Tag: Publication Year: 2019

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‘The first great English oratorio’: Handel’s Athalia

Kate Shaw

‘Athalia is the first great English oratorio’: thus begins Winton Dean’s chapter on Athalia in his seminal work on Handel’s oratorios (1). Dean makes little attempt to define the generic label ‘oratorio’ in the context of Handel’s Athalia (1733), instead making the work conform to the theme that runs through his book: that Handel’s oratorios have roots in Classical drama. He, for example, claims that the character of Athalia is ‘a Jewish Clytemnestra’, thereby bypassing the work’s Biblical source and instead anchoring it in the tradition of Greek tragedy.

Philip Brett & George Haggerty (2), the only other scholars hitherto to discuss the work at length, conversely identify Athalia as part of the contemporary British phenomenon of Sentimental drama, which they see as evidenced by ‘the musical enlargement of Josabeth’s role’. The roles of the two leading female characters, Josabeth and Athalia, are defined as Sentimental and Tragic respectively. But Handel’s Josabeth and Athalia are complex characters, for whom such labels swiftly become limiting.

By analysing both Josabeth and Athalia in scenes critical for their character, I seek to demonstrate that they display neither tragedy nor sentimental drama, but instead that the combination of the two genres in Athalia illuminates the complexity and distinctiveness of Handel’s dramatic concept expressed in this work.

Athalia
To understand Athalia as a tragic heroine is to limit her: the vulnerability, inaction and stasis through which Handel and his librettist Samuel Humphreys characterise her might be read as granting her more complexity. Whilst it is true that Humphreys has taken much of Athalia’s text verbatim (via translation) from the true tragic heroine that Jean Racine portrays in his play Athalie (well-known in Handel’s London), Humphreys and Handel together create a character with far more agency.

Humphreys imitates yet diminishes Racine’s technique of delaying Athalia’s entry, a key point that Dean overlooks. The audience has to wait around half an hour to meet the eponymous queen. This marks a departure from both Esther and Deborah, where the titular women are the first characters on stage.

The audience meets Athalia having awoken from a nightmare where she has been stabbed by a boy dressed as a Jewish priest, allowing Humphreys and Handel to create a more exposed character. Her first number, ‘What scenes of horrors round me rise’, is an accompanied recitative and not an aria, indicating her weakened mental state. Her unease is reflected in Handel’s choice of key, F minor, a common key of despair which he had previously used in the crises of both Esther and Acis and Galatea. She is accompanied by a plangent oboe melody and sinister strings, which highlight her anxiety, and undermine any sense of authority the audience might have expected.

Throughout the scene, her interaction with those around her shows a lack of leadership. Not only is she having an extreme nervous episode in front of Mathan, her adviser, but also present is a ‘Chorus of Sidonian Priests’: Athalia totally ignores their interjections (the chorus ‘The Gods who chosen blessings shed’) and Mathan ‘achieves’ an aria before she does (‘Gentle airs, melodious strains’). Indeed, at the end of the scene, the Sidonian Priests disappear to the Temple on Mathan’s, not Athalia’s, orders.

Athalia’s first and only aria in this scene, ‘Softest sounds’, betrays her pervading melancholia and distances her from the image of a tragic heroine. The sarabande metre is sombre and the sighing paired quaver figuration in the strings completes the image of wretchedness. She is shown to be still unsteady, as this aria is not in da capo form, but sounds more like the A section of a da capo aria that she is insufficiently gathered to complete.

Athalia’s first scene is a personal and intimate depiction of a disturbed woman, with agency that removes her from the Tragic archetype. She is distant from Dean’s analysis of her as a ‘Jewish Clytemnestra’, as she fails to retain the sureness of that truly tragic heroine.

Josabeth
Josabeth’s sentimentality is only one aspect of her characterisation, as she is shown by Humphreys and Handel to be an active force in the oratorio while fiercely protecting her family and the Temple community. Her part is much expanded, both in volume and dramatic depth, from Racine’s depiction. Humphreys is, for this reason, unable to involve Josabeth actively in the plot of the oratorio, as it has been designed without her significant input. However, this gives the librettist licence in fleshing out her character.

Josabeth spends much of the oratorio responding to surrounding events, but this does not make her ‘passive’, to use Brett & Haggerty’s term. Instead, it allows her to establish her role as the most human character in the work, through whom the audience become emotionally involved in the action. By enlarging Josabeth’s part, Humphreys and Handel ensure that the human drama in the oratorio is always more prevalent than questions of politics. Brett & Haggerty write: ‘It was not experience itself that was important to this audience but the way one responded to it. Response, of course, was an eighteenth-century obsession.’ This could explain the expansion of Josabeth’s role: with four arias and four ensemble numbers, she is the most musically active role in the work.

