A musical tour through the land of the past/Chapter III

by Romain Rolland

 

 

III

A PORTRAIT OF HÄNDEL

They used to call him the Great Bear. He was gigantic: broad, corpulent, with big hands and enormous feet; his arms and thighs were stupendous. His hands were so fat that the bones disappeared in the flesh, forming dimples.^[1] He walked bow-legged, with a heavy, rolling gait, very erect, with his head thrown back under its huge white wig, whose curls rippled heavily over his shoulders. He had a long horse-like face, which with age became bovine and swamped in fat; with pendant cheeks and triple chin, the nose large, thick and straight, the ears red and long. His gaze was very direct; there was a quizzical gleam in his bold eye, a mocking twist at the corner of his large, finely-cut mouth.^[2] His air was impressive and jovial. When he smiled—says Burney—"his heavy, stern countenance was radiant with a flash of intelligence and wit; like the sun emerging from a cloud."

He was full of humour. He had a "sly pseudo-simplicity" which made the most solemn individuals laugh though he himself showed an unsmiling face. No one ever told a story better. "His happy way of saying the simplest things differently from anyone else gave them an amusing complexion. If his English had been as good as Swift's, his bons mots would have been equally abundant and of the same kind." But "really to enjoy what he said one had almost to know four languages: English, French, Italian and German, all of which he mixed up together."^[3]

This medley of tongues was as much due to the fashion in which his vagabond youth was moulded, while he wandered through the countries of Western Europe, as to his natural impetuosity, which, when he sought a rejoinder, seized upon all the words at his disposal. He was like Berlioz: musical notation was too slow for him; he would have needed a shorthand to follow his thought; at the beginning of his great choral compositions he wrote the motifs in full for all the parts; as he proceeded he would drop first one part, then another; finally he would retain only one voice, or he would even end up with the bass alone; he would pass at a stroke to the end of the composition which he had begun, postponing until later the completion of the whole, and on the morrow of finishing one piece he would begin another, sometimes working on two, if not three, simultaneously.^[4]

He would never have had the patience of Gluck, who began, before writing, by "going through each of his acts, and then the whole piece; which commonly cost him"—so he told Corancez—"a year, and oftener than not a serious illness."—Händel used to compose an act before he had learned how the piece continued, and sometimes before the librettist had time to write it.^[5]

The urge to create was so tyrannical that it ended by isolating him from the rest of the world. "He never allowed himself to be interrupted by any futile visit" says Hawkins, "and his impatience to be delivered of the ideas which continually flooded his mind kept him almost always shut up." His brain was never idle; and whatever he might be doing, he was no longer conscious of his surroundings. He had a habit of speaking so loudly that everybody learned what he was thinking. And what exaltation, what tears, as he wrote! He sobbed aloud when he was composing the aria He was despised.—"I have heard it said" reports Shield, "that when his servant took him his chocolate in the morning he was often surprised to see him weeping and wetting with his tears the paper on which he was writing."—With regard to the Hallelujah chorus of the Messiah he himself cited the words of St. Paul: "Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it I know not. God knows."

This huge mass of flesh was shaken by fits of fury. He swore almost with every phrase. In the orchestra, "when his great white periwig was seen to quiver the musicians trembled." When his choirs were inattentive he had a way of shouting Chorus! at them in a terrible voice that made the public jump. Even at the rehearsals of his oratorios at Carlton House, before the Prince of Wales, if the Prince and Princess did not appear punctually he took no trouble to conceal his anger; and if the ladies of the Court had the misfortune to talk during the performance he was not satisfied with cursing and swearing, but addressed them furiously by name. "Chut, chut!" the Princess would say on these occasions, with her usual indulgence: "Händel is spiteful!"

