HANDEL, GEORGE FREDERICK musi cal composer, was born at Halle, in Lower Saxony, on Feb. 23, 1685. His name was Handel, but, like most 18th century musi cians who travelled, he compromised with its pronunciation by foreigners, and when in Italy spelt it Hendel, and in England (where he became naturalized) accepted the version Handel, which is therefore correct for English writers, while Handel re mains the correct version in Germany.
Early Training.—Handel's father was a barber-surgeon, who disapproved of music and wished George Frederick to become a lawyer. A friend smuggled a clavichord into the attic, and on this instrument, which is inaudible behind a closed door, the little boy practised secretly. Before he was eight his father went to visit a son by a former marriage who was a valet-de chambre to the duke of Saxe-Weissenf els. The little boy begged in vain to go also, and at last ran after the carriage on foot so far that he had to be taken. He made acquaintance with the court musicians and contrived to practise on the organ when he could be overheard by the duke, who, immediately recognizing his talent, spoke seriously to the father, who had to yield to his arguments.
On returning to Halle Handel became a pupil of Zachau, the cathedral organist, who gave him a thorough training as a com poser and as a performer on keyed instruments, the oboe and the violin. Six very good trios for two oboes and bass, which Handel wrote in his I 1 th year, are extant ; and when he himself was shown them by an English admirer who had discovered them, he was much amused and remarked, "I wrote like the devil in those days, and chiefly for the oboe, which was my favourite instru ment." These trios were mere parerga beside the study and corn position of vocal music, and he had to show Zachau a motet every week. By the time he was 12 Zachau thought he could teach him no more, and accordingly the boy was sent to Berlin, where he made a great impression at the court.
His father, however, thought fit to decline the proposal of the elector of Brandenburg, afterwards King Frederick I. of Prussia, to send the boy to Italy in order afterwards to attach him to the court at Berlin. German court musicians, as late as the time of Mozart, had hardly enough freedom to satisfy a man of inde pendent character, and the elder Handel had not yet given up hope of his son becoming a lawyer. Young Handel, therefore, returned to Halle and resumed his work with Zachau. In his father died, but the boy with great filial piety, finished the ordinary course of his education, both general and musical, and entered the university of Halle in 1702 as a law student. But in that year he succeeded to the post of organist at the cathedral, and after his "probation" year in that capacity he departed to Hamburg, where the only German opera worthy of the name was flourishing under the direction of its founder, Reinhold Keiser. Friendship with Matheson.—Here he became friends with Matheson, a prolific composer and writer on music. On one oc casion they set out together to go to Lubeck, where a successor was to be appointed to the post left vacant by the great organist Buxtehude, who was retiring at the age of go. Handel and Mathe son made much music on this occasion, but did not compete, because they found that the successful candidate was required to marry the retiring organist's daughter. Another adventure might have had even more serious consequences. At a performance of Matheson's opera Cleopatra at Hamburg, Handel refused to give up the conductor's seat to the composer when the latter returned to his usual post at the harpsichord after singing the part of Antony on the stage. The dispute led to a duel outside the theatre, and, but for a large button on Handel's coat which intercepted Mathe son's sword, there would have been no Messiah or Israel in Egypt. But the young men remained friends, and Matheson's writings are full of the most valuable facts for Handel's biog raphy. He relates in his Ehrenp f orte that his friend at that time used to compose "interminable cantatas" of no great merit ; but of these no traces now remain, unless we assume that a Passion according to St. John, the manuscript of which is in the royal library at Berlin, is among the works alluded to. But its authen ticity, while strongly upheld by Chrysander, has since been as strongly assailed on internal evidence.
On Jan. 8, 1705, Handel's first opera, Almira, was performed at Hamburg with great success, and was followed a few weeks later by another work, entitled Nero. Nero is lost, but Almira, with its mixture of Italian and German language and form, is extant. It contains many themes used by Handel in well-known later works ; but the current statement that the famous aria in Rinaldo, "Lascia ch'io pianga," comes from a saraband in Almira, is based upon nothing more definite than the common form of saraband-rhythm.
