Ruth Smith
Handel wrote three compositions about salvation through Christ, all for performance at Easter: La Resurrezione, for a Catholic audience, in Italian; the Brockes Passion, for a Lutheran audience, in German; and Messiah, intended by its librettist for his London audience. Of these, the Brockes Passion (1716?), named for the author of its libretto, is the least familiar to British audiences. On Good Friday (19 April) 2019, in its (presumed) tercentenary year, Handel’s Brockes Passion will be performed at the Barbican by the Academy of Ancient Music under Richard Egarr, affording a rare opportunity to experience a work that is unlike anything else Handel ever wrote.
The first performance of Handel’s Brockes Passion that we know of was given on 3 April 1719 in a hall (the former refectory) attached to Hamburg Cathedral, during a fortnight which enabled audiences to compare and contrast settings of the same libretto by four composers who all had Hamburg connections and were all acquainted. Reinhard Keiser had been the director of Hamburg opera when Handel played in its orchestra; Johann Mattheson, organiser of the event, had been Handel’s colleague at the opera (and almost his killer), and in 1715 had become the Cathedral’s Director of Music; and Telemann, who was to become music director at the city’s five main churches two years later, had been known to Handel since 1702.
Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680-1747), himself a Hamburger, was at school with Mattheson, and at Halle University he was a fellow student of Handel, like him studying law. Like Handel, Brockes soon dedicated himself to the liberal arts, and after travels in Italy, France and the Netherlands he settled in Hamburg, pursuing a literary life on several fronts – poetry, translation, journalism – and becoming a respected senator and holder of several important civic positions. By the time of Keiser’s setting (1712) he was sufficiently established to host its first performances in his own house to an audience (so he reported) of all the upper echelons of Hamburg society and ‘the entire foreign nobility, all the ministers and residents with their ladies’, numbering over five hundred.
Handel set more of Brockes’ texts in his lovely Nine German Arias (1724-5), celebrations of divine creation manifest in the natural world, with words from Brockes’ Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (‘Earthly Contentment in God’). The verses are perfectly consistent with Brockes’ translations into German of the most deistical poems in the English language, Pope’s Essay on Man and Thomson’s Seasons; but they make the fervent Pietism of his Passion text seem all the more remarkable. Clearly he was a man of many parts, and persuasions.
Der für die Sünden der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus aus den vier Evangelisten in gedunde Rede vorgestellt (‘Jesus suffering and dying for the sins of the world, presented in verse out of the four Evangelists’): the title of Brockes’ libretto declares that it belongs to the genre known as Passion oratorio, a freely paraphrased, versified and amplified dramatisation of the Passion story based on chosen elements of all four gospels. If the number of printings and settings is a guide, this was the most celebrated libretto Handel ever set apart from the texts of Messiah. According to one 18th-century contemporary, it had had over thirty editions by 1727; by 1750 it had been given over fifty performances that we know of, in settings by nine composers and as a pasticcio by Bach.
Mattheson recorded in his Grundlage einer Ehrenpforte that Handel wrote the Passion setting in England and sent it to him in Hamburg by post ‘in an unusually closely written score’. That manuscript is lost, and while Handel was normally a careful curator of his own performing scores, it would not be surprising if he never asked for the return of this one, since he could not have intended to perform his Brockes Passion for his British audience; and he never did. In Baroque Germany the Kapellmeister of a city or court was expected to produce Passion music every year for Holy Week services and extra-liturgical performances. In Britain no such performance tradition existed; Handel’s normal performance space, a theatre, was too secular (see objections to Messiah in 1743); all the many religious, literary and musical influences that Brockes drew on and fused would have made it problematically alien to Handel’s Londoners; and it was in the language of the ruling family, who were widely disliked for being German.
Why, then, did Handel write it? The presumed date of c. 1716 is doubly suggestive. Handel wrote no new operas that year; and the British Hanoverian regime had just survived a Jacobite rebellion. What if there were to be another such rebellion, this time successful? Handel, Hanoverian pensioner, would probably have to return to Germany with his employers. So a work with a secure place in the repertory – a good likelihood, given Mattheson’s admiration for Handel’s music and directorship, from 1715, of Hamburg Cathedral’s music – would keep his reputation bright till such time as it might be useful to appear as an established German composer as well as a composer of Italian opera (his Rinaldo was performed in Hamburg in November 1715). Hamburgers were accustomed to musical Passion dramas both staged and unacted; they had flocked to Keiser’s setting of Brockes’ text; and that text had had a forerunner in the Passion oratorio by the celebrated ‘Menantes’, Christian Friedrich Hunold (1681-1721), which Keiser set for Holy Week 1704 and in which Handel very likely played, as he was then a member of Keiser’s opera orchestra.