Spiteful he was not. "He was rough and peremptory," says Burney, "but entirely without malevolence. There was, in his most violent fits of anger, a touch of originality which, together with his bad English, made them absolutely comical. Like Lully and Gluck, he had the gift of command; and like them he combined an irascible violence that overcame all opposition with a witty good-nature which, though wounding to vanity, had the power of healing the wounds which it had caused. "At his rehearsals he was an arbitrary person; but his remarks and even his reprimands were full of an extremely droll humour." At the time when the opera in London was a field of battle between the supporters of the Faustina and those of the Cuzzoni, and when the two prime donne seized one another by the hair in the middle of a performance, patronised by the Princess of Wales, to the roars of the house, a farce by Colley Gibber, who dramatised this historic bout of fisticuffs, represented Händel as the only person who remained cool in the midst of the uproar. "To my thinking" he said "one should leave them to fight it out in peace. If you want to make an end of it throw oil on the fire. When they are tired their fury will abate of itself." And in order that the battle should end the sooner he expedited it with great blows on the kettledrum.^[6]

Even when he flew into a rage people felt that he was laughing in his sleeve. Thus, when he seized the irascible Cuzzoni, who refused to sing one of his airs, by the waist, and, carrying her to the window, threatened to throw her into the street, he said, with a bantering air: "Now, madame, I know very well that you are a regular she-devil; but I'll make you realise that I am Beelzebub the prince of devils!"^[7]

*⁠*⁠*

All his life he enjoyed a wonderful amount of freedom. He hated all restrictions and avoided all official appointments; for we cannot so describe his position of teacher to the princesses; the important musical posts about the Court and the fat pensions were never bestowed upon him, even after his naturalisation as an English citizen; they were conferred upon indifferent composers.^[8] He took no pains to humour these; he spoke of his English colleagues with contemptuous sarcasm. Indifferently educated, apart from music,^[9] he despised academics and academic musicians. He was not a doctor of Oxford University, although the degree was offered to him. It is recorded that he complained: "What the devil! should I have had to spend my money in order to be like those idiots?^[10] Never in this world!"

And later, in Dublin, where he was entitled Dr. Händel on a placard, he was annoyed by the mistake and promptly had it corrected on the programmes, which announced him as Mr. Händel.

Although he was far from turning up his nose at fame—speaking at some length in his last will and testament of his burial at Westminster, and carefully settling the amount to which he wished to limit the cost of his own monument—he had no respect whatever for the opinions of the critics. Mattheson was unable to obtain from him the data which he needed to write his biography. His Rousseau-like manners filled the courtiers with indignation. The fashionable folk who had always been given to inflicting boredom upon artists without any protest from the latter resented the supercilious and unsociable fashion in which he kept them at a distance. In 1719 the field-marshal Count Flemming wrote to Mlle. de Schulenburg, one of Händel's pupils:

Mademoiselle!—I had hoped to speak to M. Händel and should have liked to offer him a few polite attentions on your behalf, but there has been no opportunity; I made use of your name to induce him to come to my house, but on some occasions he was not at home, while on others he was ill; it seems to me that he is rather crazy, which he ought not to be as far as I am concerned, considering that I am a musician … and that I am proud to be one of your most faithful servants, Mademoiselle, who are the most agreeable of his pupils; I should have liked to tell you all this, so that you in your turn might give lessons to your master.^[11]

In 1741, an anonymous letter to the London Daily Post^[12] speaks of "the declared displeasure of so many gentlemen of rank and influence" in respect of Händel's attitude toward them.

Excepting the single opera Radamisto, which he dedicated to George I.—and this he did with dignity—he set his face against the humiliating and profitable custom of placing his compositions under the patronage of some wealthy person; and only when he was in the last extremity, when poverty and sickness had overwhelmed him, did he resolve to give a "benefit" concert: "that fashion of begging alms" as he called it.

From 1720 until his death in 1759 he was engaged in an unending conflict with the public. Like Lully, he managed a theatre, directed an Academy of Music and sought to reform—or to form—the musical taste of a nation. But he never had Lully's powers of control; for Lully was an absolute monarch of French music; and if Händel relied, as he did, on the king's favour, that favour was a long way from being as important to him as it was to Lully. He was in a country which did not obey the orders of those in high places with docility; a country which was not enslaved to the State; a free country, of a critical, unruly temper; and, apart from a select few, anything but hospitable, and inimical to foreigners. And he was a foreigner, and so was his Hanoverian king, whose patronage compromised him more than it benefited him.

He was surrounded by a crowd of bull-dogs with terrible fangs, by unmusical men of letters, who were likewise able to bite, by jealous colleagues, arrogant virtuosi, cannibalistic theatrical companies, fashionable cliques, feminine plots and nationalistic leagues. He was a prey to financial embarrassments which grew daily more inextricable; and he was constantly compelled to write new compositions to satisfy the curiosity of a public that nothing ever did satisfy, that was really interested in nothing, and to strive against the competition of harlequinades and bearfights; to write, and write, and write: not an opera each year, as Lully did so peacefully, but often two or three each winter, without counting the compositions of other musicians which he was forced to rehearse and conduct. What other genius ever drove such a trade for twenty years?