Three Years in Italy.—In 1706 Handel left Hamburg for Italy, where he remained for three years, rapidly acquiring the smooth Italian vocal style which thereafter always characterized his work. He had before this refused offers from noble patrons to send him there, but had now saved enough money not only to support his mother at home, but to travel as his own master. He divided his time in Italy between Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice; and many anecdotes are preserved of his meetings with Corelli, Lotti, Alessandro Scarlatti, the founder of the Neapoli tan school, or rather of the classical language of music as under stood by Handel himself, and Alessandro's unacademic son Do menico, whose wonderful harpsichord technique still furnishes problems for the modern pianoforte virtuoso. Handel soon be came famous as Il Sassone ("the Saxon"), and it is said that Domenico on first hearing him play incognito exclaimed, "It is either the devil or the Saxon!" There is also a story of Corelli's coming to grief over a pas sage in Handel's overture to Il Trionfo del tempo, in which the violins went up to A in altissimo. Handel impatiently snatched away the violin to show Corelli how the passage ought to be played, and Corelli, who had never written or played beyond the third position in his life (this passage being in the seventh), said gently, "My dear Saxon, this music is in the French style, which I do not understand." The story becomes more interesting in view of the fact that Handel's later treatment of the violin is hardly less restrained than Corelli's, though he often wrote for the greatest players of the day.
In Italy he produced two operas, Rodrigo and Agrippina, the latter a very important work, of which the splendid overture was remodelled 44 years afterwards as that of his last original oratorio, Jephtha. He also produced two oratorios, La Resurrezione, and Il Trion f o del tempo. The latter, 46 years afterwards, formed the basis of his last work, The Triumph of Time and Truth, which contains no original matter. All Handel's early works con tain material that he used often with very little alteration later on, and, though the famous "Lascia ch'io pianga" does not occur in Almira, it occurs note for note in Agrippina and the two Italian oratorios. On the other hand the cantata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo has nothing in common with Acis and Galatea.
Besides these larger works there are several choral and solo cantatas of which the earliest, such as the great Dixit Dominus, show in their extravagant vocal difficulty how radical was the change which Handel's Italian experience so rapidly effected in his methods. Handel's success in Italy established his fame and led to his receiving at Venice in i 7og the offer of the post of Kapell meister to the elector of Hanover, transmitted to him by Baron Kielmansegge, his patron and staunch friend of later years.
Later Handel became music master to the little princesses and was given an additional £200 by the princess Caroline. In 1716 he followed the king to Germany, where he wrote a second German Passion to the popular poem of Brockes, a text which, divested of its worst features, forms the basis of several of the arias in Bach's Passion according to St. John. This was Handel's last work to a German text. A copy much more accurate than Handel's auto graph, exists in Bach's handwriting. The Water Music was com posed expressly for the occasion of a royal water picnic on the Thames in July 1717.
Composer and Impresario.—On his return to England he en tered the service of the duke of Chandos as conductor of his con certs, receiving a thousand pounds for his first oratorio Esther. The music which Handel wrote for performance at Cannons, the duke of Chandos's residence at Edgware, is comprised in the first version of Esther, Acis and Galatea, and the twelve Chandos Anthems, which are compositions approximately in the.same form as Bach's church cantatas but without any systematic use of chorale tunes. The fashionable Londoner would travel nine miles in those days to the little chapel of Whitchurch to hear Handel's music ; of the magnificent scene of these visits all that now re mains is the church.
In 172o Handel appeared again in a public capacity as im presario of the Italian opera at the Haymarket theatre, which he managed for the institution called the Royal Academy of Music. Senesino, a famous singer, to engage whom Handel especially journeyed to Dresden, was the mainstay of the enterprise, which opened with a highly successful performance of Handel's opera Radamisto. To this time belongs the famous rivalry between Handel and Buononcini, a melodious Italian composer whom many thought to be the greater of the two. The controversy has been perpetuated in John Byrom's well-known lines: Some say, compared to Buononcini That Mynheer Handel's but a ninny ; Others aver that he to Handel Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.
Strange all this difference should be Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.
