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Page 11
But his lofty position was not entirely due to his overwhelming
personality. His intellect, if less vast, less comprehensive, than
Beethoven's, was less like the intellect of a great peasant: it was
swifter, keener, surer. Where Beethoven plodded, Handel leaped. And a
degree of genius which did nothing for Bach, a little for Mozart, and
all for Beethoven, did something for Handel. Without a voice worth
taking into consideration, he could, and at least on one occasion did,
sing so touchingly that the leading singer of the age dared not risk
his reputation by singing after him. He was not only the first
composer of the day, but also the first organist and the first
harpsichord player; for his only possible rival, Sebastian Bach, was
an obscure schoolmaster in a small, nearly unheard-of, German town.
And so personal force, musical genius, business talent, education, and
general brain power went to the making of a man who hobnobbed with
dukes and kings, who ruled musical England with an iron rule, who
threatened to throw distinguished soprano ladies from windows, and was
threatened with never an action for battery in return, who went
through the world with a regal gait, and was, in a word, the most
astonishing lord of music the world has seen.
That this aristocrat should come to be the musical prophet of an
evangelical bourgeoisie would be felt as a most comical irony, were it
only something less of a mystery. Handel was brought up in the bosom
of the Lutheran Church, and was religious in his way. But it was
emphatically a pagan way. Let those who doubt it turn to his setting
of "All we like sheep have gone astray," in the "Messiah," and ask
whether a religious man, whether Byrde or Palestrina, would have
painted that exciting picture on those words. Imagine how Bach would
have set them. That Handel lived an intense inner life we know, but
what that life was no man can ever know. It is only certain that it
was not a life such as Bach's; for he lived an active outer life also,
and was troubled with no illusions, no morbid introspection. He seemed
to accept the theology of the time in simple sincerity as a sufficient
explanation of the world and human existence. He had little desire to
write sacred music. He felt that his enormous force found its finest
exercise in song-making; and Italian opera, consisting nearly wholly
of songs, was his favourite form to the finish. The instinct was a
true one. It is as a song-writer he is supreme, surpassing as he does
Schubert, and sometimes even Mozart. Mozart is a prince of
song-writers; but Handel is their king. He does not get the breezy
picturesqueness of Purcell, nor the entrancing absolute beauty that
Mozart often gets; but as pieces of art, each constructed so as to
get the most out of the human voice in expressing a rich human passion
in a noble form, they stand unapproachable in their perfection. For
many reasons the English public refused to hear them in his own time,
and Handel, as a general whose business was to win the battle, not in
this or that way, but in any possible way, turned his attention to
oratorio, and in this found success and a fortune. In this lies also
our great gain, for in addition to the Italian opera songs we have the
oratorio choruses. But when we come to think of it, might not
Buononcini and Cuzzoni laugh to see how time has avenged them on their
old enemy? For Handel's best music is in the songs, which rarely find
a singer; and his fame is kept alive by performances of "Israel in
Egypt" at the Albert Hall, where (until lately) evangelical small
grocers crowded to hear the duet for two basses, "The Lord is a man of
war," which Handel did not write, massacred by a huge bass chorus.
His "Messiah" is in much the same plight as Milton's "Paradise Lost,"
the plays of Shakespeare and the source of all true religion--it
suffers from being so excessively well known and so generally accepted
as a classic that few want to hear it, and none think it worth knowing
thoroughly. A few years ago the late Sir Joseph Barnby went through
the entire work in St. James's Hall with his Guildhall students; but
such a feat had not, I believe, been accomplished previously within
living memory, and certainly it has not been attempted again since. We
constantly speak of the "Messiah" as the most popular oratorio ever
written; but even in the provinces only selections from it are sung,
and in the metropolis the selections are cut very short indeed,
frequently by the sapient device of taking out all the best numbers
and leaving only those that appeal to the religious instincts of
Clapham. I cannot resist the suspicion that but for the words of "He
was despised," "Behold, and see," and "I know that my Redeemer
liveth," Clapham would have tired of the oratorio before now, and that
but for its having become a Christmas institution, like roast beef,
plum-puddings, mince-pies, and other indigestible foods, it would no
longer be heard in the provinces. And perhaps it would be better
forgotten--perhaps Handel would rather have seen it forgotten than
regarded as it is regarded, than existing merely as an aid to
evangelical religion or an after-dinner digestive on Christmas Day.
Still, during the last hundred and fifty years, it has suffered so
many humiliations that possibly one more, even this last one, does not
so much matter. First its great domes and pillars and mighty arches
were prettily ornamented and tinted by Mozart, who surely knew not
what he did; then in England a barbarous traditional method of singing
it was evolved; later it was Costa-mongered; finally even the late
eminent Macfarren, the worst enemy music has ever had in this
country, did not disdain to prepare "a performing edition," and to
improve Mozart's improvements on Handel. One wonders whether Mozart,
when he overlaid the "Messiah" with his gay tinsel-work, dreamed that
some Costa, encouraged by Mozart's own example, and without brains
enough to guess that he had nothing like Mozart's brains, would in
like manner desecrate "Don Giovanni." Like "Don Giovanni," there the
"Messiah" lies, almost unrecognisable under its outrageous adornments,
misunderstood, its splendours largely unknown and hardly even
suspected, the best known and the least known of oratorios, a work
spoken of as fine by those who cannot hum one of its greatest themes
or in the least comprehend the plan on which its noblest choruses are
constructed.
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