PURPOSE AND SCOPE

This book is about the words of Handel's oratorios. In recent decades concern for historical authenticity has transformed our reception of baroque music, Handel's included. Scholarly performers strive to recreate for modern ears the sounds that the composers' first audiences would have heard; music historians increase modern understanding and enjoyment of the music by explaining its historical contexts. This book aims to bring a complementary historical perspective to our understanding of the librettos – the verbal texts – of a mainstay of western culture, Handel's English oratorios.

It might be thought that such familiar works do not need this treatment. After all, what is obscure or recondite about, for example, Messiah or Judas Macchabæus? Their continual performance by people of every kind from the date of their composition to the present proves their accessibility. But though the music is accessible, the point of the words which Handel set frequently eludes us. To some of us they are so familiar that we tend not to hear them, far less think what they mean. Those who have listened to them critically in the twentieth century have often damned them as worthless.

THE PRIME MINISTER

James Miller's libretto Joseph and his Brethren, which begins with its hero's entry to the service of Pharaoh, portrays in the character of Joseph a perfect chief minister. It was written after the fall of Robert Walpole, the most powerful chief minister since Wolsey (to whom Walpole was often compared by his detractors). Polemic against Walpole continued well into 1743; government critics demanded that the minister who had been forced to resign should be called to account. Almost nothing came of this, and disillusion with government was deepened among Patriots committed to reform by the apostasy of their leader William Pulteney (see chapter 8). While Miller's libretto was being set by Handel, the king's chief minister was Lord Carteret, whose pro-Hanoverian mind-set enraged patriots of every hue. The long-desired changes of political management altered none of the defects in government and public life of which moral-political writers like Miller complained.

Much of Miller's description of his hero recalls contemporary writing about the desired qualities of a head of government:

For those who wanted art to appeal to man's higher, rational, nature and engage the mind, music raised a constant problem: where it was not closely associated with comprehensible words it could smother rather than inform the understanding. The statement most frequently made about music in eighteenth-century England is that it is dangerous, because of its power over the emotions. Instrumental music, and music only loosely allied with words (as in extended melismas), is considered especially subversive because it stirs up emotions which drive out objective thought, and often, because of the indeterminate effect of instrumental music, the listener is confused even about what emotions it is evoking. The distress caused by such disturbance is perceptible in the literature of music, especially in comments on Italian opera:

For Hill, as for others, certain instruments, when used singly, beneficially stir up useful emotions (for example, the drum and trumpet inspire courage, see the passage quoted above, p. 78); but the ability of concerted instrumental music to infuse and overcome us with ‘unmanning’ emotions renders it deeply suspect. Professional musicians, and music lovers inclined to view human nature optimistically, might commend music without qualification, but they were a minority, and even they felt the need to justify music morally, as a civilising social influence.

In the discussion of good citizenship which political controversy kept alive throughout the mid-century, government writers presented personal and public life as easily reconcilable spheres in which variable behaviour was unobjectionable and moral consistency uncalled for; or they were still less idealistic, assuming self-interest to be the unexceptionable basis of any politician's activities.

James Pitt is jeering at Patriot political ideals. These prescribe that rulers respond to political corruption with the moral rectitude which they exercise in their private lives; there are to be no double standards and no expediency. Only men of integrity can be trusted to serve their country. Walpole's greatest iniquity as chief minister, according to the Patriots, was ‘the constant endeavour he has employed to corrupt the morals of men. I say thus generally, the morals; because he who abandons or betrays his country, will abandon or betray his friend.’ But to take this stand will involve a clash of interests, which itself becomes a touchstone of true patriotism. The real Patriot, the opposition journal Common Sense declared (7 October 1738), is ‘one who pursues the Good of his Country, preferable to, and independent of, all private Considerations’.