It must be remembered that at this time Handel had not yet asserted his greatness as a choral writer. The fashionable ideas of music and musicianship were based entirely upon success in Italian opera, and the contest between the rival composers was waged on the basis of works which have fallen into almost as complete oblivion in Handel's case as in Buononcini's. Apart from scholarly revivals, none of Handel's 41 Italian operas sur vives, except in some few detached arias out of each opera; arias which reveal their essential qualities far better in isolation than when performed in groups of between 20 and 3o on the stage, as interruptions to the action of a classical drama which was nothing but an interruption to them. But even under these conditions Handel's inexhaustible inventive power proved de cisive; as was shown when he wrote the third act of an opera Muzio Scevola, of which Buononcini and Ariosti (Chrysander says Mattei) wrote the other two. Buononcini soon got into discredit by failing to defend himself against the charge of pro ducing as a prize-madrigal of his own a composition which proved to be by Lotti. As a consequence Buononcini left London, and Handel for the next ten years was without a rival in his ventures as an operatic composer.
From Opera to Oratorio.—He was not, however, without a rival as an impresario ; and the hostile competition of a rival company which obtained the services of the great Farinelli and also induced Senesino to desert him led to his bankruptcy in 1737, and to an attack of paralysis caused by anxiety and over work. The rival company, it may be added, also had to be dis solved from want of support. Handel's artistic conscience was that of an opportunist, or he would never have continued till 1741 to work in a field that gave so little scope for his genius. But operas were the only music that was known to pay, and at all events he could supply better operas more quickly and easily than any other living composer. And this he naturally continued to do so long as it seemed the best way to keep up his reputation. But his opportunism did not include a readiness to stand any non sense; and when the prima-donna Cuzzoni tried to give herself other airs than he had written for her, he held her at arm's length out of a window until she capitulated.
Already before his last opera, Deidamia, produced in 1741, Handel had been making a growing impression with his oratorios. In these, freed from the restrictions of the stage, he was able to give scope to his genius for choral writing, and so to develop, or rather revive, that art of chorus singing which is the normal out let for English musical talent. In 1726 Handel had become a naturalized Englishman, and in 1733 he began his public career as a composer of English texts by producing the second and larger version of Esther at the King's Theatre. This was followed early in the same year by Deborah, in which the share of the chorus is much greater. In July he produced Athalia at Oxford, the first work in which his eight-part double choruses appear. The share of the chorus increases in Saul (1738) ; and Israel in Egypt (also 1738) is practically entirely a choral work, the solo movements being few and, in spite of their fame, perfunctory. The public, who still considered Italian opera the highest form of musical art, not unnaturally obliged Handel at subsequent per formances of this gigantic work to insert more solos.
The Messiah was produced at Dublin on April 13, 1742. Sam son (which Handel preferred to The Messiah) appeared at Covent Garden on March 2, Belshazzar at the King's theatre, March ; the Occasional Oratorio (chiefly a compilation of the earlier oratorios, but with a few important new numbers), on Feb. 14, 1746, at Covent Garden, where all his later oratorios were produced; Judas Maccabaeus on April 1, 1747; Joshua on March 9, 1748; Alexander Balus on March 23, 1748 ; Solomon on March 17, 1749 ; Susanna, spring of 1749 ; Theodora, a great favourite of Handel's, who was much disappointed by its cold reception, on March 16, 175o; Jephtha (strictly speaking, his last work) on Feb. 26, 1752, and The Triumph of Time and Truth (transcribed from Il Trion f o del tempo with the addition of many later favourite numbers) , in 1757. Other important works, indistinguishable in artistic form from oratorios but on secular subjects, are Alexander's Feast, 1736; Ode for St. Cecilia's Day (words by Dryden) ; L'Allegro, it pensieroso ed it moderato (Milton, with a third part by Jennens) , 1740 ; Semele, Hercules, 1745; and The Choice of Hercules, 1751.
In 1751 his sight began to trouble him; and the autograph of Jephtha, published in facsimile by the Hiindelgesellscha f t, shows pathetic traces of this in his handwriting, and so greatly reveals his methods of composition, all the accompaniments, recitatives, and less essential portions of the work being evidently filled in long after the rest. By a dramatic coincidence Handel's blind ness interrupted him during the writing of the chorus, "How dark, oh Lord, are Thy decrees, . . . all our joys to sorrow turn ing . . . as the night succeeds the day." He underwent unsuc cessful operations, one of them by the same surgeon who had operated on Bach's eyes. He was able to see at intervals during his last years, but his sight practically never returned after May 1752.
