General Biography on Handel

Over the years we’ve heard a great deal from Handel on the stages of the Staunton Music Festival, including several fully-staged operas. Tonight we have a chance to hear delightful selections, both vocal and instrumental, from throughout his long career. And before going further one may point out that Handel was perhaps the most well-known musician across continental and British Europe in the mid-18th century. Born 1685 in Halle (Saale) in central Germany, young Handel received only modest compositional lessons. This was very much the era of “on-the-job training”, especially for church musicians, and Handel would continue to self-instruct as he gradually came into contact with more diverse styles. After leaving Halle in his 17th year, Handel spent several years in Hamburg before launching a “grand tour” with an extended trip into Italy. The capital of vocal and instrumental music, Italy beckoned to Handel as it would one day attract Mozart, Goethe, Mendelssohn and many others. These years (1706-10) were decisive in Handel’s growth as an artist, and they laid the foundation for later triumphs on the London opera scene.
One of his earliest achievements in Italy was the sacred Dixit Dominus, a setting of Psalm 110 which he completed in Rome in April 1707. The opening vibrant chorus typifies Handel’s growing comfort in merging older imitative writing with a more punctuated, theatrical idiom. Just months later he dashed off his first brilliant oratorio (meaning essentially an unstaged opera), Il trionfe del Tempo e del Disinganno. The material stayed with him: fifty years later he was still tweaking it for a London revival in English. Il trionfe is an allegorical battle between Pleasure and Wisdom for the attentions of Beauty. Lascia la spina, sung by Pleasure, is accordingly sweet, ingratiating, and brief. At his best, Handel could write Italian melody with an ease and charm that native composers failed to surpass. The song Caro autor, written at this same time, captures that ability perfectly. Broadly organized in three sections, the first offers a passionate duet sprinkled with imitation and a lively continuo accompaniment. Both the second section, which is athletic and fitful, and the third are fugal in design; Handel takes the obvious opportunity to pun on the Italian text fuggirà (“to flee,” but also the root of a musical fugue) and discordia (discord) in this popular updating of a Renaissance madrigal.
Less than a year later Handel completed La Resurrezione, first performed on Easter Sunday 1708. This sacred oratorio includes the dazzling coloratura arias Disserratevi, o porte d’Averno and Naufragando va per l’onde. The former, suitably triumphal with opening trumpet calls, depicts the Angel of the Lord at the gates of Hell, announcing Christ’s victory over death. Naufragando continues the story as St John exhorts the women to visit the tomb, and one muses on the need for an anchor through life’s storms. Handel’s Italian period culminates with Agrippina, a powerful opera on classical themes that he presented during the Venetian carnival season 1709-10. Telling the tale of Nero’s mother and her attempts to control the Roman throne, Agrippina was critically acclaimed and ran longer than any Venetian opera in memory. The opening Sinfonia revels in grandeur—as befits the tragic, classical theme—and the ensuing fugue is almost a tempestuous Vivaldian concerto in miniature.
Even after he crossed north over the Alps in early 1710, Handel continued to think and create in the Italian style. He took a post at Hanover in Germany, but left for his first (and important) visit to London before the end of the year. He received permission from the Elector of Hanover for a second visit to the English capital, from which he never returned to Germany. Handel wrote the cantata Mi palpita il cor (My Heart Throbs) on one of these trips. The brief work, treating the age-old theme of love scorned, divides into five alternating movements of aria and recitative. The first aria, a graceful siciliano in E minor for flute and voice, strikes a nice balance between stepwise runs and angular, expressive leaps. In the concluding Allegro we enter the brighter realm of G major as the protagonist gives vent to (misguided) hopes of requited love.
As fate would have it, his old employer in Hanover eventually became King George I of England in 1714. Handel smoothed the day of reckoning by writing the dazzling Water Music at the king’s request. Around the same time Handel was writing very different music for Rodelinda (1719), from which we hear the extended, poignant Act 2 duet Io t’abbracio depicting the final embrace of the opera’s lead characters. Less than a decade later Handel composed the anthem Zadok the Priest for a new king, George II, October 4, 1727. Zadok has been sung at every English coronation since. The anthem opens in a gentle spirit, gradually building to the overwhelming entrance of the chorus. Much here will be familiar to fans of Handel’s Messiah, with its balance between instrumental-style melodies and punctuated, martial proclamation.
In London Handel also found time—and an interested audience—for his efforts in instrumental genres. Not all of the music was new, however. For instance, around 1725 he produced an Oboe Sonata in G Minor much in the style of late-17th-century Italian models. Never averse to reuse material, Handel may actually have begun this sonata while still a youth in Germany. Similarly the Sonata in B-flat, so-called “Fitzwilliam,” is hard to date with precision, though in style it seems an early work. The market for instrumental music paled in comparison to demands for sacred and secular vocal music. Thus Handel typically would introduce instrumental works, such as organ concertos and concerti grossi, into his operas and oratorios as a way to “test the waters.” The Concerto Grosso in A, op. 6 no. 11, of which we will hear the striking French-style overture and the finale, was originally incorporated into an Italian oratorio performance (L’allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, 1740).
1738 marked a turning point in Handel’s relation to English audiences, signaling Handel’s move away from Italian opera toward the English oratorio. Of his 40 Italian operas, only one was composed after 1738 though he lived another 20 years. A large part of Handel’s shift must be understood as a financial decision. Conventional sources for funding—patronage and subscriptions—were running run dry, and Handel knew it. Plans for a new opera season were scrapped in mid 1738. Still, Handel’s operatic muse could not be turned off quite so easily. He composed the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day at this time as a kind of transition, distilling much of his dramatic art into a single “act.” A decade later he brought out Theodora, one of his final large-scale vocal works. It had been almost 50 years since this Saxon first crossed into Italy. Yet somehow the fire endures even here, with writing as virile as any he had yet composed, with command of voice and strings as compelling as Agrippina.

(c) Jason Stell