In this perpetual conflict he never made use of concessions, compromises or discreet expedients; neither with his actresses nor their protectors, the great nobles, nor the pamphleteers, nor all that clique which makes the fortune of the theatres and the fame or ruin of the artists. He held his own against the aristocracy of London. The war was bitter and merciless, and, on the part of his enemies, ignobly fought; there was no device, however petty, that was not employed to drive him into bankruptcy.

In 1733, after a long campaign in the Press and the drawing-rooms of London, his enemies managed to contrive that the concerts at which Händel produced his first oratorios were given to empty chairs; they succeeded in killing them, and people were already repeating, exultingly, that the discouraged German was about to return to his own country. In 1741, the fashionable cabal went so far as to hire little street-arabs to tear down the advertisements of Händel's concerts which were posted up out of doors, and "made use of a thousand expedients, equally pitiable, to cause him injury."^[13] Händel would very probably have left the United Kingdom, but for the unexpected sympathy which he found in Ireland, where he proceeded to spend a year.—In 1745, after all his masterpieces, after the Messiah, Samson, Belshazzar, and Herakles, the cabal was reconstituted, and was even more violent than before. Bolingbroke and Smollet mention the tenacity with which certain ladies gave tea-parties, entertainments and theatrical performances—which were not usually given in Lent—on the days when Händel's concerts were to take place, in order to rob him of his audience. Horace Walpole was greatly entertained by the fashion of going to the Italian opera when Händel was giving his oratorios.^[14]

In short, Händel was ruined; and although he was victorious in the end the causes of his victory were quite unconnected with art. To him there happened in 1746 what happened to Beethoven in 1813, after he had written the Battle of Vittoria and his patriotic songs for a Germany that had risen against Napoleon: Händel suddenly became, after the Battle of Culloden and his two patriotic oratorios, the Occasional Oratorio and Judas Maccabaeus, a national bard. From that moment his cause was gained, and the cabal had to keep silence; he was a part of England's patrimony, and the British lion walked beside him. But if after this period England no longer grudged his fame she nevertheless made him purchase it dearly; and it was no fault of the London public that he did not die, in the midst of his career, of poverty and mortification. Twice he was bankrupt;^[15] and once he was stricken down by apoplexy, amid the ruins of his company.^[16] But he always found his feet again; he never gave in. "To re-establish his fortunes he need only have made certain concessions; but his character rebelled against such a course.^[17] He had a hatred of all that might restrict his liberty, and was intractable in matters affecting the honour of his art. He was not willing that he should owe his fortune to any but himself."^[18] An English caricaturist represented him under the title of "The Bewitching Brute," trampling underfoot a banner on which was written: Pension, Privilege, Nobility, Favours; and in the face of disaster he laughed with a laugh of a Cornelian Pantagruel. Finding himself, on the evening of a concert, confronted by an empty hall, he said: "My music will sound the better so!"

*⁠*⁠*

This masterful character, with its violence and its transports of anger and of genius, was governed by a supreme self-control. In Händel that tranquillity prevailed which is sometimes met with in the offspring of certain sound, but late marriages.^[19] All his life he preserved this profound serenity in his art. While his mother, whom he worshipped, lay dying he wrote Poro, that delightfully care-free opera.^[20] The terrible year 1717, when he lay at the point of death, in the depths of a gulf of calamity, was preceded and followed by two oratorios overflowing with joy and material energy: Alexander's Feast (1736) and Saul (1738), and also by the two sparkling operas, Giustino (1736) with its pastoral fragrance, and Serse (1738), in which a comic vein appears.

… La calma del cor, del sen, dell' alma, says a song at the close of the serene Giustino. And this was the time when Händel's mind was strained to breaking-point by its load of anxieties!

