Handel

David Vickers

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754628859
• eBook ISBN: 9781351564243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This anthology represents scholarly literature devoted to Handel over the last few decades, and contains different kinds of studies of the composer's biography, operatic career, singers, librettists, and his relationship with the music of other composers. Case studies range from recent research that transforms our knowledge of large-scale English works to an interdisciplinary exploration of an individual opera aria. Designed to bring easy and convenient access to students, performers and music lovers, the wide-ranging articles are selected by David Vickers (co-editor of the recent Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia) from diverse sources - not only familiar important journals, but also specialist yearbooks, festschrifts, not easily accessible newsletters, conference proceedings and exhibition catalogues. Many of these represent an up-to-date understanding of modern Handel studies, deal with fascinating biographical issues (such as the composer's art collection, his chronic health problems, and the nature of popular anecdotal evidence), and fill gaps in the mainstream Handelian literature.

Part I
Biographical Aspects

[1]

Mythistorica Handeliana

CHARLES CUDWORTH Cambridge, England

(To J. P. L., in happy memory of a flask of Chianti, joyfully shared in Washington, D.C., one day in September, 1961…)

It’s nearly three-quarters of a century now since the distinguished Cambridge classical scholar F. M. Cornford produced his celebrated book entitled Thucydides Mythistoricus in which he showed, among other things, that the speeches which that famous old Greek historian put into the mouths of his heroes and generals was not so much what they actually said as what he thought they ought to have said, in accordance with their fame and status. I’ve often reflected, over the years, that something of the same process must have gone on with regard to Handel’s biographers and chroniclers. Handel was a great character, as well as a very great composer; everything about him was on the epic scale, rather larger than life. Yet on the whole we know remarkably little about the man himself and about his real personality. He is still one of music’s great enigmas. His early biographers, realising this, tried to fill in the gaps with anecdotes, some of which seem to have the ring of truth, whilst others give the feeling of being counterfeit. Where a direct witness speaks, we can perhaps grant his or her veracity—as for example when Charles Burney tells us how, as a young man, he found himself singing a voice part over the great man’s shoulder. Something went wrong and in an instant Handel’s ‘Great Bear’ of a temper flared up, only to subside again when Burney hesitantly pointed out a mistake in the score. Handel, said Burney, ‘Instantly, and with the greatest humility, said “I pec your barton—I am a very odd tog:—mishter Schmitt is to plame.”¹ This is direct reporting and we almost hear, not only the great man’s voice, but his German accent, too, closely reported. But when another eyewitness reports that after a performance of Messiah Handel said, “I did not wish to entertain them, I wished to make them better!” then we are on our guard at once. This is Mythistoricus speaking, surely; not what Handel really said, but what, given the circumstances, he ought to have said. Handel’s heart was usually more on the side of the Philistines than of the unco’ guid. But when that charming lady Mrs Delaney writes to her sister Ann, telling her of ‘a little entertainment of music’ which she gave in April, 1734, at which ‘Mr Handel … in the best humor in the world, played lessons and accompanied Strada and all the ladies that sang, from seven o’ the clock till eleven … everybody was easy and seemed pleased …’ we can take it that she was merely reporting a pleasant domestic occasion, with quiet candour and a little pardonable female pride, but no exaggeration. Or again, when stolid Squire Jennens wrote of how he went along to Brook Street, when Handel was working on the oratorio Saul and was both baffled and perplexed that the nigh-bankrupt Handel had just ordered ‘an organ of £500 price’ and was playing about with another ‘instrument which he calls carillon’ and with which ‘he designs to make poor Saul stark mad’, we can allow that Jennens may have been bothered and even baffled, but he was at least reporting honestly what he had seen and heard, especially when we remember that the score of Saul contains two organ parts, as well as pieces marked ‘Carillon’.²