He continued nevertheless superintending performances of his works and writing new arias for them, or inserting revised old ones, and he attended a performance of The Messiah a week before his death, which took place, according to the Public Ad vertiser of April 16, not on Good Friday, April 13, according to his own pious wish and according to common report, but on April 14, 1759. He was buried in Westminster Abbey; and his monument is by L. F. Roubilliac, the same sculptor who modelled the marble statue erected in 1739 in Vauxhall gardens, where his works had been frequently performed.
Handel was a man of high character and intelligence, and his interest was not confined to his own art exclusively. He liked the society of politicians and literary men, and he was also a col lector of pictures and articles of vertu. His power of work was enormous, so that the Htindelgesellschafts edition of his com plete works fills 10o volumes, forming a total bulk almost equal to the works of Bach and Beethoven together. (F. Hu.; D. F. T.) Handelian Opera.—No one has more successfully popu larized the greatest artistic ideals than Handel ; no artist is more disconcerting to critics who expect to follow a great man's mental development easily. Not even Wagner effected a greater trans formation in the possibilities of dramatic music than Handel ef fected in oratorio, yet we have seen that Handel was the very opposite of a reformer. Indeed he hardly took the pains to as certain what an art-form was, so long as something externally like it would convey his idea. But he never failed to convey his idea, and, if the hybrid forms in which he conveyed it had no historic influence and no typical character, they were none the less fit for each case. The same aptness and the same absence of method are conspicuous in his style.
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 i8th century Italian and English style as Handelian, instead of regarding Handel's style as typical Italian i8th century. Noth ing 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 ab sorbed, and which in his uninspired pages absorbed him. His easy mastery was acquired, like Mozart's, in childhood. The sonatas for two oboes and bass which he wrote in his 1 i th year are, except in their diffuseness and an occasional slip In grammar, indistinguishable from his later works, and they show a boyish inventiveness worthy of Mozart's work at the same age. Such early choral works, as the Dixit Dominus (1707), show the ill-regulated power of his choral writing before he assimilated Italian influences. Its practical difficulties are at least as great as Bach's though they are not as necessary; but the grandeur of the scheme and nobility of thought are already those for which Handel so often in later years found the simplest adequate means of expression that music has ever attained. His eminently prac tical genius soon formed his vocal style, and long before the period of his great oratorios such works as The Birthday Ode for Queen Anne (1713) and the Utrecht Te Deum show not a trace of extravagance.
Operatic Methods.—The only drawback to his practical genius was that it led him to bury perhaps half of his finest melodies, and nearly all the secular features of interest in his treatment of instruments and of the aria forms, in that limbo of vanity, the i8th century Italian opera. The allegation is untrue that his operas are no better than those of his contemporaries ; but it is certainly true that he never stirred a finger to improve the con dition of dramatic musical art. He was notoriously masterful with singers; and was not bound by the operatic conventions of the time. In Teseo he not only wrote an opera in five acts when custom prescribed three, but also broke a much more rational rule in arranging that each character should have two arias in succession.
He also showed a feeling for expression and style which led him to write arias of new kinds. But he never made any inno vation which had the slightest bearing upon the stage-craft of opera, for he never concerned himself with any artistic question beyond the matter in hand ; and the matter in hand was neither to create dramatic music nor to make the story intelligible, but simply to provide a concert of between some 20 and 3o Italian arias and duets, wherein singers could display their abilities and spectators find distraction from the monotony of so large a dose of the aria form (which was then the only opportunity for solo vocal music) in gorgeous costumes and scenery.
The Transition to Oratorio.—When the question arose how such musical entertainments could be managed in Lent without protests from the bishop of London, Handelian oratorio came into being as a matter of course. But though Handel was an op portunist he was not shallow. His artistic sense seized upon the natural possibilities which arose as soon as the music was trans f erred from the stage to the concert platform ; and his first Eng lish oratorio, Esther (172o), beautifully shows the transition.