In the first half of the eighteenth century the assumption that the best art teaches religion is as firmly entrenched in musical as in literary circles, perhaps even more so. As we saw in chapter 3, music was felt to have irresistible power over the emotions and mind, such that it could do dreadful damage; but in alliance with a moral or religious message it was a wonderful force for good. John Blow's preface to his Amphion Anglicus is indicative. This introduction to a (very) secular song collection stresses music's religious pedigree and its ability to civilise, to reform ‘and, above all, to inflame the Pious and Devout’. Still bound by the Protestant tradition that views lay singing of anything but psalm settings with suspicion, Blow makes the case for merely social music almost apologetically, and he ends his preface with an assurance that the present volume will shortly be followed by one ‘incomparably better: I mean my Church-Services, and Divine Compositions’. The opinion of Humphrey Wanley, librarian to Robert and Edward Harley, Earls of Oxford, is evidence of the assumption among disinterested connoisseurs that sacred music is superior to secular because it is more improving:

Elucidating the possible political implications of an oratorio libretto, it will by now be agreed, is unlikely to be plain sailing. This is abundantly illustrated by Esther, which not only demands attention as Handel's first English oratorio but has the most complicated textual history. Trying to ‘unpack’ its meaning demonstrates the delicacy of the operation and the often unexpectedly rich nature of its results.

The story begins in France. The first performances of Racine's Esther, in January and February 1689, by the protégées of Mme de Maintenon's school of St Cyr, were given to a highly select court audience. At the third performance, 5 February, this included the recently deposed James II of England and his queen, Mary of Modena. The cast included Mile Marie-Claire Decamps de Marcilly, who so enchanted the Marquis de Villette in her role of Zarès that he subsequently married her (thus causing a rift with Mme de Maintenon, who was also the Marquis' aunt). The possible importance to Handel's Esther of both Marie-Claire's participation and its outcome will appear presently.

In England there was no performance of Racine's Esther on the public stage in the early eighteenth century, but the play was known in French – Swift had Racine in his library, as did Handel's friend John Arbuthnot, a member of the Burlington House and Cannons circles which generated the first Esther libretto.

THE SPREAD OF SCEPTICISM

Eighteenth-century Anglican teaching stressed good works more than faith. Ethical social benevolence is the road to salvation in countless sermons of the period by the latitudinarian Archbishop Tillotson, his clergy and their followers. In this neglect of the concept of original sin and emphasis on humanity's potential to fulfil the requirements of divine precepts in this life, Christianity relaxed its doctrine of redemption by grace further than in any previous period of English history. Some versions of religion, most influentially that of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, secularised ethics to the extent of suggesting that men and women did not need God to teach them perfection. At the same time, in France, Richard Simon initiated scholarly criticism of the text of the Bible, and a translation of his work (Critical History of the Old Testament, 1682) devastatingly undermined English Protestant faith in the integrity, inspiration and authority of Scripture. These were the intellectual seedbeds of the freethinking deist movement in England.

The greatest importance of the English deist controversy to the history of religion is that it gave rise to the major Anglican apologetics of the eighteenth century. Its importance to students of Handel's oratorios is that it helps to explain the librettos' content and gives us a further sense of the strength of their engagement with major concerns of their time.

To the modern audience of Handel's Israelite oratorios the narratives of the librettos and their common themes are unremarkable and usually unremarked. But if we look at their biblical sources, we notice that the librettists made choices – what to take, what to leave, what to emphasise – and used their minds more than they admitted in their genteel disclaimers of the value of their librettos. Compilers of anthem texts had established a precedent for bold selection, rearrangement and adaptation of holy writ for musical setting (see chapter 3), on which the librettists built. Some common elements, and some common emphases, in their manipulation of the Scriptures become apparent when we compare their texts with their sources. In general, we can say of the librettists that

1. they used the partisan focus on the Jewish people but not the division into factious tribes

2. they emphasised the conflict with other nations and greatly reduced the proportion of internecine strife

3. they used divinely aided Israelite victories but proportionately far fewer Israelite disasters

4. they used the priestly caste but not its dominance

5. they used the heroes' virtues but proportionately fewer of their human weaknesses

6. they used the concept of the Covenant and extended it (for example, there is no mention of God in the biblical Book of Esther)

Comparison of an individual libretto with its source fills out this picture.