It is in the stories related at second and third hand that one begins to suspect that Mythistoricus has been at work—especially in the numerous anecdotes which circle the fringes of the Handelian saga—the tales about Handel dashing off by coach in the middle of the night and rousting out poor long-suffering Dr Morell, to question him on some point of prosody or word-meaning; the stories, too, about Handel’s dealings with recalcitrant singers or players. The further removed from Handel’s own lifetime, the more dubiously mythistorical these stories become. William Linley (1771–1835) last scion of a famous musical family, included one such doubtful tale in the dedicatory preface to his own Eight glees (London, Hawes, c. 1830): ‘There are’, says Linley, ‘some fastidious and over punctilious critics, whose chief delight consists in poring over scares … not to trace out the passages which are most striking for elegance or originality, but for the purpose of detecting some insignificant breach in the laws of counterpoint, or a plagiarism from some obsolete writer; but surely this argues but an invidious feeling, totally unworthy of an original mind or a kindred genius. Some such hypercritic it was who, after a very rigid examination of the chorus “Envy, eldest-born of Hell” in Saul, shewed Handel, with a chuckle of triumphant conceit, two consecutive fifths in the tenor and bass at the close, and where they certainly appear. “Veil, sare,” said the great musician, “de fifths produce my effect; here is a pen, please to make it petter.” Here we have Mythistoricus hard at work, triumphant chuckle, phoney German accent and all—I wonder that Handel’s legendary ‘Great Bar’ of a temper was not brought into play as well, to lend what Pooh Bah would have called ‘Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative …’ But we too can say, with his friend Ko-Ko, ‘Corroborative fiddlesticks!’—very appropriate, those fiddlesticks … Linley’s tale bears all the marks of a ‘Just-So story’, invented to explain away the awkward presence of a couple of fifths in the cadential bars of a mighty chorus, and quite forgetting that such fifths can be found in innumerable Baroque cadences—in fact were a well-known feature of them. Where Linley got his tale from, we shall probably never know, but he was just the sort of highly-clubbable man who would dine out for years on stories such as this—just as many a modern British orchestral player can extract an everlasting supply of free drinks in exchange for his tales (often equally mythistorical) of Beecham, Boult or Sargent.

As I have said, I have long suspected that many of the best-known Handelian anecdotes were of the mythistorical variety, but I have hitherto lacked substantial proof. But some such proof did come my way recently, when I was collating the letters of Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), the famous Georgian portraitist and would-be ‘painter in the landskip way’. Now all pious Handelians have relished for years Burney’s famous story of how the great composer, detained at Chester by contrary winds, on his way to Dublin and Messianic immortality, wished to ‘prove’ (or as we would say, try out) the parts of his new oratorio, and therefore gathered together a group of singers, one of whom, ‘a printer of the name of Janson’ (I’ve always been a bit suspicious of that name Janson, but let it pass, let it pass!) who had assured the great man that he could ‘sing at sight’. Let Burney continue his tale, as he recounts it in the pages of his immortal Commemoration³: ‘Alas! on trial of the chorus “And with his stripes we are healed” poor Janson, after repeated attempts, failed so egregiously, that Handel let loose his Great Bear upon him; and after swearing in four or five languages, cried out in broken English: “You schauntrell! tit you not dell me dat you could sing at soight?” “Yes, sir,” says the printer, “And so I can, but not at first sight.”’ This account was published by Burney in 1785 and has ever since been accepted as a more or less veracious Handelian anecdote. But—here is Thomas Gainsborough, painter and music-lover, writing to his friend David Garrick, no less, from Bath, in July, 1768:

‘Come, if you will not plague me any more … I will tell you a story about first sight. You must know, sir, whilst I lived in Ipswich, there was a benefit concert in which a new song was to be interduced [sic!] and I being Steward, went to the honest cabinetmaker who was our singer instead of a better, and asked him if he could sing at sight, for that I had a new song with all the parts wrote out. “Yes, sir,” said he, “I can.” Upon which I order Mr Giardini of Ipswich⁴ to begin the Symphony and gave my signal for the attention of the company; but behold, a dead silence followed the Symphony instead of the song; upon which I jumped up to the fellow: “D-n you, why don’t you sing? Did you not tell me you could sing at first sight?” “Yes, please your honour, I did say I could sing at sight, but not at first sight.”⁵

By the time that Burney wrote his Commemoration, nearly two decades later, Gainsborough’s Suffolk tale had lost some of its original East Anglian flavour and taken on the accents of the north-west, but it is still essentially the same story. Ah, you may say, but which came first? East Anglian chicken or North Country egg? Personally, I feel that in Burney’s version, Mythistoricus has been at work. There is, indeed, a third tale, perhaps also linked with Chester in which the protagonist is neither cabinet-maker nor printer, but ‘an old man behind a violoncello’ who assured Handel that everything would be allright, ‘as he played in church’. Once again, things went wrong; the cellist played in neither time nor tune, and soon that legendary Great Bear was loose once more, with Handel snatching up the band parts from off the old man’s desk, saying, “You say you blay in de church. Ver’ well, you may blay in de church, for we read in de Scripture dat de Lord is long-suffering and of great kindness. You sal blay in de church, but you sal not blay for me!” Exit Handel, swearing, in five or six assorted languages. Mythistoricus again, artistic verisimilitude and all...⁶

The most audacious piece of mythistorical Handeliana is of course the supposed account of Zachary Hardcastle’s notorious musical breakfast party, at which we di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I BIOGRAPHICAL ASPECTS
• PART II HANDEL AND THE OPERA HOUSE
• PART III CASE STUDIES OF HANDEL’S COMPOSITIONS
• PART IV HANDEL’S PERFORMERS
• PART V LIBRETTISTS
• PART VI HANDEL AND OTHER COMPOSERS
• PART VII PERFORMING HANDEL
• Name Index