The subject is as nearly secular as any that can be extracted from the Bible, and the treatment was based on Racine's Esther, which was much discussed at the time. Handel's oratorio was reproduced in an enlarged version in 1732 at the King's theatre; the princess royal wished for scenery and action, but the bishop of London protested. And the choruses, of which in the first version there are already no fewer than ten, are on the one hand operatic and unecclesiastical in expression, until the last, where polyphonic work on a large scale first appears ; but on the other hand they are all much too long to be sung by heart, as is neces sary on the stage. In fact, the turning-point in Handel's develop ment is the emancipation of the chorus from theatrical limita tions. This had as great an effect upon his few but important secu lar English works as upon his other oratorios. Acis and Galatea, Senzele, and Hercules are in fact secular oratorios; the choral music in them is pagan, but it is large, independent, and poly phonic.
Handel's scheme of oratorio is, then, operatic in its origin and has no historic connection with the German Passion music of his time; and nothing is more significant than that the chorus should have so readily assumed its proper place in a scheme which the public at first certainly regarded as a sort of Lenten biblical opera. And, as the chorus gains its musical freedom by the disappearance of theatrical necessities, it becomes the more powerful as a means of dramatic expression (as opposed to dramatic action).
Already in Athalia the "Hallelujah" chorus at the end of the first act is a marvel of dramatic truth. It is sung by Israelites almost in despair beneath usurping tyranny ; and accordingly it is a severe double fugue in a minor key, expressive of devout courage at a moment of depression. On purely musical grounds it is no less powerful in throwing into relief the ecstatic solemnity of the psalm with which the second act opens. Now this sombre "Hallelujah" chorus conveniently illustrates the real originality and creative power of Handel's art. It was not originally written for its situation in Athalia, but it was chosen for it. It was originally the last chorus of the second version of the anthem, "As pants the Hart," from the autograph of which it is missing because Handel cut out the last pages in order to insert them into the manuscript of Athalia. The inspiration in Athalia thus lies not in the creation of the chorus itself, but in the choice of it.
In choral music Handel made no more innovation than he made in arias. His sense of fitness in expression was of little use to him in opera, because opera could not become dramatic until musical forms broke with architectural and decorative limitations (see GLUCK; MUSIC; SONATA-FORMS; and INSTRUMENTATION). But in oratorio there was no necessity for reforming any art forms. The ordinary choral resources of the time had perfect expressive possibilities where there were no actors and actions to keep waiting. Moreover, when ordinary decorum dictated an attitude of reverent attention towards the subject of the oratorio, then the man of genius could find the true scope for his dramatic sense and base immortal music thereon.
On such matters heat is unaccompanied by light. No apology for Handel can plausibly maintain that his enormous physical industry was not compensated for by the Johnsonian indolence of a well-stocked mind. One writer (P. Robinson, Handel and his Orbit) tries to explain away Handel's Holinsheds and Plutarchs by pointing out that Urio and Erba, etc., are place-names around the Italian lakes which Handel visited. You cannot explain away Palestrina and half the Italian masters of painting by pointing out that their names are place-names; nor can you thus explain why Handel, who cares so little for art-forms, should faithfully imitate the minutest features of a style 5o years earlier than his own, or why his manuscript of the archaic Erba Magnificat should break off as a copyist breaks off, from the top of the page down wards. Besides, why explain away these Italian masters (whose existence as persons is attested by other evidence) when Handel borrowed a chorus in Esther from Graun? This disposes, on the other hand, of attacks made on Handel's morality in plagiarising from sources that could never be traced in his lifetime. Within four years of Handel's death the child Mozart dedicated a set of sonatas to Queen Charlotte with the assurance that, inspired by her Majesty's protection "je devi endrai immortel comme Handel et Hasse"; and if he had substi tuted Graun, his patroness and his public would have missed no point but the alliteration. The only plausible reason why Handel did not plagiarise from Bach is that he would have thought any chorus of Bach quite impracticable in England. With the old Erba Magnificat the puzzle is that Handel should have thought such leaden vocal writing worth borrowing for Israel in Egypt. He could not add four chords, with the words "my fathers' God" without producing a vocal colour that aggravates rather than relieves the surrounding muddiness.
