George Frideric Handel

P.H.L.

INTRODUCTION

FAME, SAYS RILKF, IS NOTHING BUT THE SUM TOTAL OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS that cling to a name." There is no more misunderstood and misrepresented composer in the history of music than Handel. With a few laudable exceptions the Handelian literature is selective, and the selection is not history and esthetics so much as edification, therefore his name has become a religious monument. But behind that name is the man and the musician who is the object of this study. I shall attempt to speak about Handel, not impartially, but with the objectivity of a faith that rests on firm conviction.

How does one approach such a veiled and distant figure? Weighted down with a historical sense and obsessed with the idea of evolution and progress, we tend to see the past exclusively in the light of later development. We think that it is more important to know how the artist stands in relation to us than to himself. He becomes for us a bit of history. But his history cannot be understood, nor his relationship either to his own time or to ours, without knowing the man, his nature, his spirit. We like to proceed in inverse order, often mistaking results for intentions; and the outsider approaching a long-lost cultural era inclines to take the features he first perceives as the most important. Indeed, the farther removed we are from a period the less we separate material from spirit. We can hardly view Palestrina or Bach purely historically; we are compelled to see them immediately as the creators of works of art, their personality retreats behind their work and can be seen only through it.

If one enters such an immense territory as Handel’s he must be careful to state at the outset what part of it he intends to traverse. The occasion does not permit a visit to every obscure corner, for, two hundred years after Handel’s death, only what is lasting is important. We propose to resort to that old-fashioned method of art criticism which seeks to understand not only the man from his works, but the works from the man. This does not entail a scientific case history. We shall never see the inner picture of the whole man; that could be divulged to us only by the artist himself or by a faithful Horatio. But Handel said very little about himself and had false, self-appointed Horatios. The regrettable and incredible fact is that the magnitude of Handel’s genius and the avalanche of great music he wrote is scarcely suspected today. True, he is always bracketed with Bach, but once we remove the brackets and omit Messiah and two or three other works, we have precious little left. We know that his was a purposeful life, that he went through heroic and incessant struggles, and that he finally came to rest with Britain’s great in Westminster Abbey. Little was accidental in his life, for Handel virtually controlled his fate. Yet, by merely following external criteria, using them for the measuring of personality, we can never arrive at a true appreciation of Handel.

The central fact of a musician’s life is his music, and here the biographer is confronted with an obstacle unknown to his colleagues in other fields. It is extremely difficult to convey to the reader, instructed or uninstructed, just what constitutes the essential and particular quality of the musician’s thoughts, methods, speculations, and inventions. Yet his musical thought is the very core of his life story. Something may be made of tales of musical precocity, of the early struggles of genius, of the triumphs of the master, but the great man’s thought remains the root of his life, and an effort must be made to bring home to the reader a notion, however partial, however resistant to verbalization, of what lies behind the external events in the life of so colorful a man of action as Handel.

Hero worship has dominated our musical outlook for over a century. It has caused untold damage, making the contemplation of the work of art in all its aspects virtually impossible. Fortunately, there are some who realize that even the work of genius can be viewed and examined with scholarly detachment—witness Winton Dean’s magnificent Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques and Otto Erich Deutsch’s invaluable Handel, a Documentary Biography.

Sir Newman Flower has rightly said: It is questionable whether any music, composed in England or imported into it, has reached the heart of the people so truly as Handel’s. Yet, familiar as the picture of Handel is, some of its most vital aspects elude us. He has always been before us; we know his consummate confidence in himself; we know he had no illusions about either himself or his works; he chose his part and played it to perfection. It is his silence that is so baffling. No family doctor or lawyer, no father confessor was ever more close-mouthed about the confidences entrusted to him than Handel was about his own person and private life.

We do not know the real reason for artistic creativity—and probably never shall know. We can find some similarities in the manifestations of creative force, which we then attempt to range into types, but the reasons for their differentiation are still largely unknown. It can be seen, then, that creative power itself cannot be espied in its secret functioning by any known method or science, yet we are always trying to do just that. This naive belief falsifies esthetics and musicological thought alike, while the psychologists have their own merry time by themselves. All we can do is to endeavor to follow the development of thought and technique, placing them in their proper environment, so that the image of the artist will appear before us. And since the scholar recognizes that this great musician’s portrait is covered by countless layers of overpainting, like a very old canvas, his true features indistinct and even distorted, the layers will have to be peeled off one by one.

In the English-speaking Protestant world Handel is known by a portrait distinct, indeed, but painted in a later age without first-hand acquaintance with its subject. Here Handel is universally and uniquely known as the composer of Messiah. But it was not with Messiah that Handel first entered the ranks of the very great, though it was this work that made his name a household word. No matter what came before or after—and the masterpieces are legion—it is always Messiah that is immediately associated with his name whenever it is mentioned. For generations we have known the oratorio by heart, and Messiah is perhaps the only major work about which public sentiment is unanimous. Its freshness, its warmth, its beautifully rounded forms and sculptured melodies offer universal experience to men of all walks of life and all shades of faith. Handel achieved with this work the most widespread critical recognition ever accorded a composer, for among his acclaimers are not only every English-speaking church congregation, small or large, but also Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, and every musician who ever tried his hand at choral writing.

Still, for all we know, Bacon may have composed the rest of the hundred volumes of the old Handelgesellschaft edition. No other great master is so narrowly known. His works have to be uncovered and washed free of the prejudices and falsifications that cling to them. Granted, no one can go through the entire work of Handel without admitting that a good deal of it has faded away, perhaps forever, and it is easy to suppose that he always owed his fame to one oratorio and half a dozen opera tunes that were turned into sacred songs. But we know that much contained in these volumes possesses real life, and it is shocking how reluctant the musical world is to investigate. (Anatole France says somewhere that the best way to travel to the land of immortality is with a small suitcase. This is hardly true: Bach, Mozart, and many others prove the contrary.)