Josbeth’s characterisation is concluded in the duet ‘Joys in gentle trains appearing’, sung after the demise of Athalia. In this duet Josabeth and Joad affirm their love for each other and the sureness of their faith in God. As in their previous duet, ‘Cease thy anguish’, Joad presents the theme, befitting his role as High Priest and husband. Josabeth then mirrors his melody, but not in a way that suggests she is subordinate. The duet is in A major, which the listener fails to realise as Joad exposes the theme on the dominant, E. When Josabeth copies him in A major at bar 17, it then becomes clear that she is resolving the duet to its tonic. Dean’s assertion that this is merely practical, and that it fits the ‘natural compass of the voices’, seems to accord Handel insufficient dramatic awareness. It is as if, throughout the oratorio, Josabeth has been increasing in self-confidence and assuredness, relinquishing the passivity that Brett & Haggerty have assigned to her.

Conclusion
This musico-dramatic analysis of Handel’s characterisation of Josabeth and Athalia is enlightening when considering the complexities of genre in this early oratorio.

Josabeth is a deeply human character, frequently used by Handel and Humphreys to provide insight into emotional situations as they arise and evolve. But Handel and Humphreys have granted her more agency than would be possible were she entirely stooped in sentimental drama. Therefore any reference to this genre must remain only a reference, not a straight-jacket.

Athalia is likewise more complex than previous scholarship has recognised. Her portrayal by Humphreys and Handel is considerably weakened from the truly tragic heroine as depicted by Racine, and in the oratorio she fails to establish the dominance and awe required by tragedy. Indeed, Brett & Haggerty’s statement about Josabeth, that ‘she is an entirely passive creature, dominated either by events or by her husband’s will’, could be said of Athalia if ‘her husband’s will’ was replaced with ‘Mathan’s will’.

The subtleties of characterisation used by Handel and Humphreys create in Athalia two women that refuse to be limited as belonging to one particular musical or literary school or another. This indicates that the generic influences that, in combination, create the early English oratorio are drawn upon more subtly than previously recognised. Handel and Humphreys adopt characteristics of several theatrical and musical genres to form the first truly three-dimensional characters in Handel’s English theatre works. Dean’s designation of the work as ‘the first great English oratorio’ is even more deserved than critical commentary has hitherto suggested.

Notes
(1) Dean, W. (1959). Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques, p.247. London: Oxford University Press.
(2) Brett, P. & Haggerty, G. (1987). Handel and the Sentimental: the case of ‘Athalia’. Music and Letters, 68(2), 112-127.

This article is based on an undergraduate dissertation prepared for examination at the University of Cambridge. Kate Shaw wishes to express her gratitude to her supervisor Dr Ruth Smith.

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Liszt’s Performances and Arrangements of Handel

Graham Pont

Arrangements of Bach’s music by the great pianist Franz Liszt are well-known but most Handelians would be surprised to learn that Liszt also took inspiration from their favourite composer. In an article published in Göttinger Händel-Beiträge (1), Christiane Wiesenfeldt notes that Liszt performed works by Handel at Vienna in April-May 1838 and again in March-April 1846. He also conducted performances of Messiah at Weimar and Aachen in 1850 and of Judas Maccabaeus at Weimar in May of the Handel centenary year 1859.

In June 1879 Handel’s first opera Almira was performed at Leipzig: it is not known if Liszt attended the performance but he did acquire a copy of the vocal score of Almira that was arranged by the Austrian composer Johann Nepomuk Fuchs and published at Leipzig in the summer of 1879. In Act I of Almira there are two dance movements, a Chaconne and a Sarabande (HWV 1: 3& 4). By September 1879 Liszt had produced ‘un morceau de concert pour piano’: an elaborate paraphrase which was published later that year under the title ‘Sarabande und Chaconne aus dem “Almira” von G.F. Händel, für Pianoforte zum Konzertvortrg bearbeitet’ (Kistner, Leipzig, 1879). The work was dedicated to Liszt’s English pupil Walter Bache. It received its premiere public performance by Alfred Reisenauer at Leipzig in May 1883 and a few months later was performed at London by Walter Bache.

Liszt arrangement of a piece from Handel's Almira.

The original publication is now very rare: the only recorded copies are held by the Liszt Foundation in Budapest and the Library of the University of Berne, which has kindly supplied the copy reproduced here. Note that in his introduction to the Sarabande (bars 1-4) Liszt has indicated signs of articulation in both hands and the pianoforte pedalling that are inconsistent with Handel’s opening bars (5ff.) and with the staccato chords of bars 13ff. The contrast of three forms of articulation for thematically related passages is very Handelian.

Although Handelians (including me) have been generally unaware of this work, it is well-known to Lisztians: there are several performances available (about 11 minutes long) on YouTube. While the dances are blown up with characteristic virtuoso fireworks, Liszt’s treatment of Handel strikes me as quite sympathetic, at least when he stays close to Handel’s original text. I just wonder what Handel himself would have made of it.

The Sarabande and Chaconne from Almira was not the end of Liszt’s involvement with Handel. The Australian Liszt authority Dr Leslie Howard is editing an unpublished medley for the pianoforte which includes melodies from Handel’s Messiah, as well as ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God save the Queen’.

Note
(1) ‘Eine Laune des “anbetundswürdigen Fingerhelden”? Liszts Variationen über Sarabande und Chaconne aus Händels Almira’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, XIII (2010), pp.63-78. The article includes copies of Liszt’s much-corrected autograph of the Sarabande and Chaconne.

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Handel’s Brockes Passion: a Unique Composition

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.