The evidence of Handel’s score suggests that a further attraction of an undertaking on such a scale – nearly three hours of music – was its two-way benefit to Handel the master recycler. For the Hamburg audience, which knew few of his Italian and English compositions, Handel could and did draw on the Birthday Ode for Queen Anne, the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate, Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, Apollo e Dafne and several other cantatas. Equally safely assuming that he would never perform the Passion in Britain, he drew on it for his subsequent English works, especially Esther, Deborah and Athalia, but also for some operas and later works – as late as The Triumph of Time and Truth. Elements of nearly half the arias, duets and choruses come from or go into other works, and, since many of those contexts are better known to audiences in the English-speaking world, hearing Handel’s Brockes Passion can be a slightly distracting experience for us – as when, for instance, a pre-echo of ‘Mourn all ye muses’ (Acis and Galatea) is closely followed by a forerunner of ‘Cara speme’ (Giulio Cesare), or the duet of Jesus and his mother as he hangs on the cross is recognised as a source of the duet of Esther and Ahasuerus. We need to try to listen with the unaccustomed ears of the Hamburg citizenry of 1719.
We also need to clear our minds of Bach’s Passions, which not only came later but are in a different tradition from Handel’s. Theirs is a genre known as oratorio Passion, with biblical text of one gospel (recitative) interspersed with contemporary poetic responses (arias, choruses, chorales). Bach knew and had a copy (partly copied out by himself) of Handel’s Brockes Passion, and performed it in Leipzig on Good Friday 1746; and as well as setting versions of some of Brockes’ verses in his St John Passion he absorbed Handel’s ‘Eilt, ihr angefochten Seelen’ into it.
Despite Bach’s admiration, the response of 19th and 20th century commentators was almost universally to damn Handel’s work with the faintest praise. I suspect their distaste had two main sources in the verbal text, which is a treasury of sophisticated rhetoric. The first is its cerebral elaboration of the Christian paradox of salvation (such as the opening ‘To free me from the bonds of my sins Christ himself must be bound’, or, as the Believing Soul protests to Christ’s interrogators, ‘You are denying life to life itself, through you the death of death will die’). The second is the close-focus, graphic, unsparing representation of physical suffering and mental anguish. This begins as early as the agony in the garden, when a terrified Christ feels engulfed by a muddy morass and eviscerated by burning coals; he gasps for breath, his mouth is dry, his heart pounds and his sweat is not (as in Luke’s gospel) like drops of blood, but is drops of blood forced from every vein. During his scourging, his tormentors score his back with nailed whips; the thorns of the crown pierce his brain. Brockes also, with truly baroque ingenuity, fuses these abstract and pictorial styles in astonishing metaphysical conceits (Christ’s flogged back appears like a rainbow and likewise brings us hope; Christ sweats bloody drops which for us are rubies to bejewel our souls). The brutality and rawness in this Passion may be a legacy of the Thirty Years War, in which four times as many died in Europe as in World War I; perhaps in this respect the Brockes Passion’s hour has come, now that our daily news graphically shows us barbaric cruelty and human suffering on an unprecedented scale.
A third problem for some commentators is that this Passion is so near to being an opera. There is hardly any narrative, and all the main biblical characters (Christ, Peter, Judas, Mary) and the two allegorical characters, the Daughter of Zion and the Believing Soul – who are allegorical only in name, not, as some state, merely providing comment and reflection, but actively present at and engaging in the action and reacting to it in the moment – have extended solo and dialoguing scenas, with invented utterances voicing a huge range of emotions: fear, anger, grief, remorse, despair, outrage, joy, defiance, love, compassion, resolve and more.
Handel responds with all his power of dramatising immediacy and human sympathy. The text that he set was Brockes’ preferred version, his 1713 revision of his original of 1712. This is not always recognised by commentators who state that Handel omitted parts of Brockes’ text. In this and other respects Handel, so often noticed in his English oratorios overriding his librettists’ texts or intentions, almost wholly obeyed Brockes’ very specific demarcations of recitative, accompagnato, arioso, strophic song, da capo aria, chorus and chorale. In following Brockes’ directions for da capo (fewer than a third of the arias) and chorales (only four) and keeping the choruses short (all but one last less than a minute) Handel sets a far swifter and more gripping pace than in his English oratorios. And he deploys not only vivid pictorialism but heartstopping melody, balancing the horror with tenderness, the anguish with assurance, and matching Brockes’ fervour. His music here is not academic, not extensively worked, not demanding to follow, and above all it serves the text. Brockes, as Handel must have known, had been impressed by oratorio when in Italy, and Handel’s composition is a pattern-book illustration of Orazio Griffi’s precept for oratorio: ‘to draw sinners to holy exercises by a sweet deception’.
To renew the faith of lapsed Christians was likewise one of Jennens’ intentions in compiling the text of Messiah, and it is intriguing that Jennens had a copy made for him of Handel’s score of the Brockes Passion without its verbal text (now in Manchester Public Library). He meant to give it English words, as is shown by his having done so for about a sixth of the score, after which the task evidently defeated him: he broke off mid-sentence in Christ’s agony in the garden. He had a score of La Resurrezione copied for him in 1738. It is tempting to suppose that these two earlier works by Handel about salvation through Christ contributed to stimulating Jennens to compile a libretto on the same theme for a British audience.