George Frideric Handel was the first composer in Western history who never had to be rediscovered, mainly because by the time he died his oratorio Messiah had already attained the legendary status it has never lost. Up to Handel’s time music was written for the present and was largely expected to fade away after the creator died. But because of him, the next generation of composers began to realize that their music could become part of a permanent repertoire. In his time Handel was something on the order of an international superstar, an opera composer and impresario and traveling virtuoso. Corpulent, slovenly, obstinate, he composed in a manic frenzy often followed by collapse. In his last years, when he was blind and ill but still performing, his audience saw him as a myth still living before their eyes and ears.
There’s an old story about Handel, perhaps apocryphal but indicative. In the middle of the night, one of his librettists was awakened by a German-accented ruckus in the street. He staggered to the window to find Handel in a carriage shouting: “In your text, vot is ‘billows’?” Shaking off sleep, the librettist explained that a billow is a wave on the ocean. “Aha!” cried Handel. “Ze vafe! Ze big vafe!” And he went back home to work. He couldn’t compose the word until he knew what it meant, literally and viscerally. You can be sure that his music for billows was wavelike on a grand scale.
In the history of musical illustration, Handel looms large. He was the most extravagant of his time—and yet, as we see in Messiah, he was also capable of making his pictorial touches so thoroughly musical that many people never notice them. For instance, in the aria “Every valley shall be exalted,” from Messiah those words are expressed by a melodic line mounting to exaltation. Then comes “the crooked straight”—a jagged line ending in a sudden held note—and “the rough places plain,” another jagged section that smooths into a plain, drifting line.
When Handel got hold of a juicy image, he could not resist. In the oratorio Israel in Egypt he plays the plagues for comedy. “There came all manner of flies,” declaims the chorus—and the strings erupt in buzzing. When the soprano sings, “Their land brought forth froooogs, froooogs,” a singer in on the joke will croak in a musical yet illustrative manner. Meanwhile her accompaniment is hopping, hopping, hopping.
Born Georg Friedrich Händel in Halle, Brandenburg, he was a barber’s son who early on showed a remarkable gift for music, but for a time had to pursue it in secret. His father discouraged music and wanted his son to study law. Musical studies were eventually allowed, but despite his father’s death when Handel was eleven, he went through the motions of enrolling in law at the University of Halle in 1702. The next year, though, found him playing violin and harpsichord in an opera orchestra in Hamburg. In 1715 Handel produced an opera of his own in Hamburg, Almira, and his career as a composer was on its way.
In those days, Germany was considered the home of harmony and counterpoint, Italy home of song and opera. After Hamburg, Handel spent four years performing and composing in Italy, absorbing the country’s music and enriching his own work with a compelling melodic style. From this point on, much of Handel’s essence would combine a fluid gift for counterpoint with a great warmth and clarity of means.
Handel’s Italian years reached their climax in 1710 when his opera Agrippina caused a sensation in Venice. That year the elector of Hanover, later King George I of England, hired him as director of court music. The following year Handel scored a success in London with another opera, Rinaldo. When his employer ascended the British throne in 1714, Handel saw his opportunity and took it, never looking back. By the time he moved to London Handel had written a great deal of music and a number of operas, and he was already famous around Europe, but it was in England that he truly came into his own. Georg Friedrich Händel was now George Frideric Handel, British gentleman (though his English remained a bit comical).
He quickly found his place in court and among the music-loving aristocracy. In 1727 he became a British subject and was named composer of the Royal Chapel. There are various stories about his quirks. It was noted that he had a propensity for prodigious and polylingual swearing. On one occasion he dealt with a raging—and hefty—diva by hoisting her up and dangling her by the heels out a window, finally pulling her back in and crying, “I know you’re a vitch, but dun’t forget I’m ze devil himself!”
If Handel’s career sounds nicely rosy on paper, in practice it was rockier, both personally and professionally. Historians have retroactively diagnosed him as bipolar. He composed when he was manic, his mind racing beyond the scratching of his pen, but he had to endure the depressive interims.
For many years, Handel was primarily an opera composer, and in that respect he increasingly bucked the tide of fashion in England. His stage works were in the genre of Italian opera seria, meaning historical stories about royal clemency and charity, the music an alternation of mostly da capo (= ABA) arias and choruses during which the drama came to a halt, while the story was told in long stretches of recitative secco, “dry recitative,” accompanied only by harpsichord. There was a great emphasis on vocal virtuosity—you had to keep your divas happy. Some leading roles were taken by castrati, men who had in youth been subjected to the eponymous barbaric operation to preserve their high voice. It all made for a dramatically static spectacle, and it took exceptional music to raise it beyond that.
On this increasingly obsolescent genre Handel lavished his extravagant gift for painting character, scene, and action. For a small sample of his operatic and oratorio style, try the sparkling “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” from the oratorio Solomon. With all the dry recitative, even the best recordings of his operas leave something to be desired; it is in live performance that they come more readily to life. Certainly they are full of marvelous stuff; several of them, including the Giulio Cesare of 1724, turn up now and then on the stage. Still, so far none has established itself in the modern repertoire that essentially begins with Mozart.