Besides being often didactic, the politically imbued verse, drama and music theatre of the first half of the eighteenth century is often allusive and cryptic. Many of its ‘lessons’ were so familiar to readers that only a phrase was needed to bring whole ideologies to mind. This makes comprehension a challenging business for the twentieth-century reader. Understanding – even noticing – the coded references needs the basic equipment of acquaintance with not only the topics which interested eighteenth-century writers and readers, but their methods of referring to them. Without such knowledge we see these works, which include the oratorio librettos, through a fog, and are in danger of thinking there is nothing there. This chapter offers some signposts to the allusive practices of three areas occupied by oratorio: the theatre, the interpretation of Scripture, and the writing of history. But it begins with political journalism, and the verbal involvement of Handel and his music in day-to-day political life.

MUSIC AS POLITICAL METAPHOR

The previous chapter noted the importance of music theatre as a vehicle for political messages. Music and musicians also served as a prime analogy for the state and statesmen. This had a direct impact on the history of oratorio. On 7 April 1733, at the height of the Excise crisis, the Craftsman devoted a whole issue to attacking Walpole through a lampoon of Handel.

Why did Handel produce no Israelite oratorio after Jephtha? The obvious answer is that he was growing blind and exhausted; yet this did not prevent the production, when his sight was completely extinguished, of a ‘new’ work. The Triumph of Time and Truth (1757) was a compilation (perhaps by a collaborator) of earlier compositions fitted to a text provided by Morell. The libretto and most of the music derived from Handel's Il trionfo del tempo, but for the public it was a new oratorio. Why did Morell and Handel choose a non-biblical text at this juncture? Morell had to fit new words to the music, and though some were ready made (the translation by George Oldmixon in the 1737 libretto of Il trionfo), he could have found Old Testament ones to adapt that would have done as well. That he was not averse to making up more texts from the Old Testament is evident from his doing so after Handel's death: his Nabal (1764) and Gideon (1769) are characteristic Israelite librettos, which he fitted to existing music by Handel. The collaborators had had much more success with their Israelite oratorios up to 1753 than with their one full-length oratorio on another theme (Theodora was a box-office disaster). If Handel was the one who resisted another Israelite topic, one must ask why, his health being (in view of The Triumph of Time and Truth) an insufficient reason. It is plausible that the reason was the 1753 Jew Bill furore.

When the English public was introduced to Esther in 1732 it also encountered the designation oratorio for the first time. The advertisements for both the ‘pirated’ York Buildings version and Handel's own performances referred to the work as such. The former helpfully added ‘or Sacred Drama’, but this may have raised false expectations. The commentator who objected to Handel's Italian singers mangling the English words, though carefully warned in Handel's advertisement that ‘There will be no Action on the Stage’, complained that ‘I saw indeed the finest Assembly of People I ever beheld in my Life, but, to my great Surprize, found this Sacred Drama a mere Consort [concert], no Scenary, Dress or Action, so necessary to a Drama’. Preferring Handel's new operas, Ezio and Sosarme, he confesses:

THE CONTENT OF ART

One basis of the shocked reaction to the performance of oratorio in the theatre was the widespread view that the theatre was a principal purveyor of vice and encourager of vicious habits. The severest members of the moral majority, for example the Nonjuring clergymen Jeremy Collier and William Law, whose writings on the subject were seriously read and responded to, wanted the playhouses closed. But the belief that public performances were matters of public concern, because they influenced behaviour, was not confined to churchmen; it was universal. Even the popular weeklies agreed that ‘Public Diversions are by no Means Things indifferent; they give a Right or a Wrong Turn to the Minds of the People, and the wisest Governments have always thought them worth their Attention.’ Art affected individual and civic well-being, so it was a matter of national importance. A number of writers, including several friends of Handel and his librettists, and some of the librettists themselves, campaigned for a reform of the stage. Sensitivity about differences of genre co-existed with a very flexible attitude to the uses to which different kinds of art could be put. As Part II of this book shows in more detail, music and drama were arenas for political debate. They had always been vehicles for moral and religious instruction, and some recent commentators have recognised positive campaigns by establishment groups in the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth to exploit them more vigorously to this end.