Handel, Between Universal Acclaim and Critical Scrutiny

“ No great musician is more impossible to include in the limits of one definition, or even of several, than Handel. It is a fact that he reached the complete mastery of his style very early (much earlier than J. S. Bach) , although it was never really fixed, and he never devoted himself to any one form of art. It is even difficult to see a conscious and a logical evolution in him. His genius is not of the kind which follows a single path, and forges right ahead until it reaches its object. For his aim is none other than to do well whatever he undertook. ”

“ Handel was too universal and too objective to believe that one kind of art only was the true one. He believed in two kinds of music only, the good and the bad. Apart from that he appreciated all styles. Thus he has left masterpieces in every style, but he did not open any new way in opera for the simple reason that he went a long way in nearly all paths already opened up. Constantly he experimented, invented, and always with his singularly sure touch. ”

“ Handel's works appeal to all alike. He was a man of action; what he felt and what he saw he painted, but did not analyse. The difference is the same as that which lies between a great philosopher and a great epic poet,—between Plato and Homer. Who shall say whether is greater? For traces of the influence of the one we must seek deeper and look farther, but the power of the other is more consciously felt and more universally recognised. ”

“ It is not only of this popularity, a little banal, of which I wish to speak, which one could not ignore—for it is only a stupid pride and a small heart which denies great value to the art which pleases humble people;—what I wish to notice chiefly in the popular character of Handel's music is that it is always truly conceived for the people, and not for an élite dilettanti, as was the French Opera between Lully and Gluck. ”

“ Where thousands sing the same slow melody, the mighty waves of sound wake in the air their own accompaniment, and the effect is that of harmony. On this broad popular basis, Handel built. He is the Protestant, the people's man, in music. In him the great sentiment of a common humanity found expression. The individual vanishes: it is the mighty music of humanity; his theme, the one first theme, and properly the burthen of all music, humanity's looking-for and welcome of its Messiah. What a prediction and foreshadowing of the future harmony and unity of the whole race is that great Oratorio! ”

“ There is a certain class of music, which has been respectfully listened to for upwards of a century; which, having been admired before, is therefore proper to be admired again. Few would dare to criticize, or avow a distaste for, music which has so long been popular. Handel and some others still meet with universal deference, and their very names alone suffice to silence any one who, more hardy than the rest, should be disposed to find fault. ”

“ It would be useless to try to review Handel's operas in detail. By reason of their subjects perhaps even more than their intrinsic musical value some of them appeal to a modern audience far less than the others. Many of the librettos which he set are inane rubbish, but no one who turns their pages can fail to be struck by the amazing force with which he gave realization to any spark of human interest which the situation contained. ”

“ With inexhaustible inventive power, Handel has drawn such pictures in his operas. No reproach is less deserved than that he has acquired a stereotyped manner and turns out his productions as if they were cast in a mould. Whenever the same forms and turns recur in his works, they express exactly what is demanded by the situation and is necessary for the accomplishing of a powerful effect. For the rest, he seizes every problem firmly and repeats himself as little as the circumstances of our lives are exactly repeated, even if they sometimes seem to show a general resemblance. ”

“ The popular idea that Handel’s style is easily recognizable comes from the fact that he overshadows all his predecessors and contemporaries, except Bach, and so makes us regard typical 18th-century Italian and English style as Handelian, instead of regarding Handel’s style as typical Italian 18th-century. Nothing in music requires more minute expert knowledge than the sifting of the real peculiarities of Handel’s style from the mass of contemporary formulae which in his inspired pages he absorbed, and which in his uninspired pages absorbed him. ”

“ This reasoning makes it mysterious that a man of such moral obliquity should ever have written a note of his own music in England when he could have stolen the complete choral works of Bach and most of the hundred operas of Alessandro Scarlatti with the certainty that the sources would not be printed for a century after his death, even if his own name did not then check curiosity among antiquarians. Of course Handel’s plagiarisms would have damaged his reputation if contemporaries had known of them. His polyphonic scholarship was more “antiquated” in the 18th century than it is in the 20th. ”

“ Do you know the music? It is of Handel’s best: and as classical as any man who wore a full-bottomed wig could write. I think Handel never gets out of his wig: that is, out of his age: his Hallelujah chorus is a chorus not of angels, but of well-fed earthly choristers, ranged tier above tier in a Gothic cathedral, with princes for audience, and their military trumpets flourishing over the full volume of the organ. Handel’s gods are like Homer’s, and his sublime never reaches beyond the region of the clouds. ”

“ Unlike Bach or Haydn, Handel lacked the power by which an artist is impelled to progress beyond his contemporaries and to point the way to new methods which will preserve his art from stagnation. Every composer of the very first rank has possessed this power, and the want of it has prevented those critics who only regard Handel's music in the light of that which succeeded him from doing him full justice. His influence upon modern music is very slight ”

“ When lastly, ordinary decorum dictated an attitude of reverent attention towards the subject of the oratorio, then the man of genius could find such a scope for his real sense of dramatic fitness as would make his work immortal.
In estimating Handel’s greatness we must think away all orthodox musical and progressive prejudices, and learn to apply the lessons critics of architecture and some critics of literature seem to know by nature. Originality, in music as in other arts, lies in the whole, and in a sense of the true meaning of every part. ”

“ Yet it is a curious question whether if Handel, say, could have heard an overture of Wagner's he would have thought it an advance in beauty or not—whether it would have seemed to him like the realisation of some incredible dream, a heavenly music, or whether he would have thought it licentious, and even shapeless. Of course, one knows that there is going to be development in art, but the imagination is unable to forecast it, except in so far as it can forecast a possibility of an increased perfection of technique. ”