One of the important reasons for this regrettable situation is that the principal musical representatives of Handel’s generation were not primarily composers of suites, sonatas, and concertos—though they wrote them too—but of works for the lyric theatre and of concerted church music, which then was part of the great field of dramatic music. But both Baroque opera and concerted church music have long since faded from our world, and with a few exceptions their creators have either disappeared from the annals or, if like Vivaldi they also composed fine sonatas and concertos, they are remembered only for their instrumental works, which seem to stand for the whole era. As we look at this vast amount of music we seem to behold historical ruins, which one contemplates with a curiosity mingled with pity. Handel composed operas, dozens of them, for thirty-six years. To succeeding generations they appeared to have been composed in an idiom not only dead but quite safely buried. Surely, there must be more than a few among them that need only be excavated and cleaned to radiate that life we seek in a work of art. Unfortunately, those few operas that have been revived have been so badly mutilated that they were only a shadow of their original state. It is a pity that the restorers of these operas come either from the ranks of practicing musicians without adequate stylistic insight or from among men of letters unschooled in music. Oskar Hagen, the person who had the taste and foresight to start the Handelian opera renaissance in the 1920s in Göttingen, was an eminent art historian but an amateur in musicology, as the scores he edited prove conclusively. All these men have had the best intentions, but they worked under the terrible handicap of the cumulative force of prejudice and prohibition which made them helpless, panicky, and ruthless. Their fatal error was that they saw in Handel’s operas not things resurrected but things renovated.

A study of Handel’s operas and other dramatic works in addition to the undramatic and hence atypical Messiah will disclose a Handel largely unknown: a composer with a remarkable sense for dramatic human character. He saw men and women where others have seen only historical-mythical busts. There are artists to whom the demands of one genre remain a priori for their entire life, whose soul is so filled by these demands that they see them everywhere, no matter what the occasion, or the setting, or even the material. Michelangelo divined in every block of stone the statue hidden in it, and even his paintings were envisaged with the eye of the sculptor. It was the same with Beethoven the symphonist, and it was the same with Handel the dramatist.

If so important a part of Handel’s life work as the operas must remain unknown to the public (they cannot be resuscitated without a renaissance of Baroque opera in general), there is no excuse for the neglect of the oratorios—more properly, the English music dramas—and the other vocal works. They are modern and accessible and can be made wonderfully viable with intelligent and knowledgeable editorial work. We have been misled and have been deprived of these great works because they are divested—the few that are heard—of their true nature, forcibly removed from their true home, the theatre, and made to present religion as a rather athletic system of health and happiness. It was from Handel’s personal struggle that the English oratorio was born. Under the gradual impact of the ideological, rational pressure of English middle-class attitudes his long-held faith in the future of opera in England had to succumb. But we should never forget what Arnold Schering wisely said: Handel’s operas are to his life work as Beethoven’s quartets are to the symphonies.

There are few instances in the history of music in which an immigrant has so completely assimilated himself with his new surroundings as Handel; perhaps Lully is the only other example. Handel became an English subject not only de jure but even more so de facto, and remained one to the end of his life. We can see how he was gradually enveloped by the particular qualities, tenets, and problems of his adopted country, and how he tied himself ever more strongly to England. This assimilation must be borne in mind if we want to understand why the imagination of one who so strenuously lived in the present turned to the Old Testament and the oratorio.

Handel recognized no artistic absolutes; he wrote a great deal out of necessity, for money, or because he wanted to beat the opposition. And much of this he did rather loosely and with a careless hand. Like all Baroque masters he was the purveyor of musical entertainment for everyday use, but he was never a hypocrite and was absolutely free of false refinement. His confidence in his vocation had not only the objective strength of genius but the profound conviction that he must reach his aim no matter what might happen, no matter what he must do to himself or to anyone else. His ruthlessness and boundless courage are awe-inspiring, his audacious speculative temper and passion for business extraordinary. For such a temper competition is a challenge that must be met at any cost. That he was a good businessman and an impresario in the grand style did not bother anyone until the Romantic era, when this proclivity became embarrassing. In the eyes of the Romantics this conflicted with the ordinary habits of both the genius and the dedicated religious composer. But Handel was serious about his art; he demands understanding and respect, not uncritical adulation or righteous censure.

The man and artist form a unity, though with various points of gravity. Since these points of gravity are not always clear to us, we must study the man and the artist separately, though never losing sight of one when we are dealing with the other. This is what I propose to do in the following pages, fully realizing that it is difficult to catalogue a man’s virtues without appearing to freeze him into a statue.

I

1685-1703

Halle—Handel’s family—Earliest youth—Apprenticed to Zachow—Zachow as teacher—Handel’s notebook and its contents—Fellow students —Visit to Berlin—Meeting electoral couple and Italian composers —Appointed organist at Halle Cathedral—The university student—Compositions in Halle period—Decision to leave Halle

EVERYTHING GREAT MEN ACHIEVE DURING THEIR RECORDED public lives is the transformation into negotiable currency of forces and capabilities they gathered when they were as yet neither great nor famous. If we want to judge the individuality of great men without the images their greatness and fame thrust upon them, so far as this is possible, we must begin our investigation in that period of their lives when in the darkness of anonymity they prepared themselves, consciously or unconsciously, for their future vocations.

If an artist could live to read his biography, he would recognize not so much himself as the mask that covered his face. Where is his true face? We see it in his works, which testify to the gifts he was endowed with, which made him what he is. Here we discover that humility, that patience, that disinterestedness and love to which are opposed the many rivalries of life. It is for these reasons the artist’s creative work is called a confession, for in the work of art he is purely himself. To write a biography of a great composer without constantly exploring the music that accompanies the stations of his life is an idle undertaking; it is one of the chief reasons Handel is so little understood in the English-speaking world. But biography presents problems that become all the more acute if it is attempted in an unorthodox and unsystematic way. Where is the emphasis to be thrown? On the personality of the subject or on the measure of his work? There is the biographical thrill of demonstrating how personality gradually broadens out into the event. Yet there is the danger that a biographer may attempt to organize and arrange history.