The most probable explanation is that Handel, who never thought of writing an original eight-part fugue, seriously imagined like an examiner for a university musical doctorate, that eight part fugues were objects of veneration, and that the British pub lic would be the better for hearing some old Italian masterpieces in this form. At all events he made no attempt to improve the Erba fugues, or even to assign them to texts that gave a tolerable declamation. A fugue on Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper has to be sung to the words "THE earth swal ... lowed them." Plagiarism or Transmutation?—Handel's plagiarisms begin to be interesting when we turn from these wholesale pilferings to his real transmutations of foreign elements. For English readers Sedley Taylor's volume of analysed illustrations (The Indebted ness of Handel to the works of other Composers, Cambridge 1906) is indispensable for a true understanding of the case. Its appearance gave rise to renewals of controversy which proved how dangerous it would have been to Handel if the matter had been raised in his lifetime. His rival Buononcini was finally dis credited by the discovery that he had sent in as his own work for a prize competition a madrigal by Lotti. What, say the moralists, was one madrigal against Handel's wholesale thefts? This query overlooks the distinction between a single prize com position, which is nothing if not wholly original, and a four hours' entertainment which was so seldom entirely new that it was specially advertised to be so when that statement was per missible.
Hardly any two performances of Handel's oratorios took place, during his lifetime, without the addition and substitution of many favourite airs from other works. Later on, in the time of Mozart, performances of operas (which had become much tighter unities than Handelian oratorios) were often adorned with inserted arias by other composers; Mozart's own contributions to other men's operas fill two stout volumes. Music was in the same con dition as architecture ; and Handel was as indebted to other com posers as Wren was to Palladian architects, and as Mozart was (especially in his Requiem) to Handel. And no fear that discovery might discredit him seems to have entered into Handel's mind, for he left his whole musical library to his copyist, and it was from this library that the sources of his work were discovered.
The true plagiarist is the man who does not know the meaning of the ideas he copies, and the true creator is he in whose hands they remain or become true ideas. The theme "He led them forth like sheep" in the chorus "But as for his people" is one of the most beautiful in Handel's works, and we may be shocked by the bare statement that it comes from a serenata by Stradella. But, to any one, who knew Stradella's treatment of it first, Han del's would come as a greater revelation than if he had never heard the theme before. Stradella makes nothing more of it than an agreeably frivolous tune which lends itself to comedic purposes by repetition, throughout eight pages of patchy aria and ritornello, at an ever-increasing pace. What Handel sees in it is what he makes of it, one of the most solemn and poetic things in music.
Again, how shocking that the famous opening of the "Hailstone chorus" comes from the patchy and facetious overture to this same serenata, with which it is identical for ten bars all in the tonic chord representing, according to Stradella, someone knock ing at a door. And how yet more shocking that the chorus "He spake the word, and there came all manner of flies" contains no idea of Handel's own; at least, none except the realistic swarm ing violin-passages, the general structure, and the vocal colouring; whereas the rhythmic and melodic figures of the voice parts come from an equally patchy sin f onia concertata in Stradella's work. The effects of Handel's original inspiration upon foreign ma terial are really the best indication of the range of his style. The comic intention of Stradella's doorknocking overture be comes Handel's inspiration in the "Hailstone chorus." In the theme of "He led them forth like sheep" what Stradella thought frivolous Handel makes sublime.
The converse process is equally instructive. In the short caril lon choruses in Saul, where the Israelitish women welcome David after his victory over Goliath, Handel uses a delightful instru mental tune which stands at the beginning of a Te Deum by Urio, from which he drew extensively in Saul, L'Allegro, the Dettingen Te Deum, and other works. Urio's idea is first to make a jubilant and melodious noise from the lower register of the strings, and then to bring out a flourish of high trumpets as a contrast. The tune could not bear and does not receive any further development, beyond statement and counterstatement. It has none of the solemnity of church music, and its value as a contrast to the flourish of trumpets depends, not upon itself, but upon its position in the orchestra. Handel did not see in it a fine opening for a Te Deum, but he saw in it a perfect type of popular jubilation, and, taking it at its face value as a popular tune he raised it to a high dramatic level. So he uses it as an instrumental interlude accompanied with a jingle of carillons, while the daughters of Israel sing to a square-cut tune those praises of David which aroused the jealousy of Saul.