“ We do not appreciate the continuity of musical art, and we do not value the stimulating and school-forming influences. It is the same now as a hundred and fifty years ago, when we preferred Handel, who never influenced any other composer to good purpose, and who essentially represented the end of a development, to Bach, who is the greatest and most fruitful formative influence of any musical age, and who has powerfully influenced all subsequent composers of genius, except two or three of the Latin races. ”

“ The opinion has been widespread and prevails even in our day, that so long as Handel occupied himself with the opera, he was obstinately pursuing the wrong path, which he only abandoned after many bitter experiences, in order henceforth to devote himself to the oratorio, for which nature had intended him. For it has always been considered one of the most marked characteristics of genius that it discovers the right way unconsciously, as it were, and impelled by inward necessity. ”

“ History is the most partial of the sciences. When it becomes enamoured of a man it loves him jealously; it will not even hear of others. Since the day when the greatness of Johann Sebastian Bach was admitted all that was great in his lifetime has become less than nothing. The world has hardly been able to forgive Händel for the impertinence of having had as great a genius as Bach's and a much greater success. The rest have fallen into dust; and there is no dust so dry as that of Telemann, whom posterity has forced to pay for the insolent victory which he won over Bach in his lifetime. ”

“ Because in our time this art has been lost, the beauty of Handel's opera arias remains for the most part concealed from us, but that another change will one day take place there is no doubt. An immediate revolution, to be sure, is not to be expected. Music has fallen by degrees from that lofty height, and only by degrees can she again attain unto it. ”

“ Early in the following year the doors of the theatre in the Haymarket were besieged by a huge crowd, anxious to secure seats for the performance of Handel's new opera, 'Radamisto,' which was being produced by the Royal Academy of Music. The applause was deafening, and the success of the opera was assured. But Handel was not to be left to enjoy his honours in peace; an opposition party had already arisen, who were moved to do him evil partly from envy, and partly because he had stirred them up to resentment by his dominancy and self-will. ”

“ No one has more successfully popularized the greatest artistic ideals than Handel; no artist is more disconcerting to critics who imagine that a great man’s mental development is easy to follow. Not even Wagner effected a greater Handel as composer. transformation in the possibilities of dramatic music than Handel effected in oratorio, yet we have seen that Handel was the very opposite of a reformer. ”

“ It is true that his style is strongly marked and individual, and it may well be that a man—even a musician—whose experience has been confined entirely to modern music, would derive an impression of monotony from Handel's work, largely because the methods of expression common to all eighteenth-century composers differs so widely from those now in common use as to constitute almost a different musical language.
It is a grave injustice to Handel that fate has fixed on "The Messiah" as the one work by which he should be known to the general public to-day ”

“ That they are felt as absurdities and defects already shows that Handel created in English oratorio a true art-form on the largest possible scale.
There never has been a time when Handel has been overrated, except in so far as other composers have been neglected. But no composer has suffered so much from pious misinterpretation and the popular admiration of misleading externals. It is not the place here to dilate upon the burial of Handel’s art beneath the “mammoth” performances of the Handel Festivals at the Crystal Palace ”

“ If you tie Handel’s hands by debarring him from the rendering of human emotion, and if you set Bach’s free by giving him no human emotion to render—if, in fact, you rob Handel of his opportunities and Bach of his difficulties—the two men can fight after a fashion, but Handel will even so come off victorious. ”

“ It is strange that he in his seclusion should have preserved a keen interest in the music of other men, whereas Handel's shell of artistic egotism seemed hardened by the rough contact of the world and society; music for him existed only in his own works. Bach was very anxious to make the acquaintance of his famous contemporary; and, on two occasions, when the latter visited Halle, made efforts to meet him, but without success. When Handel went thither the third time. Bach was dead. ”

“ That which is imitable in his work is simply the result of certain forms of expression that he used because he found them ready to his hand; that which is his own is inimitable. His oratorios are, in their own style, as unapproached now as ever; he seems to have exhausted what art can do in this direction; but he has not swayed the minds of modern composers as Bach has done.
Bach lived and wrote in retirement; a small proportion only of his works was published in his lifetime, nor did he take into account their effect on the public mind, or feel the public pulse, as Handel did. ”

“ Bach's influence began to be felt some fifty years after his death, when the treasures he had left behind him were first brought to light. He was a thinker who traced ideas to their source, an idealist who worshipped abstract truth for its own sake. His works are close chains of thought and reasoning, prompted by profound feeling, and infinitely suggestive; from the various starting-points which they offer, we go on arguing to this day; but they appeal chiefly to the reflective mind. They are no less complete as wholes than the works of Handel, but they are far more complex ”

“ Bach lacked the impulse of the Italian to write tune for tune's sake. Striving as he did "for characteristic expression," it was impossible for him to reach a simple song-style in the solo parts of his Passion. His recitative is too intricate, too detailed, and too thoughtful to produce the broad declamatory effects of Handel's. The same assertion may be made as to his airs. Bach's music always has a reflective quality which robs it of the conventional dramatic appearance and stands as an obstacle in the way of its immediate appreciation by a miscellaneous and unprepared audience. ”

“ The cynic who said "Every man has his price" was evidently not acquainted with the life of Bach. Steadily ignoring those temptations to prostitute his genius for the public's pleasure, which so materially affected the life course of his great contemporary Handel, he followed his own ideals with an undivided mind. As always happens in such cases, since it takes decades for the world to comprehend a sincere individual, or even centuries if his individuality is deep and unique, he was not appreciated in his life-time, nor for many years after his death. ”

“ Indeed, he is not appreciated now, for a man can be appreciated only by his equals. But we have at last got an inkling of the treasure that still lies hidden away in Bach; and while Handel and the other idols of the age sound daily more thin and archaic, Bach grows ever richer as the understanding we bring to him increases, and still holds out his promise of novel and perennial artistic delights. ”