Herein the anti-psychologists, who claim that the knowledge of an artist's life is of no value in the understanding of his work, will find cause for triumph, but they will do well to avoid a hasty judgment; for the very fact that Händel's art was independent of his life is of capital importance in the comprehension of his art. That a Beethoven should find solace for his sufferings and his passions in works of suffering and passion is easily understood. But that Händel, a sick man, assailed by anxieties, should find distraction in works expressing joy and serenity presupposes an almost superhuman mental equilibrium. How natural it is that Beethoven, endeavouring to write his Symphony of Joy, should have been fascinated by Händel!^[21] He must have looked with envious eyes upon the man who had attained that mastery over things and self to which he himself was aspiring, and which he was to achieve by an effort of impassioned heroism. It is this effort that we admire: it is indeed sublime. But is not the serenity with which Händel retained his footing on these heights equally sublime? People are too much accustomed to regard his serenity as the phlegmatic indifference of an English athlete:

Gorgé jusques aux dents de rouges aloyaux
Händel éclate en chants robustes et loyaux.^[22]

No one had any suspicion of the nervous tension or the superhuman determination which he must have needed in order to sustain this tranquillity. At times the machine broke down, and his magnificent health of body and mind was shaken to the roots. In 1737 Händel's friends believed that he had permanently lost his reason. But this crisis was not exceptional in his life. In 1745, when the hostility of London society, implacable in its attacks upon his Belshazzar and Herakles, ruined him for the second time, his reason was again very near to giving way. The hazard of a correspondence which has recently been published has afforded us this information.^[23] The Countess of Shaftesbury wrote on the 13th of March, 1745:

I went to Alexander's Feast with a melancholy pleasure. I wept tears of mortification at the sight of the great and unfortunate Händel, crestfallen, gloomy, with fallen cheeks, seated beside the harpsichord which he could not play; it made me sad to reflect that his light has burned itself out in the service of music.

On the 29th of August of the same year the Rev. William Harris wrote to his wife:

Met Händel in the street. Stopped him and reminded him who I was, upon which I am sure it would have entertained you to see his fantastic gestures. He spoke a great deal of the precarious condition of his health.

This condition continued for seven or eight months. On the 24th of October, Shaftesbury wrote to Harris:

Poor Händel looks a little better. I hope he will recover completely, though his mind has been entirely deranged.

He did recover completely, since in November he wrote his Occasional Oratorio, and soon afterwards his Judas Maccabaeus. But we see what a gulf perpetually yawned beneath him. It was only by the skin of his teeth that he, the sanest of geniuses, kept himself going, a hand's-breadth from insanity, and I repeat that these sudden organic lesions have been revealed only by the hazards of a correspondence. There must have been many others of which we know nothing. Let us remember this, and also the fact that Händel's tranquillity concealed a prodigious expenditure of emotion. The indifferent, phlegmatic Händel is only the outer shell.

Those who conceive of him thus have never understood him, never penetrated his mind, which was exalted by transports of enthusiasm, pride, fury and joy; which was, at times, almost hallucinated. But music, for him, was a serene region which he would not allow the disorders of his life to enter; when he surrendered to it wholly he was, despite himself, carried away by the delirium of a visionary, as when the God of Moses and the Prophets appeared to him in his Psalms and his oratorios—or betrayed by his heart, in moments of pity and compassion, that were yet without a trace of sentimentality.^[24]

He was, in his art, one of those men who, like Goethe, regard their lives from a great distance, a great height. Our modern sentimentality, which displays itself with complacent indiscretion, is disconcerted by this haughty reserve. In this kingdom of art, inaccesible to the capricious chances of life, it seems to us that the prevailing light is sometimes too uniform. Here are the Elysian Fields; hither one retreats from the life of the world; here, often enough, one regrets it. But is there not something affecting in the spectacle of this master, serene amidst all his afflictions, his brow unlined and his heart without a care?

*⁠*⁠*

Such a man, who lived entirely for his art, was not calculated to please women; and he troubled his head very little about them. None the less, they were his warmest partisans and his most venemous adversaries. The English pamphleteers made merry over one of his worshippers, who, under the pseudonym of Ophelia, sent him, when his Julius Cæsar was produced, a crown of laurel, with an enthusiastic poem in which she represented him as the greatest of musicians, and also of the English poets of his time. I have already alluded to those fashionable dames who endeavoured, with hateful animosity, to ruin him. Händel went his own way, indifferent to worshippers and adversaries alike.