Handel steps into history suddenly, already full-grown, in the first decade of the 18th century. To the average lover of music this date must be advanced farther, to the time of the successful oratorios, but even some of the well-informed Handelian authors in England and America deal perfunctorily with the youthful experiences that were vital to his future career. The twenty-five-year-old Handel who arrived in England was a mature master, but even the twenty-one-year-old who ventured into Italy was an accomplished composer capable of plunging immediately into the thick of the highly competitive Italian musical life and holding his own. And now we must turn the clock back still farther: the eighteen-year-old Handel, scarcely more than an adolescent, who left his home town to seek his fortune in the Hanseatic metropolis was a superbly trained, confident musician and virtuoso player with far more practical experience, knowledge, and assurance than most professionals many years his senior. He is never spoken of as a child prodigy, but in fact he was one, and at eighteen had all the assurance and savoir-faire of that miraculous youngster in the second half of the century: Mozart.

How had this style, already so mature, been formed? Surely this compels the historian to take a much more searching look at Handel’s German phase than is customary among our English and American authors. Hitherto, for English readers, the period of Handel’s apprenticeship as a composer has been shrouded in a certain mystery. They had a vague knowledge of his studies with Zachow and of his years of wandering in Italy, where he made the acquaintance of great musicians, but for them the curtain really rose on Handel’s career with his arrival in England.

[2]

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL was born February 23, 1685, in Halle, the second issue of his father’s second marriage, to a pastor’s daughter thirty years his junior. The family and surroundings into which he was born were conservative, steady, thrifty, unadventurous, and unimaginative, a typical provincial Saxon petit bourgeois existence. But his father, Georg, a barber-surgeon, was a man of strength, if lacking in warmth. Iron self-discipline, force of character, robust health, pugnacious will to fight for a cause, courage, infinite capacity for work, as well as an astute business sense, the son inherited from the father, though fortunately not his morose, misanthropic disposition. His mother came from a dynasty of Lutheran pastors. Equally sturdy and courageous, she was a good and pious woman whom Handel remembered with warm affection, even though he saw very little of her after leaving Halle in his early youth. Obviously, his kind and hearty nature came from the maternal stock. His musical abilities must have been noticed at an early age, but the dour surgeon paid no attention to such frivolities as music; that sort of thing was not encouraged in a solid professional family, and he preferred a lawyer’s career for his son.

The boy must have taken part in the singing at grammar school and heard the Sunday music in Our Lady’s Lutheran church where the family worshipped, but where and in what manner he acquired his early proficiency at the keyboard is unknown. There are many romantic stories, such as one about a clavichord hidden in the attic, but none of them can be proved. One important fact is known: the barber-surgeon held a court appointment, and therefore often journeyed to nearby Weissenfels, where the duke had established his residence after Prussia annexed the city of Halle. Georg Händel undoubtedly took his son with him on many occasions, because a relative of his first wife was employed at the court and could look after the youngster while the father made his professional rounds. On one of these occasions when young Handel was permitted to play the postlude to a service, the duke happened to be lingering and was impressed that an eight- or nine-year-old child should play with such ease and fluency. His Serene Highness summoned the elder Händel, suggesting he encourage such a manifest talent. Ducal hints are not to be disregarded, especially by such a hard-bitten status seeker as the court surgeon, so upon their return to Halle the boy was turned over for musical instruction to the organist of the Händels’ parish church. Here we have arrived at the first important turn in the future great composer’s life but also at the first crucial biographical, artistic, and historical lacuna in the Handel literature.

Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow (1663-1712), Handel’s first and only teacher, was still a young man of about thirty when the new student was entrusted to him, but he was already widely known as a fine organist and a rather original composer in the new style. This man, who is referred to as lacking in imagination, whose music, innocuous and trifling, never rose to great heights, whom even Friedrich Chrysander, the editor of Handel’s collected works, held in low esteem, was actually one of the most cultivated, learned, and imaginative musicians in Germany at the end of the century. Nor was Zachow an ordinary cantor, for he enthusiastically embraced the new concerted, dramatic style. His cantatas, often highly dramatic, are distinguished by very imaginative choral writing, colorful orchestration, and skilful handling of the concerted element. Many traits we consider typically Handelian are present in Zachow’s music;¹ it is spacious, euphonious, its melody sturdily designed yet sensuous, it can be suave but also monumental. Above all, this music is healthy and communicative; Zachow too had the ability—and the power—to be simple yet effective. He understood the Italians and managed to unite their art felicitously with his German heritage.

This distinguished musician was also an excellent, understanding, and solicitous teacher of both composition and performance. He taught the boy harpsichord and organ (as well as other instruments), which Handel played so capably that by his eleventh year he was able to substitute for Zachow on the organ when the need arose. Handel’s first compositions date from this same year, 1696. He received from his master a solid grounding in harmony, counterpoint, and choral writing, as well as in very imaginative orchestration. This consisted not only in writing for a full ensemble with all the winds but also in the subtle art of coaxing varied effects from a simple string orchestra. More than that, Zachow inculcated in his young pupil an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know all styles of music in all countries, an interest he always retained. And there was something else he received from Zachow that became his for the rest of his life: the cool discipline, the artistic brakes to tame the wayward flights of a rich imagination. It is amusing to read in a popular Handel biography that Zachow had taught him the rudiments of counterpoint and harmony, as if the instruction had been something like a college course for freshmen. The thorough training he received at Zachow’s hand formed the boy’s musical nature for life.

These studies were copious and severe, but the disciple could not get too much of them and composed steadily. I used to write like the devil in those days, reminisced Handel many years later, and in view of the enormous productivity of the years of his full maturity, reams of note paper must have been covered for daily exercises with Zachow. Handel’s admiration for his teacher was boundless and reverential. After Zachow’s death in 1712, Handel, famous London composer, sent frequent remittances to his widow.