But now turn to the opening of the Dettingen Te Deum and see realized the other side of Urio's idea, the contrast between a jubilant noise in the lowest part of the scale and the blaze of trumpets at an extreme height. In the fourth bar of the Dettingen Te Deum we find the same florid trumpet figures as we find in the fifth bar of Urio's, but at the first moment they are on oboes. The first four bars beat a tattoo on the tonic and dominant, with the whole orchestra, including trumpets and drums, in the lowest possible position, with all the drastic power of Handel's genius. Then the oboes appear with Urio's trumpet flourishes; the mo mentary contrast is not less brilliant than Urio's; but when the oboes are immediately followed by the same figures on the trum pets themselves the contrast gains gradation and climax. More over, these flourishes are more melodious than the sledge-hammer opening, whereas in Urio's scheme they were mere conventionali ties coming after a good melody. Lastly, Handel's primitive open ing rhythmic figures inevitably underlie every subsequent inner part and bass that occurs at every half close and full close throughout the movement, especially where the trumpets are used. And thus every detail of his scheme is rendered alive with a rhythmic significance like that of the themes of Beethoven's second period, whereby he obtains the liveliness of polyphony without fussiness.
Greatness of the Oratorios.—No other great composer has ever so overcrowded his life with occasional and mechanical work as Handel, and in no other artist are the qualities that make the difference between inspired and uninspired pages more elu sive. The libretti of his oratorios are full of absurdities, except when they are derived in every detail from Scripture, as in The Messiah and Israel in Egypt, or from the classics of English literature, as in Samson and L'Allegro. The absurdities, and the way in which all Handel's works exist by taking in each other's washing, only serve to strengthen the conviction of sound musi cians that Handel's originality and greatness consist in his grasp of the works as wholes. They would not matter but for the fact that in English oratorio Handel created a true art-form on the largest possible scale.
Though drama, in the proper and Aristotelian sense of action, was inherently beyond the terms of Handel's art, the two main qualities of dramatic language, viz., rhetoric and characterization, are at their highest power in all his music, and are, in spite of all that an obscurantist piety has done to conceal them, a main source of his popularity. The i8th century love-affairs of the Israelite warriors and their Israelite maidens cease to resemble the Loves of the Triangles when Handel's music begins to dis criminate. It cannot always save the situation, unless we are prepared (as the bishop of London in 574o was not) to be amused at the contrast between the passionate Elder and the crafty Elder in their trio with the chaste Susannah. But it leaves no part of the work altogether lifeless, even where the music is most perfunctory. Neither the chorus nor the solo parts admit any lay-figures. The heathen are so delightfully pagan that Han del has often been praised for his sympathy with them ; but it is a feebly man-about-townish view that thinks his orthodox Jews and Christians less true to their ideals and to life. Their music is the work of the man who hoped to die on Good Friday that he might rise with his Christ on Easter Day.
The power of Handel's English declamation is famous and might with advantage be used as a touchstone for the originality of his setting of words. For instance, the theme of "For unto us a child is born" puts an awkward strain on the word "For"; whereas the next theme, "And the government shall be upon his shoulder," is magnificently suggestive of the action symbolical of assuming the load of government. The rest of the chorus "Wonderful Counsellor," etc., obviously goes straight to the point. Now the first two themes come from an earlier Italian duet, of which the first words are No, da voi non put fidarmi, so that the word "For" replaces the exclamation "No." The other theme was meant to scold blind Love for its lying cajoleries, the word "shoulder" coinciding with lusinghie . . . re. Handel, seeing in this theme the possibility of a majestic interpretation, put up with a slight inconvenience in the opening theme for the sake of the spacious general structure of the whole movement which was easily expanded to include the new material of "Wonderful Counsellor." It can hardly be doubted that the melody of "He shall feed his flock like a shepherd" was originally composed to some text, now lost, which gave the awkward expansion and fall of the word "shepherd" (scarcely better on the word "weary") a meaning as convincing as the famous "sheds delicious death" in Acis and Galatea.