In Italy, when he was twenty years of age, he had a few temporary love affairs, traces of which survive in several of the Italian Cantatas.^[25] There is a rumour too of an affair which he is supposed to have had at Hamburg when he was second violin in the orchestra of the Opera. He was attracted by one of his pupils, a girl of good family, and wanted to marry her; but the girl's mother declared that she would never consent to her daughter's marriage with a cat-gut scraper. Later, when the mother was dead and Händel famous, it was suggested to him that the obstacles were now removed; but he replied that the time had gone by; and according to his friend, Schmidt, who, like a good romantic German, delights to embellish history, "the young lady fell into a decline that ended her days." In London a little later there was a fresh project of marriage with a lady in fashionable society; once more, she was one of his pupils; but this aristocratic person wanted him to abandon his profession. Händel, indignant, "broke off the relations which would have fettered his genius."^[26] Hawkins tells us: "His sociable instincts were not very strong; whence it comes, no doubt, that he was a celibate all his life; it is asserted that he never had any dealings with women." Schmidt, who knew Händel very much better than Hawkins, protests that Händel was not unsociable, but that his frantic craving for independence "made him afraid of belittling himself, and that he had a dread of indissoluble ties."

In default of love he knew and faithfully practised friendship. He inspired the most touching affection, such as that of Schmidt, who left his country and his kin to follow him, in 1726, and never left him again until his death. Some of his friends were among the noblest intellects of the age: such was the witty Dr. Arbuthnot, whose apparent Epicurianism concealed a stoical disdain of mankind, and who, in his last letter to Swift, made this admirable remark: "As for leaving, for the world's sake, the path of virtue and honour, the world is not worth it." Händel had moreover a profound and pious feeling for the family, which was never extinguished, and to which he gave expression in some touching characters, such as Joseph, and the good mother in Solomon.

But the finest, purest feeling of which he was capable was his ardent charity. In a country which witnessed, in the eighteenth century, a magnificent impulse of human solidarity,^[27] he was one of those who were most sincerely devoted to the cause of the unfortunate. His generosity was not extended merely to this or that individual whom he had personally known, such as the widow of his old master, Lachow; it was lavished continually and abundantly in the interest of all charitable undertakings, more especially in that of two such organisations which made especial appeal to him: the Society of Musicians and the Foundling Hospital.

The Society of Musicians was founded in 1738 by a group of the principal artists in London,—artists of all descriptions, for the assistance of indigent musicians and their families. An aged musician received a weekly allowance of ten shillings; a musician's widow, seven shillings. The Society also undertook to give them decent burial. Händel, embarrassed though he was, showed himself more generous than his colleagues. On the 20th March, 1739, he produced, for the benefit of the Society, defraying all expenses, his Alexander's Feast, with a new organ concerto especially written for the occasion. On the 28th March, 1740, in the midst of his worst difficulties, he produced Acis and Galatea and the little Ode to St. Cecilia. On the 18th March, 1741, he gave a gala performance—for him a most onerous task—of Parnasso in Festa, with scenery and costumes, and five concerti soli executed by the most famous instrumentalists. He left the Society the largest legacy which it received—one of a thousand pounds.

As for the Foundling Hospital, founded in 1739 by an old sailor, Thomas Coram, "for the relief and education of deserted children," "one may say," writes Mainwaring, "that it owed its establishment and its prosperity to Händel." In 1749, Händel wrote for it his beautiful Anthem for the Foundling Hospital.^[28] In 1750, after the gift of an organ to the Hospital, he was elected Governor. We know that his Messiah was first performed, and afterwards almost entirely reserved, for the benefit of charitable undertakings. The first performance in Dublin, on the 12th April, 1742, was given for the benefit of the poor. The profits of the concert were entirely divided between the Society for the Relief of Debtor Prisoners, the Infirmary for the Poor^[29] and the Mercers' Hospital. When the success of the Messiah was established in London,—not without difficulty—in 1750, Händel decided to give annual performances for the benefit of the Foundling Hospital. Even after he was blind he continued to direct these performances. Between 1750 and 1759, the date of Händel's death, the Messiah earned for the Hospital a sum of £6,955. Händel had forbidden his publisher, Walsh, to publish any part of this work, the first edition of which did not appear until 1763; and he bequeathed to the Hospital a copy of the full score. He had given another copy to the Dublin Society for the Relief of Debtor Prisoners, with permission to make use of it as often as the Society pleased in the interest of their beneficiaries.