The manner in which Zachow dealt with Handel shows that he recognized the child’s exceptional musical talents. There was a system in this instruction as rare as it was enlightened and thorough. Zachow possessed an unusually well-stocked library of music that reflected both the catholicity of his taste and the inquisitive turn of his mind. During the years of his apprenticeship, Handel became methodically acquainted with the contents of this library, thus acquiring as comprehensive a knowledge of styles and techniques as possible. Apparently, besides strenuous exercises in the strenger Satz, the cantor’s traditional art in fugue and cantus firmus work, the master made the pupil copy what he considered significant and instructive scores by all manner of composers. Here we are dealing with actual documents, particularly with a notebook dating from 1698, which Handel kept all his life. While unfortunately lost, the book was sufficiently well described so that we know whose airs, choruses, fugues, and other works it contained.

Now let us examine the panorama offered by the notebook, which is in fact the panorama of music Handel beheld in the most impressionable years of his life. There were, of course, the works of his teacher, but we also encounter some of the key figures in German musical history.

There is Johann Krieger (1652-1735), who, according to Mattheson, excelled all the brave old masters in fugues. Indeed, Handel took a copy of Krieger’s Clavier-Übung with him to England, later presenting it to his friend Bernard Granville. Granville wrote on the flyleaf: The printed book is by one of the celebrated Organ players of Germany; Mr. Handel in his youth formed himself a good deal on his plan, and said that Krieger was one of the best writers of his time for the organ. Krieger’s counterpoint is smooth and fluent, the handling of the themes, especially counter-subjects, individual and incisive, and he shows considerable inventiveness and originality in the devising of fugal episodes. Unfortunately, his harmonic sense was not venturesome. Handel was undoubtedly also acquainted with Krieger’s cantatas, of which there were over two hundred, though scarcely three dozen survive. However, at least one, Geliebet sei der Herr (printed in the Bavarian Denkmäler, VI/1), was preserved in a copy made by Zachow. Handel did not miss the remarkable triple fugue contained in this work.

Johann Caspar Kerll (1627-1693), the much-travelled disciple of Valentini, Carissimi, and Frescobaldi, is another significant German master represented in the notebook who looms large in Handel’s initial musical formation. With him Handel was introduced to the southern style and manner, for Kerll, though born a Saxon, spent ten years in Italy and was so thoroughly converted to the southern way that he even became a Catholic. Kerll’s keyboard works were highly regarded and soon became known in the north, where Zachow and Handel studied them avidly. Handel remembered this music for a long time, borrowing not only bits but an entire movement, which he used in Israel in Egypt. Kerll’s bold, even romantic, treatment of dissonance fascinated Bach too, who not only studied Kerll’s works but, like Handel, borrowed from them.

Still another keyboard composer who appears in the notebook is Johann Jakob Froberger (1616-1667). In his works, Handel, who later became a past master of the art, could observe the working of the mind of an internationally oriented musician who, like himself, was receptive to ideas, no matter what source they came from, that he could reconcile and fuse in a logical and well-balanced style. Once more, both Handel and Bach (together with Zachow and Buxtehude, whose wondrous preludes and toccatas cannot be imagined without Froberger’s example) studied this music closely and with considerable profit. Another southerner appearing in the notebook was Froberger’s Viennese colleague Wolfgang Ebner (1612-1665). But Ebner, though less well known than Froberger, surely must be considered co-founder of this 17th-century Viennese keyboard school; besides, he was the originator of Viennese ballet music.

Vocal composers were not neglected. Handel was introduced to Heinrich Albert (1604-1651),² the most popular and admired song composer of his time, virtually the founder of the modern German song. Albert’s songs and arias appeared in practically every anthology, were printed and pirated for two centuries, and many of them are still alive as folksongs. Handel must have been attracted by the irregular period structure, the highly expressive and free recitative encountered in Albert’s works, all of which became part and parcel of his own style.

Adam Krieger (1634-1666), a disciple of Samuel Scheidt, was one of the most engaging song composers of the German Baroque. Handel studied his so-called ritornel constructions and later used them in the formal articulation of some of his choral movements. Johann Philipp Krieger (1649-1725), who in the seventies was active in Halle and later in nearby Weissenfels where he stayed for forty-five years until his death, was a prolific opera and cantata composer. He impressed Handel both as an instrumental and as a vocal composer. Aside from studying his works with Zachow, Handel must have heard—even met—the court conductor in Weissenfels; it is hard to believe that the duke did not consult his court musician before summoning the elder Händel to that memorable audience. The fugal Amens or Hallelujah choruses in Krieger’s cantatas (of which he wrote at least six times as many as Bach), simple but solid and very effective, lingered in Handel’s capacious memory. Krieger was an experienced, worldly-wise musician quite different from his home-bred colleagues. This could not have escaped Handel, no matter how young. Also, Krieger had the Handelian characteristic of dominating the musical scene around him.

The notebook also contained music by Georg Muffat (1653-1704), in whose works the young student could observe the entire formative process of the age he was about to enter. Muffat, whose distant ancestors were Catholic Scots who fled from Elizabethan Britain, was born (of a French mother) in Savoy, but always professed himself a German, and indeed, aside from his years of study, his professional life was spent within the German orbit. Since he studied with Lully, Corelli, and Pasquini, his music is as many-sided as his ancestry, a remarkable combination of Italian, French, and German elements that made him a style builder of the rank of a Froberger. It seems that the French accents we encounter in Handel owe their inception to Muffat’s works, which abound in them. Muffat’s easy and imaginative synthesis of suite, sonata, and fugue found a ready echo in the younger man.

