have wished in these
instances for severe contrapuntal movements which he had not
time to write, though he could have done them far better himself.
Be this as it may, these choruses have certainly added nothing
to the popularity of a work of which the public from the outset
complained that there was not enough solo music; and what
effect they have is merely to throw Handel’s own style into
relief. To draw any parallel between the theft of such unattractive
details in the grand and intensely Handelian scheme
of Israel in Egypt and Buononcini’s alleged theft of a prize
madrigal is merely ridiculous. Handel himself, if he had any
suspicion that contemporaries did not take a sane architect’s
view of the originality of large musical schemes,[2] probably gave
himself no more trouble about their scruples on this matter than
about other forms of musical banality.
The History of Music by Burney, the cleverest and most refined musical critic of the age, shows in the very freshness of its musical scholarship how completely unscholarly were the musical ideas of the time. Burney was incapable of regarding choral music as other than a highly improving academic exercise in which he himself was proficient; and for him Handel is the great opera-writer whose choral music will reward the study of the curious. If Handel had attempted to explain his methods to the musicians of his age, he would probably have found himself alone in his opinions as to the property of musical ideas. He did not trouble to explain, but he made no concealment of his sources. He left his whole musical library to his copyist, and it was from this that the sources of his work were discovered. And when the whole series of plagiarisms is studied, the fact forces itself upon us that nothing except themes and forms which are common property in all 18th-century music, has yet been discovered as the source of any work of Handel’s which is not felt as part of a larger design. Operatic arias were never felt as parts of a whole. The opera was a concert on the stage, and it stood or fell, not by a dramatic propriety which it notoriously neglected to consider at all, but by the popularity of its arias. There is no aria in Handel’s operas which is traceable to another composer. Even in the oratorios there is no solo number in which more than the themes are pilfered, for in oratorios the solo work still appealed to the popular criterion of novelty and individual attractiveness. And when we leave the question of copying of whole movements and come to that of the adaptation of passages, and still more of themes, Handel shows himself to be simply on a line with Mozart. Jahn compares the opening of Mozart’s Requiem with that of the first chorus in Handel’s Funeral Anthem. Mozart recreates at least as much from Handel’s already perfect framework as Handel ever idealized from the inorganic fragments of earlier writers. The double counterpoint of the Kyrie in Mozart’s Requiem is still more indisputably identical with that of the last chorus of Handel’s Joseph, and if the themes are common property their combination certainly is not. But the true plagiarist is the man who does not know the meaning of the ideas he copies, and the true creator is he in whose hands they remain or become true ideas. The theme “He led them forth like sheep” in the chorus “But as for his people” is one of the most beautiful in Handel’s works, and the bare statement that it comes from a serenata by Stradella seems at first rather shocking. But, to any one who knew Stradella’s treatment of it first, Handel’s would come as a revelation actually greater than if he had never heard the theme before. Stradella makes nothing more of it, and therefore presumably sees nothing more in it than an agreeable and essentially frivolous little tune which lends itself to comic dramatic purpose by a wearisome repetition throughout eight pages of patchy aria and instrumental ritornello at an ever-increasing pace. What Handel sees in it is what he makes of it, one of the most solemn and poetic things in music. Again, it may be very shocking to discover that the famous opening of the “Hailstone chorus” comes from the patchy and facetious overture to this same serenata, with which it is identical for ten bars all in the tonic chord (representing, according to Stradella, someone knocking at a door). And it is no doubt yet more shocking that the chorus “He spake the word, and
- ↑ The “moral” question has been raised afresh in reviews of Mr Sedley Taylor’s admirable volume of analysed illustrations (The Indebtedness of Handel to works of other Composers, Cambridge, 1906). The latest argument is that Handel shows moral obliquity in borrowing “regrettably” from sources no one could know at the time. This reasoning makes it mysterious that a man of such moral obliquity should ever have written a note of his own music in England when he could have stolen the complete choral works of Bach and most of the hundred operas of Alessandro Scarlatti with the certainty that the sources would not be printed for a century after his death, even if his own name did not then check curiosity among antiquarians. Of course Handel’s plagiarisms would have damaged his reputation if contemporaries had known of them. His polyphonic scholarship was more “antiquated” in the 18th century than it is in the 20th.
- ↑ Much light would be thrown on the subject if some one sufficiently ignorant of architecture were to make researches into Sir Christopher Wren’s indebtedness to Italian architects!