This love of the poor inspired Händel in some of his most characteristic passages, such as certain pages of the Foundling anthem, full of a touching benevolence, or the pathetic evocation of the orphans and foundlings, whose pure shrill voices rise alone and without accompaniment in the midst of the triumphant chorus of the Funeral Anthem, attesting to the beneficence of the dead Queen.

One year, almost to the day, before Händel's death, there stands on the register of the Foundling Hospital the name of a little Maria Augusta Händel, born on the 15th April, 1758. She was a foundling to whom he had given his name.

*⁠*⁠*

For him, charity was the true religion. He loved God in the poor.

For the rest, he was by no means religious in the strict sense of the word,—except at the close of his life, after the loss of his sight had cut him off from the society of his kind and isolated him almost completely. Hawkins used to see him then, in the last three years of his life, diligently attending the services of his parish church,—St. George's, Hanover Square—kneeling "and manifesting, by his gestures and his attitude, the most fervent devotion." During his last illness he said: "I wish I might die on Good Friday, in the hope of joining my God, my sweet Lord and Saviour, on the day of his Resurrection."^[30]

But during the greater part of his lifetime, when he was in the fullness of his strength, he rarely attended a place of worship. A Lutheran by birth, replying ironically in Rome, where an attempt was made to convert him, "that he was determined to die in the communion in which he had been brought up, whether it was true or false,"^[31] he nevertheless found no difficulty in conforming to the Anglican form of worship, and was regarded as very much of an unbeliever.

Whatever his faith, he was religious at heart. He had a lofty conception of the moral obligations of art. After the first performance in London of the Messiah he said to a noble amateur: "I should be sorry, my lord, if I gave pleasure to men; my aim is to make them better."^[32]

During his lifetime "his moral character was publicly acknowledged," as Beethoven^[33] arrogantly wrote of himself. Even at the period when he was most discussed discerning admirers had realised the moral and social value of his art. Some verses which were published in the English newspapers in 1745 praised the miraculous power which the music of Saul possessed of alleviating suffering by exalting it. A letter in the London Daily Post for the 13th April, 1739, says that "a people which appreciates the music of Israel in Egypt should have nothing to fear on whatever occasion, though all the might of an invasion were gathered against it."^[34]

No music in the world gives forth so mighty a faith. It is the faith that removes mountains, and, like the rod of Moses, makes the eternal waters gush forth from the rock of hardened souls. Certain passages from his oratorios, certain cries of resurrection are living miracles, as of Lazarus rising from the tomb. Thus, in the second act of Theodora,^[35] God's thunderous command breaks through the mournful slumber of death:

"Arise!" cried His voice. And the young man arose.

Or again, in the Funeral Anthem, the intoxicated cry, almost painful in its joy, of the immortal soul that puts off the husk of the body and holds out its arms to its God.^[36]

But nothing approaches in moral grandeur the chorus that closes the second act of Jephthah. Nothing enables us better than the story of this composition to gain an insight into Händel's heroic faith.

When he began to write it, on the 21st January, 1751, he was in perfect health, despite his sixty-six years. He composed the first act in twelve days, working without intermission. There is no trace of care to be found in it. Never had his mind been freer; it was almost indifferent as to the subject under treatment.^[37] In the course of the second act his sight became suddenly clouded. The writing, so clear at the beginning, is now confused and tremulous.^[38] The music too assumes a mournful character.^[39] He had just begun the final chorus of Act II.: How mysterious, O Lord, are Thy ways! Hardly had he written the initial movement, a largo with pathetic modulations, when he was forced to stop. He has noted at the foot of the page:

"Have got so far, Wednesday, 13th February. Prevented from continuing because of my left eye."

He breaks off for ten days. On the eleventh he writes on his manuscript:

"The 23rd February, am a little better. Resumed work."

And he sets to music these words, which contain a tragic allusion to his own misfortune:

Our joy is lost in grief … as day is lost in night.

Laboriously, in five days' time—five days!—and formerly he could have written a whole act in the time—he struggles on to the end of this sombre chorus, which illumines, in the darkness that envelops him, one of the grandest affirmations of faith in time of suffering. On emerging from these gloomy and tormented passages, a few voices (tenor and bass) in unison murmur very softly

All that is… … is good.

For a moment they hesitate, seeming to take breath, and then all the voices together affirm with unshakable conviction that all that is

All that is… … is good.

The heroism of Händel and his fearless music, which breathes of courage and faith, is summed up in this cry of the dying Hercules.