Johann Kuhnau (1660-1722), Bach’s predecessor in the cantor’s chair at St. Thomas’s, though represented in the book, did not seem to have impressed Handel. Kuhnau opened new doors in the history of keyboard music, but there is a certain blandness in his music that Handel may have found uncongenial. Of the others, Johann Heinrich Buttstett and Andreas Nicolaus Vetter were minor masters whose presence in the notebook does not imply any particular interest, but their teacher, Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706), did attract Handel. This Bavarian musician, who introduced the southern German strain into Saxon-Thuringian music, shows a melodiousness and intimacy quite different from the music of his northern colleagues. His easy-flowing and plastic counterpoint can be playful, and he exhibits a genial disregard for such a rule as maintenance of a stated number of parts, something that was not approved by the Northern cantors but was practiced with equal geniality by Handel. Of the foreigners represented in the notebook, we should mention Alessandro Poglietti (d. 1683), an Italian settled in Vienna. Poglietti’s brilliant and witty keyboard pieces were not forgotten by Handel; Max Seiffert has pointed out borrowings, notably in the first movement of the eleventh Grand Concerto, Opus 6.

Handel was not a solitary disciple, for Zachow had around him a number of talented youngsters; the exchange and companionship among them must have been mutually beneficial. Of these we know of Gottfried Kirchhoff, exactly Handel’s age, who later succeeded his master, upon the latter’s death, as organist and choirmaster of Our Lady’s Church. (Incidentally, he was almost nosed out of this position by Sebastian Bach.) While not a distinguished composer, Kirchhoff was an able and versatile musician, fairly widely known, especially for his keyboard music. Leopold Mozart appreciated him sufficiently to include one of his sonatas in the instruction book he prepared for Wolfgang in 1761.

Thus we can see that the young musician became acquainted with the entire range and tradition of German music and undoubtedly with a good deal of Italian and French music—surely a musical education as thorough, comprehensive, and enlightened as one could wish.

[3]

ZACHOW ALSO took his pupil on trips, usually to nearby places. A visit to Berlin in 1698 (without his master?) was of decisive influence upon Handel’s future plans, even though its impact was not immediately in evidence. Nothing is known about the circumstances leading to the Berlin trip. Biographers set the date as 1696, in the boy’s eleventh year, and wonder why the stubborn barber-surgeon permitted his son to go to a place where his objectionable musical leanings would only receive a powerful boost. Some even intimate that it was his father who took him to Berlin. Furthermore, the argument runs, this trip, of several months’ duration rather than one of those short excursions taken in the company of Zachow, must have been financed by the elder Händel; surely a largesse quite out of character. We are obviously dealing here with faulty dates: the journey took place at least two years later than 1696, and the means were probably provided by Handel’s kindly mother. There is absolutely no documentary proof that the visit took place in 1696, or, as is supposed, that the elder Händel refused to accede to the Berlin court’s wish that his son be sent to Italy on a stipend, but there are quite plausible indications that the trip took place in 1698, after his father’s death, when Handel was thirteen. Mainwaring, Handel’s first biographer (1760), is often unreliable, but Mattheson, the close friend of his years in Hamburg, seldom so. In this case both agree on 1698. Since all parties accept the fact that Handel met Ariosti repeatedly in Berlin, this ought to settle the question: Ariosti did not arrive in Berlin until 1697; in 1696 he was definitely in Mantua. It is also held that Handel met Giovanni Bononcini in Berlin, which makes the date 1696 even more implausible because the Italian did not arrive in Berlin until 1702.

Though at that time a modest city, Berlin was a metropolis as far as music is concerned, mainly because of the energetic and enthusiastic Electress Sophie Charlotte, later Queen of Prussia. This lady is depicted by Sir Newman Flower as a neurotic scatterbrain and her husband, the future Frederick I of Prussia, as a henpecked nonentity who had to put up with his wife’s musical prodigality while he himself did not care a whit about the art. Sophie Charlotte was anything but an empty-headed dilettante with a compulsion to throw away her money. She was extremely fond of music, not necessarily a sign of an unbalanced mind, and besides being fond of it was a well-trained and versatile musician and a highly cultivated woman, later earning the sobriquet the Philosopher Queen. Sophie was the daughter of the Elector of Hanover (and sister of the future George I of England); she heard good music at her father’s court and received excellent instruction from Agostino Steffani, with whom she remained on friendly terms all her life. She composed, and was a good harpsichord player perfectly capable of officiating as maestra al cembalo at chamber music and even opera performances. The Elector himself was an amateur with a good grasp of music, and his court orchestra, drilled in the French manner of Lully, was one of the best in Europe. Above all, the court was teeming with illustrious musicians: Ariosti, Steffani, Pistocchi, Bononcini, Corelli, and others, who not only visited and worked there but composed for and dedicated works to Sophie Charlotte. In 1700 Corelli published and dedicated to her his famous Opus 5, the twelve sonatas, the last of which is the Follia. While dedicatory prefaces in that age were of course flowery to the point of being obsequious, Corelli’s specifically emphasizes that the Electress’s interest in music was not a simple divertissement; she has a sound and scientific [i.e. professional] knowledge of it.

Here was something new and exciting for Handel: flesh-and-blood Italians and their original music. According to Mainwaring and Mattheson, Handel particularly cultivated Ariosti, and, considering the sound judgment Handel exhibited from his youth, his preference is quite understandable. Notwithstanding Chrysander’s and others’ patronizing or derogatory estimates of this Servite friar, he is again one of those whose music exerted a powerful influence on the great composer in his formative years.

Attilio Ariosti (1666-c. 1740) was a musician who could take his place in the Scarlatti-Steffani-Caldara-Bononcini-Lotti circle at no disadvantage. He composed excellent instrumental music as well as cantatas and operas of a very dramatic hue. But there is something else in his oeuvre that seems to have escaped the Handel specialists, though not that able historian of the oratorio, Schering: Ariosti the composer of dramatic oratorios. La Passione di Cristo (1693) is described by Schering as being strong and vigorous, and its dramatically agitated choral scenes seem to have been the first modern turbae depicting a people in action. Unfortunately, Ariosti is one of those neglected, solitary figures to whom modern musicology owes a debt. A few instrumental pieces of his are available in modern prints, and of his dramatic works, sacred and secular, only a few arias appear in anthologies. Of the music he composed for Berlin we know nothing.