While vocal music was at the center of Handel’s art, he was still a splendid composer of instrumental music. The most famous of his larger pieces are two that show off his genius for beguiling melody, vigorous rhythm, and variegated instrumental color: the Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. Both are suites of short movements for outdoor occasions, so Handel wielded the loud stuff: brass, winds, and drums. Water Music was composed for a royal bash on the Thames in summer of 1717: George I’s barge was followed by another with fifty musicians, then a gigantic flotilla, all of it cheered by crowds on the banks. The music is as winning as anything Handel produced, rich with trumpets and hunting horns and oboes. The king was so delighted with the music that it had to be repeated three times.
The Royal Fireworks was written in 1749 to accompany a regal pyrotechnic display. A rehearsal of the music at Vauxhall Gardens drew an audience of twelve thousand, showing the kind of popularity Handel enjoyed by that point. The music isn’t fireworky, but rather a suite of vivacious and dancing movements, first performed by a band of sixty winds and drums. The premiere occasion ended in a magnificent fiasco: the fireworks set fire to a wooden pavilion, scattering the crowd in a panic. Both Water Music and the Royal Fireworks went on to be arranged in various collections for full orchestra with strings. I suggest going for one of the renditions of the complete suites with the original scoring and original instruments. They’re great fun. Pick the rowdiest performance you can find.
Handel based his career on opera seria in Italian, but as the 1720s went on the style began to sag in popularity in England. The beginning of the end came in 1728 with John Gay’s send-up of the genre, called The Beggar’s Opera. This satirical potpourri of tunes was a runaway hit—hastening the decline of Italian opera. (A twentieth-century adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera is Brecht and Weill’s Three-Penny Opera, whose most famous tune is “Mack the Knife.”) Handel obstinately continued to write operas for his own stage company until 1737, when the company went bust and he suffered some sort of breakdown.
Soon he was back, trying again with opera among other things. But the answer to his problems was already in his hands: the genre of oratorio, as noted before essentially an unstaged opera usually on a sacred subject. As the popularity of opera fell, oratorio rose. Handel had written oratorios in the 1730s; earlier, as a warm-up, in 1718 he premiered his pastoral masque Acis and Galatea. Have a listen to that; it’s Handel in all his youthful vigor and wit, a delicious stretch of Arcadian charm.
In 1742 came his sixth and most ambitious oratorio, the one that secured his fortune in his time and his central place in Western music for all time: Messiah. It premiered at an overflowing concert in Dublin and quickly spread around England and Europe. On his first visit to London in the 1790s Franz Joseph Haydn was deeply moved by it; no less was Messiah the main reason Beethoven considered Handel the only composer to outrank him. (Beethoven knew little to none of Bach’s choral works.) He admired Handel’s ability to get huge effects with simple means. As Beethoven knew, simple is not easy.
Today as 250 years ago, Messiah is the most famous and beloved classical piece in the world. Handel wrote the gigantic composition in twenty-four days. Pious sorts call this a sign of divine inspiration, but in fact he often worked that quickly, manic and ecstatic, barely sleeping, sometimes sobbing, the progress of the work helped out by copious borrowings from his earlier music. The tremendous “Hallelujah” chorus, for example, began life as a hymn to Bacchus—that is, a drinking song—in one of his operas. The exquisite chorus “For unto us a Child is born” was originally a racy operatic duet for sopranos addressed to Cupid; after Messiah it turned up in an oboe concerto. Still, Handel is reported to have said that in reworking the music for “Hallelujah,” he had a vision of the heavenly panoply before his eyes.
In Messiah Handel was on an exalted plane of inspiration few composers have ever reached. There are no dull patches, and so many moments of the most remarkable beauty. For one example, “For unto us a Child is born”: it builds in a surging, almost childlike play of voices until it reaches the spine-chilling proclamations of “Wonderful! Councilor! The mighty God! The prince of peace!” the strings racing ecstatically above. Never has music driven home the meaning and emotion of words more powerfully. The music of Messiah ranges from the incomparable grandeur of “Hallelujah” to the tender intimacy of “Comfort ye my people.” There is an old story that when King George II first heard “Hallelujah,” he was so moved he rose to his feet. That could be true, but in any case from early on rose a tradition of standing for the “Hallelujah Chorus,” and audiences still do. The chorus earns those centuries of reverence.
In 1751, working on the oratorio Jephthe, Handel wrote on the manuscript, “Reached here on 13 February 1751, unable to go on owing to weakening of the sight of my left eye.” He finished the oratorio, but by the end of the next year he was effectively blind and his composing coasted to a halt. He kept supervising concerts, including an annual gala performance of Messiah, and played organ concertos in which he improvised the solo part. He died soon after a Messiah performance in April 1759 and was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.
Handel’s posthumous influence was—and continues to be—incalculable. For the first hundred-plus years he had virtually no competitors in choral music, because Bach was still being rediscovered. He established oratorio as the summit of choral music. Starting with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, his style dominated nineteenth-century choral music. The century’s amateur choir movement in Europe and America was founded largely on Handel; that includes Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society, founded in 1814. He became inescapably woven into the conception of what it means to be British; it has been said that the empire was put together accompanied by Handel. The triumph of his music was also a triumph of musical art: never before had a composer lay so close to the center of a culture, and because of him composers of the future began to see themselves as part of a stream of music moving through history. Beethoven was virtually the first composer to aspire to immortality. And Beethoven called Handel the greatest of them all.
More Handel: Coronation Anthems; Concerti Grossi, Op. 6; the oratorio Samson.