 

1. When he played the harpsichord, says Burney, his fingers were so bent and clubbed together that one could not detect any movement; it was as much as one could do to distinguish his fingers.
2. See the portrait engraved by W. Bromley after the painting by Hudson. He is seated, with his legs wide apart and one fist on his thigh; he is holding a sheet of music; the head is held high, the eye ardent, the eye-brows very black under the white periwig, all but bursting out of his tightly-fastened pourpoint, overflowing with health, pride and energy.

   No less interesting but much less known is the fine portrait engraved by J. Houbraken, of Amsterdam, after the painting by F. Kyte, in 1742. In this we see Händel under an exceptional aspect, after the serious illness which proved nearly fatal, traces of which are to be seen in his face. It is heavier, and fatigued, and the eye is dull; the figure is massive; his energies seem asleep; he is like a great cat slumbering with open eyes; but the old quizzical gleam still twinkles in his drowsy gaze.

3. This portrait is drawn from the paintings by Thornhill, Hudson, Denner and Kyte, Roubillac's monument at Westminster, and the descriptions of contemporaries, such as Mattheson, Burney, Hawkins and Coxe. See also the biographies of Händel by Schoelcher and Chrysander.
4. As an example of this fever of creation, I shall take the two years 1736–8, when Händel was ill and came near to dying. Here is a summary of these years:
   In January, 1736, he wrote Alexander's Feast. In February–March, he conducted a season of oratorio. In April he wrote Atalanta and the Wedding Anthem. In April and May he direccted an opera season. Between the 14th August and the 7th September he wrote Giustino, and between the 15th September and the 14th of October, Arminio. In November he directed an opera season. Between the 18th November and the 18th January, 1737, he wrote Berenice. In February and March he directed a double season of opera and oratorio.
   In April he was stricken with paralysis; during the whole of the summer he seemed on the point of death. The baths of Aix-la-Chapelle cured him. He returned to London early in November, 1737.
   On the 15th of November he began Faramondo; on the 17th December he commenced the Funeral Anthem, which he had performed at Westminster on the 17th; by the 24th he had completed Faramondo; on the 25th he began Serse, which he finished on the 14th February, 1738. On the 25th February he gave the first performance of a new pasticcio: Alessandro Severo.—And a few months later we find him writing Saul, which occupies him from the 23rd July to the 27th September, 1738, and beginning Israel in Egypt on the 1st October, and completing it on the 28th. During the same month of October he publishes his first collection of Concertos for the Organ and delivers to the publishers the collection of Seven Trios or Sonatas with Two parts and Accompaniments, op. 5.
   Once more, the example that I have chosen is that of the two years when Händel was most seriously ill, indeed sick almost unto death; and I defy the reader to find the least trace of his illness in these compositions.
5. The poet Rossi states, in his preface to Rinaldo, that Händel barely gave him time to write the poem, and that the whole work, words and music, was composed in a fortnight (1711).—Belshazzar was composed as Ch. Jennius sent Händel the acts of the poem, too slowly to suit the musician, who never ceased to spur him on, and who, in despair of obtaining the libretto, wrote that same summer, that he might have something to do, his magnificent Herakles.
6. The Contre-Temps, or The Rival Queens, performed on the 27th July, 1727, at Drury Lane.
7. In the text cited by Mainwaring this is in French.—Händel was fond of speaking French, of which he had a very good knowledge, and employed almost exclusively in his correspondence, even with his family.
8. He was professor of music to the royal princesses, with a salary of £200—a salary lower, as Chrysander points out, than that of the dancing-master, Anthony l'Abbé, who received £240, and whose name always headed the list. Morice Green, organist at Westminster and doctor of music, for whose benefit two important musical posts were united in 1735—the directorship of the Court orchestra and that of the Chapel Royal, until then exercised by John Eccles and Dr. Croft—drew a salary of £400.
9. But according to Hawkins he had been a diligent student. His father had intended him for the law, and in 1703 Händel was still inscribed on the rolls of the faculty of law at Halle, where the famous Thomasius was his teacher. It was not until he had passed his eighteenth year that he finally devoted himself to music.
10. His confrères, Pepusch and Greene.
11. 6th October, 1719, Dresden. The original letter is in French.
12. 4th April, 1741.—See Chrysander.
13. Letter of the 9th April, 1741 to the London Daily Post.
14. See Schoelcher.
15. In 1735 and 1745.
16. In 1737.
17. Gentleman's Magazine, 1760.
18. Coxe.
19. Händel's father was 63 years of age at the time of his son's birth.
20. The date of his mother's death was the 27th of December, 1730; that of her burial, the 2nd of January, 1731. Compare these dates with those inscribed by Händel on the manuscript of Poro:

    "Finished writing the first act of Poro: 23rd December, 1730.
    Finished writing the second act: 30th December, 1730.
    Finished writing the third act: 16th January, 1731."

