Handel was first of all a dramatic musician, his ambition centring upon the opera. Under this impulse he took such forms as his age provided, such librettos as he could get, and then put his music together as he thought dramatic effectiveness required. His originality was shown more in the essential truth, beauty and energy of particular numbers than in any remodeling of accepted methods. His resources of melody were unrestricted, evolved out of a complex, nervous harmony, rather than from a simple chord-scheme, as in later writers. He much excelled his contemporaries in characterization, embodying in phrase, movement and figure the general quality and the personal reactions of a dramatic situation. And his instinct for arrangement was unerring, so that effective contrasts and climaxes were never wanting. His operas are no longer known because based on poor librettos and written in an obsolete musical and dramatic dialect, but, measured by the standards of their own time, they were masterly.
The full list of his operas (1704-41) includes over 40 full operas, over
10 pasticcios, and several serenatas. The subjects are almost all from
classical mythology or history, with some from mediæval romance. The
librettos came from various hands—7 each by Paolo Rolli and Niccolò
Francesco Haym (d. 1729), 3 by Metastasio, 1-2 each by 10 others, with
some unassigned.
The step from the opera to the oratorio was a short one, since
Handel's notion of the oratorio was primarily dramatic and not
liturgical. He transferred to it precisely the same methods, except
in the one feature of the chorus. He perceived that in a
concert-form the chorus was feasible as it was not in the theatre,
and that for the expression of the profound and collective emotions
of religion its use on a grand scale was inevitable. Here
he applied the resources of his contrapuntal skill with a lucidity,
breadth and sublimity seldom since surpassed. This fusion of
the dramatic recitative and aria with the ecclesiastical motet,
being made by one who was at once a veteran popular musician
and a truly devout man, resulted in a new composite type for
the English oratorio that has ever since persisted. Although
much of his success in this field was due to the excellence
of some of his librettos, his masterly use of choral means—not
so original or learned as Bach's, but far more immediately
effective—gives his works of this class a commanding interest.