The Additional Accompaniments Question.—There never has been a time when Handel has been overrated, except in so far as other composers have been neglected. But this favourite musician of the non-musician suffers grievously from pious mis interpretation and the popular admiration of the wrong externals. Chrysander spoke true and winged words about the burial of Handel's art beneath "mammoth" Handel Festivals at the Crys tal Palace ; but greater damage has been done to performances on a normal scale by the use of "additional accompaniments" in the style of a later symphonic art, started most unfortunately by Mozart (whose share in the work has been corrupted in its turn) and continued throughout the 19th century in progressive stages of insensibility until Handel's style has become as un recognizable as Nash's Regent street.
But while it is obvious that in The Messiah Mozart's orchestral colouring is for the most part an intrusion, the desire for purity of style overreaches itself when it leads to a condemnation of Mozart's work in Acis and Galatea and the smaller Ode to St. Cecilia's Day. (The accompaniments to Alexander's Feast, pub lished in Mozart's name, are obviously by no artist of even ordi nary competence.) Handel's secular style is by no means remote from Mozart's, and he leaves so much to the discretion of the performer that it is no indiscretion to allow Mozart to convert Handel's often very perfunctory sketch into a perfect Mozart Handel work of art.
The result is at all events less heterogeneous than the cadenzas inserted by recent Musikgelehrte who out of the fullness of research achieve a style which no real composer at any period would receive without derision.
For the rest, when the worst has been said concerning either his own weaknesses or the misdeeds of his editors, musicians will never cease to love and revere Handel as one of the greatest of composers, whose inspired work is a marvel of architectonic power, perfect sense of style, and the power to rise to the most sublime heights by the simplest means.
Works and Editions.—His important works have all been mentioned above with their dates, and a separate detailed list is unnecessary. He was an extremely rapid worker, and his later works are dated almost day by day as they proceed. From this we learn that The Messiah was sketched and scored within 21 days, and that Jephtha, with an interruption of nearly four months besides several other delays caused by Handel's failing sight, was begun and finished within seven months, representing hardly five weeks' actual writing.
Handel's extant works may be roughly summarized ft orn the edition of the Handelgesellscha f t as 41 Italian operas, 2 Italian oratorios, 2 German Passions, 18 English oratorios, 4 English secular oratorios, 4 English secular cantatas, and a few other small works, English and Italian, of the type of oratorio or in cidental dramatic music ; 3 Latin settings of the Te Deum ; the (English) Dettingen Te Deum and Utrecht Te Deum and Jubi late; 4 coronation anthems; 3 volumes of English anthems (Chandos Anthems) ; 1 volume of Latin church music; 3 volumes of Italian vocal chamber-music; 1 volume of clavier works; 37 instrumental duets and trios (sonatas), and 4 volumes of or chestral music and organ concertos (about 4o works). Precise figures are impossible as there is no means of drawing the line between pasticcios and original works. The instrumental pieces especially are used again and again as overtures to operas and oratorios and anthems.
The complete edition of the German Handelgesellscha f t suf fers from being the work of one man who would not recognize that his musicianship was unequal to the nature of the task, and that the quantity of the task was beyond any single man's power. The best editions in vocal score are undoubtedly those published by Novello that are not based on "additional accompaniments." None is absolutely trustworthy, and those of the editor of the German Handelgesellscha f t are sad proofs of the uselessness of library-scholarship without practical musicianship. Yet Chry sander's services in the restoration of Handel are beyond praise. His discovery of authentic trombone parts in Israel in Egypt is one among many valuable contributions by him to musical his tory and aesthetics. (D. F. T.) Works of Handel printed for the Handel Society, London ; J. Mainwaring, Memoirs of the late G. F. Handel (176o) ; jr. Hawkins, General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1776) ; C. Burney, Account of the Musical Performances at Westminster, etc. (1785) ; F. Chrysander, G. H. Handel (1858-67) ; Sedley Taylor, The Indebtedness of Handel to other Composers (1906) ; P. Robinson, Handel and his Orbit (19o8) ; R. A. Streatfeild, Handel in Italy (19o9), Handel (19o9), Handel, Canons, and the Duke of Chandos (1916) ; R. Rolland, Handel (191o) , Eng. trans. A. E. Hull (1916) ; M. Brenet, Handel, Biographie critique (1912) ; Newman Flower, G. F. Handel, his personality and his times (1923) ; H. Leichtentritt, Handel (1924) .