21. His perpetual expenditure of energy and his unremitting labours explain Händel's morbid voracity. Contemporaries jested in the most offensive manner concerning the ogre who was accustomed to order dinners for three, and, when asked where the party was, used to reply: "I am the party!" But this terrific worker had of course to repair his exhausted energies; and after all this diet does not seem to have done him any harm: we may therefore conclude that it was necessary to him. As Mattheson told him, "it would be as irrelevant to measure Händel's eating and drinking by those of ordinary men as to demand that the table of a London merchant should be the same as that of a Swiss peasant."
22. "Gorged to the teeth with underdone sirloins,
    Händel bursts into vigorous and loyal song."—Maurice Boucher.
23. W. B. Squire: Händel in 1745 (in the H. Riemann Festschrift, 1909, Leipzig.)
24. In the Funeral Anthem, the Foundling Anthem, and in certain pages of his later works, Theodora and Jephthah.
25. For example, in the cantata entitled, Partenza di G. F. Händel, 1708.
26. Above all he had a profound love for a sister who died in 1718, and for his mother, who died in 1730. Later his affection was given to his sister's daughter, Johanna-Fridericka, née Michaelsen, to whom he left all his property.
27. It found expression in the foundation of hospitals and benevolent societies. This movement, which about the middle of the eighteenth century had attained remarkable proportions all over England, made itself felt with peculiar enthusiasm in Ireland.
28. In the Musical Times, 1st May, 1902, a great deal of information will be found relating to the Foundling Hospital and the part which Händel took in its management.
29. Founded in 1726, "by Six Surgeons."
30. He died on the following day, on Saturday morning.
31. Mainwaring.
32. Schoelcher.
33. Letter to the Municipality of Vienna, 1st February, 1819.
34. The literal text is: "Though all the might of papistry were gathered against us."—It seems that Händel himself was struck by these words. Seven years later, when England was invaded by Papist troops, and the army of the Pretender Charles Edward was advancing to the gates of London, Händel, writing the Occasional Oratorio, that grand epic hymn to the menaced mother-country, and the God who defended her, reproduced, in the third part of this composition, the finest pages of Israel.
35. "He beheld the young man who was sleeping."
36. The chorus "But His glory endureth for ever" alternates with the funeral chorus: "His body has gone to rest in the tomb." The motive was borrowed by Händel from a motet by an old German master of the sixteenth century,—his namesake Händel (Jakobus-Gallus): Ecce quomodo moritur justus. But a single change of rhythm suffices to give wings to the old chorale; an ecstatic impulse which suddenly breaks off, breathless with emotion, unable to find further utterance. Eight times this cry rises in the course of this composition.
37. Several of Iphis' airs are built upon dance rhythms: in the first act The Smiling Dawn, on the rhythm of a bourrée (an Auvergnian dance), and in the second act, Welcome as the Cheerful Light, on a gavotte rhythm.
38. The progress of the malady may be followed exactly on the autograph manuscript, the facsimile of which was published by Chrysander in the great Breitkopf collection in 1885.
39. The change of tone begins in the second act, with the cry of horror emitted by Jephthah when he sees his daughter coming to meet him. There is to begin with a series of mournful airs sung by Jephthah and the mother and betrothed of Iphis, and then a quartette, in which Iphis' parents mingle their lamentations. To their tears replies the pure voice of Iphis, who consoles them, in a recitative which seems to open the gates of heaven; then follows an aria of great simplicity, full of a courageous resignation which conceals the fear and the anguish that lie beneath it. The emotion waxes more intense; Jephthah sings a recitative which reminds one of those of Agamemnon in Iphigenia in Aulis; at the close the recitative is interrupted, continuing in slower time, growing faint with grief and horror; certain phrases seem written by Beethoven. At last bursts forth the chorus in the midst of which Händel was stricken with blindness.