The impact of the rich secular musical life in the Brandenburg capital and of such powerful musical personalities as Ariosti’s upon the impressionable and receptive youngster must have been considerable and the contrast with provincial and bourgeois Halle enlightening. But even at that tender age Handel’s rocklike character was in evidence: he was not ready to abrogate an understanding reached with his late father that he continue his humanistic studies with a view to entering the law school of the university. While in Berlin he so enchanted the electoral couple by his playing that the Prince offered to send the boy to Italy with a stipend. Most biographies agree that the offer was made in a letter to the barber-surgeon, who turned it down; but no one ever seems to have seen the letter. The fact is that his father was dead by that time, and it is quite clear from Mainwaring and Mattheson that the offer was made to and declined by a sort of family council; a trusted member of the family actually resided in Berlin, employed at the court. Upon his return to Halle the departed father’s wish was observed and music relegated to off-hours. These spare hours, however, were well utilized, and Zachow undoubtedly stood by. The boy began to acquire a reputation. In 1701 Telemann, on his way to Leipzig, stopped over in Halle and sought out the young organist about whom he had heard complimentary things. Thus began a long friendship, as half a century of correspondence shows.

In 1702 Handel was appointed probationary organist at Halle Cathedral. Though he was a Lutheran and the cathedral belonged to the Calvinists, no lovers of Lutherans, his superiority over other possible candidates was so manifest that the authorities were willing to forget about the denominational disability. The document of appointment states that the student Georg Friedrich Händel has already at different times acted as deputy to the former [incumbent], therefore they were familiar with his capabilities.

Now a curious and seemingly inexplicable event takes place. At the end of the probationary year, just when he was about to be confirmed as cathedral organist, Handel resigned his office and decided to move to Hamburg. The biographers are in a quandary to explain this momentous decision. Why did Handel resign from a good position? Had he not received a thorough preparation for precisely such a career at the hands of one of the most estimable practitioners in a region that could boast of many? And was this not an unusually auspicious start—cathedral organist and regens chori at eighteen? Since he had no visible means of making a living waiting for him in Hamburg, and his savings could not have amounted to much, the conclusion arrived at was summarized by Sir Newman Flower: He had left Halle aimlessly to find fortune. George Frideric Handel never crossed a street aimlessly; he would certainly not have made such a fateful decision without due deliberation. Ironically, Sir Newman himself has the key to the question, though he neglects to use it: Hamburg was the beginning of the great search. This is very nicely and accurately put. In reality, Handel faced up to a multitude of problems and questions, which his responsive and acute mind had considered and examined from every angle. In no admissible way can this decision be presented as an unmeditated caprice; but in order to explain the chain of events we must turn to the youngster standing at the bier of his strange father and then examine his life and work in Halle.

[4]

GERMAN CUSTOM, upon the death of a respected and substantial burgher, was to compose and print an obituary pamphlet containing the funeral orations as well as poems by friends and relations. Georg Händel’s family observed the tradition, and among the poems that appeared in print a few days after the funeral was one by the twelve-year-old son. Though of course conventional in versification, it is a remarkably mature piece for one so young, but the most interesting part is the signature: "Georg Friedrich Händel, dedicated to the liberal arts." This was at once a true statement as to his present activity and a humble filial acknowledgment of the father’s will. And indeed, young Handel was devoted to the liberal arts, receiving an excellent training either in Halle’s Lutheran Gymnasium or the Latin School. But he was also an autodidact who with a good mind, intuition, and sharp powers of observation learned and retained everything that came upon his horizon. It is attested that the mature Handel knew English, French, and Italian, besides his mother tongue and Latin, all of which he spoke and wrote fluently. Only a thorough humanistic grounding made this possible.

A little while ago we remarked on the contrast between the brilliant court in Berlin and the provincial milieu in Halle—but that contrast concerned secular music only. Halle was an old seat of culture, and its church music was always on a high level. Though once considered one of the most Catholic cities in Germany, Halle became a stronghold of Lutheranism in the Reformer’s lifetime. Its rich cultural traditions continued, and at the opening of the 17th century arts and letters were cultivated on a remarkably high and progressive level. The theatre performed Shakespeare early in the 17th century. Samuel Scheidt played the organ in the Moritzkirche, and all other churches had able organists and fair choirs. The humanistic schools also had their musical establishments, notably choirs. The ravages of the Thirty Years’ War did not leave the cultural life of Halle untouched, but recovery was remarkably swift. It is interesting to note that the city had good resident organ-builders, and in fact, the church elders complained about the cost of maintaining the several large instruments in the city’s churches. (After Zachow’s death in 1712, Bach himself put in a bid for the vacant position of organist at Our Lady’s Church. He must have been attracted by the fine instrument in the church, for the emoluments were not enticing. In the end he went to Weimar.)

Halle’s university was founded in 1694 by the Elector for the express purpose of accommodating the great jurist Christian Thomasius, who had been expelled from Leipzig for his liberal views. Many of his students followed him to Halle. The university was one of the principal seats of Protestant theology, though at times rather prominently tinged with Pietism. It was at this institution that Handel matriculated in 1702 after finishing his secondary education. Grove’s Dictionary (1954), like biographical sketches of Handel elsewhere, is satisfied with the simple statement: In February 1702 he entered the University and finished the study of law, to which his father set him. While Handel did not actually matriculate in the faculty of law—the students’ roster is extant—he undoubtedly attended the courses given by the famous professor of law, the guiding light of the university. But what was this study of law in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in Halle?

It was not a study of the empirical-analytical practice of jurisprudence, though of course then as now lawyers had to learn the requirements of everyday law practice, but an examination of the great philosophical, moral, and ethical problems of the social organization of human affairs. That is, law was still closely allied with the humanities, a good deal of it consisting in reflections on human conduct, and it was not far different from the philosophy of history. Somewhat weighted down with metaphysical thought, German philosophy of law as professed in Halle was nevertheless distinctly liberal and progressive. The dominant figure in the university was Rector Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), a true pioneer of the Enlightenment and a most influential thinker and teacher. Handel of course heard the distinguished professor of law, the first academician to dare to lecture in German. The great liberal’s ideas as well as his lectures went far beyond law, embracing literature, theology, and social science. This courageous man made Halle into the most enlightened place in Germany. Much has been said about his valiant crusade against witch hunts and the unspeakable cruelties connected with them, but his principal aim was larger. He wanted to free statecraft, politics, and law from theology. It was here, indeed, that Handel first encountered respect for the dignity and freedom of man’s mind and for the solemn majesty of the law, principles under which he was to live for almost half a century in England. It is very important to realize that these ideals were acquired in his youth, in his home town, and not in England, otherwise his subsequent moves and decisions will make little sense.

He encountered another remarkable man at the university in Halle, August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), Professor of Greek, Oriental Languages, and Theology. Francke was particularly devoted to the welfare of wayward children and orphans and established an orphanage, a foundlings’ hospital, that became a model for all Germany. He passionately proclaimed the duty of society and of the state to look after these poor children; this made a deep impression on Handel, a charitable man and very fond of children. All his life he remembered Francke and his solicitous care for these unfortunates, and when Handel found a similar institution in London, at a time when he had the means to lend a helping hand, he gave unstintingly of his time and money. As is well known, the rights to Messiah were vested in the London Foundling Hospital, bringing the institution a handsome revenue.

It was from this atmosphere that the young man emerged at the age of eighteen with an independent, well-stocked, clear, tough brain, and a spirit touched with something of prophetic fire. He was altogether self-sufficient, and though good-natured, even gregarious, he accepted rather than gave friendship: he had no need of others to complement himself. He was now ready to make decisions that no one else could make for him.

[5]

ABOUT THE COMPOSITIONS of the Halle period we know very little, but Mattheson, a reliable witness, analyzed them succinctly in his Ehrenpforte. Handel in those days set very, very long arias and sheerly unending cantatas which, while not possessing the proper knack or correct taste, were perfect so far as harmony is concerned. Then he adds: Handel was a stranger to melody, but knew far more about fugue and counterpoint than Kuhnau. This criticism is most interesting and reveals a great deal of the character of both young men. Mattheson accepts the fact that Handel is a superbly trained composer—in the cantor’s art. Why, he even declares the youngster superior to Sebastian Bach’s famous predecessor at St. Thomas’s. But the adverse comments are significant: Handel did not have the knack to use his excellent training to write modern music. This is obviously the judgment of a progressive musician well acquainted with the new Italian dramatic style. Unfortunately, few of these early compositions—cantatas, German arias, etc.—can be reliably dated.³

The perfect knowledge of the métier is much more in evidence in Handel’s early instrumental music. The six trio sonatas for two oboes and basso continuo in Vol. 27 of the old Handel edition are generally dated as the earliest of Handel’s extant compositions; Chrysander assigns them to his eleventh year. Many years later when Handel was the much-admired London composer, they were discovered in Germany by Lord Polwarth, who purchased them and brought them to London. The statement quoted on page 12 (I used to write like the devil in those days) is supposed to have been made when Lord Polwarth showed the old manuscript to Handel. It is known that Handel was very fond of the oboe, and so was Zachow, whose way with wind instruments was far more modern than contemporary usage in Germany. Both of them acquired their taste for the instrument from Michael Hyntzsch and his son, Johann Georg, who introduced the oboe in Halle. One of Zachow’s trio sonatas for flute, bassoon, and basso continuo is available; it is a very fine work and makes us regret the more that this is the only piece of chamber music preserved from his output. So the circumstances favor Chrysander’s dating; the only thing that contradicts it is the music itself, and on the basis of the score it is impossible to accept Chrysander’s assumption. These are very good compositions, showing a maturity that no eleven-year-old child ever possessed. No autograph is known, but the copy brought to England bears the date 1700. Some of the other chamber music pieces, assigned to the Hamburg period (in Vol. 48), supposedly composed by the twenty-year-old Handel, would then represent an incomprehensible regression. Whatever the situation, and assuming that 1700 is the correct date on the copy (which I have not seen) and that the sonatas were not reworked at a later date, always a possibility with Handel, these are remarkable works that show thorough acquaintance with the distilled sonata style of the Corelli school. Handel’s typically active and sensitive bass line is there, and the pathos of the slow movement is pervasive. But what would be most disconcerting—if these works were indeed composed by an eleven-year-old—is the concentration, the formal security, and the cleanness of the texture.

A collection of chamber music brought out in Amsterdam in 1724 as Handel’s Opus 1 contains much superb music along with routine stuff, but of course these compositions do not represent his first published work; in fact, this disorderly cupboard contains works thrown into it for at least a couple of decades. Every once in a while Handel would reach into it and pull out a piece for use elsewhere and in a different medium; it is quite impossible here for us to single out the early works. As we shall see later, some of these sonatas represent Baroque chamber music at its best.

[6]

LIKE ALMOST ALL composers in the Saxon-Thuringian cultural area, Handel grew up in the humble surroundings of the organ bench and choir loft. Among his contemporaries there were other gifted musicians, but their talents were of a different nature, and they were ready to retire before a stronger god. These were the cantors, born professionals to whom music was bread and office. The German cantor, organist, and conductor was a hard-working, honest, well-trained musician and public servant, not as a rule interested in worldly affairs. His entire education was practical, tradition-bound, and he took great pride in his knowledge of the métier. Throughout his life Handel retained this characteristic German command of the métier. To the cantors, a work of art could not be merely the result of spontaneous eruption, and to these fine musicians the Romantic ideal of the God-given artist who is an untutored genius would have been inconceivable. They observed severe rules and condemned all eccentrics who offended the discipline of the craft. What they expected of the creative artist was the presentation of something original within the accepted style and with known ingredients, the principal one of which was the chorale.

This was the Zeitgeist, which was considered binding and which certainly permeated the organ loft in the cathedral where Handel was scheduled to take up permanent residence; it should have been in his bones. But the Zeitgeist is not an absolute, extra-human force; it is formed by men, by their ideas about the sense and value of life. Life itself is independent of what in any given time is thought of it; life is the origin, not the result, of the Zeitgeist. No modern historian would concede that an artist can be rooted outside the Zeitgeist, but we cannot insist on the axiom that his time must be his measure. It is often the exact opposite, that man gives dimension to his times.

Handel, with all his love for the organ, refused to continue the cantor’s art and was altogether free of the latter’s inherited mentality. He did not want to be a musician learned in the ways of the strenger Satz. He did not want to address the intellect within the accepted frames of cantata, chorale, and fugue, but to appeal to the senses and the imagination; he wanted the hearer’s soul to vibrate with his. In Handel’s time German music still harbored a good deal of the Gothic; its architecture was severe yet insisted on the arbitrary juxtaposition of details that, though well worked out and well understood, can be very strange to us. The contours are firm, the invention magnificent, and order reigns everywhere, but the elements are often disparate, for they are, to use the very graphic term of the period, gearbeitet, that is, tooled and toiled over.

Handel desired to become a free and independent artist, something unheard of in Germany, but familiar to the travelling Italians whom he first encountered in Berlin. Once more he wanted to convince himself of the rightness of his decision. When he eventually did arrive in Hamburg he set out within a month with his new friend, Mattheson, to visit Buxtehude in Lübeck. The aged master wanted to retire and the coveted position at St. Mary’s was available to the right bidder. It is perhaps easy to explain Handel’s refusal to apply for the position: the future master of the magnificent organ was required to take unto himself the old organist’s daughter as his wife; Buxtehude had married Franz Tunder’s daughter, and this arrangement was a traditional procedure of succession. The human dowry that went with the deal was a dozen years older than Handel, and though Georg Händel the elder founded his solid existence under exactly such circumstances when he married a surgeon’s widow ten years his senior, and inherited the departed surgeon’s practice, the son flatly refused. So did Mattheson, and so would Sebastian Bach, who was also to inspect the job. But that in itself does not tell the full story. There was in Handel an eagerness that could not tolerate such a restricted future. His original gifts, the quality of his mind, predestined him for a more strenuous and adventurous life.

The decision to change his course and go to Hamburg went much deeper than the problems of a musical career. The many large and small, more or less independent German states, kingdoms, electorates, and principalities lived in eternal intrigue and compromise. On one hand they wanted to preserve their independence, on the other they had to reconcile this with the concept of the Empire. Shadowy as the latter was, it was nevertheless a potential reality, though in the first half of the 18th century the relationship of the individual states within its boundaries was altogether chaotic. Able politicians such as Agostino Steffani, the prelate-ambassador-composer, could carry out diplomatic coups of astounding consequences with relative ease. The picture was really incredible in its colorful—and disorderly—magnitude. There were the marches of the Holy Roman Empire, which included such distant domains as the proud young kingdom of Prussia or, at the other end, Naples and later Tuscany. The maintenance of the Italian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Hungarian territories saddled the Viennese Imperial headquarters with tasks that inevitably weakened its hold on the western provinces, especially those that were predominantly Protestant. However, the Viennese politicians, well trained in the art of patriarchal absolutism and highly cultivated men of the Enlightenment, knew that if princes and electors were left to enjoy their privileges they would not meddle unduly in the affairs of the Empire. Since the political sagacity and savoir-faire of the Germans was notoriously of a low order—Goethe still bewails it—their understanding for this type of statecraft, which was already centuries old in other parts of Europe, was practically nil.

How well Handel appraised this situation is of course pure conjecture, and I shall not attempt to make an estimate, but that he, a student of Thomasius, was occupied with it is beyond doubt. This was part of the great search, and at least one aspect of Handel’s politico-social thought is clear: he did not want to be restricted to one class, and he realized that in the Germany of his day he could not escape this. Culture flourished only in the higher strata of society, to which he was not admitted except as a paid performer. And yet Handel was born a gentleman. It would be irrelevant to say this of a Constable or a Sir Christopher Wren, but in the case of a musician coming from the social milieu of the German cantor it is of considerable importance. Opera, which became Handel’s chief concern for decades, and in a way was his chief concern throughout his life, had, and still has, a social connotation to Germans and Englishmen entirely different from that of church music. The 18th-century term polite art fits opera admirably. What Handel craved was personal freedom to raise himself out of his provincial milieu to a life of culture. What he understood by this may be difficult to analyze, but when nothing of the sense of social inferiority so characteristic of the early 18th-century German artisan remains, then something is achieved that the German biographers who bracket Handel with Bach fail to appreciate. Handel was as unaffected by the prejudices of the higher society he frequented in England as he was by upstart envies—he was a free man. The first step in acquiring this freedom from constricting social inhibitions was migration to a free city, to the quasi-republic of Hamburg.

Then there was the question of religious orthodoxy. To Handel’s active, imperious nature religion was not a mystical concept but one that rested on rational consciousness, a theism based on the harmony of the universe, a universe that, however, emphatically included the secular kingdom on earth. He must have been familiar with the tenets, poetry, and songs of Pietism, for at Halle University the disciples of Philip Jakob Spener, the founder of Pietism, were strongly entrenched. Spener’s Pia Desiderata (1675) became the literary beacon of the movement, which was almost immediately opposed by orthodox Lutheranism. Spener himself was a staunch believer in the articles of Lutheran faith, and there is nothing in this man’s character of the extreme sentimentality later associated with Pietism. It was the disciples who distorted Spener’s aims and methods, and though its exaggerated phase came after Handel had left Germany, he did not want any part of Pietism. The Pietists, like Calvin, differed sharply with Luther on the role of music in worship, and in this Spener agreed with them. Elaborate music was not welcome in the church; only simple songs with equally simple organ accompaniment were considered churchly and proper. This led to a prodigious output of such songs, though these were intended mainly for domestic religious devotions rather than for church use. To Handel, who was not only a confirmed Lutheran but by nature and