CHRISTMAS IN ART

HALLELUJAH, HALLELUJAH, HALLELUJAH!

George Frederick Handel wasn’t supposed to be a musician at all; at his father’s insistence he studied to become a lawyer. The young man’s passion, though, was opera, and before long he left Germany for Italy, where he learned to write Italian opera from the masters and traveled from one Italian court to another, astonishing all who heard him with his virtuoso playing on the harpsichord and the organ.

Italy was the center of the opera world, except in Rome, where the Pope disapproved of works for the stage. And so in Rome Handel experimented with a new form: a story told in song but without costumes or action – the oratorio.

So great did Handel’s reputation become during his years in Italy that in 1710 a German prince, Georg Ludwig of Hanover, offered him a position as his court musician. True, it meant writing to the instructions of the employer, being in fact a high-grade servant. But it was the only security a musician could know, and the 25-year-old Handel accepted.

Within months his independent spirit was chafing. From visitors to the small, sleepy court at Hanover, he learned that Italian opera had recently been introduced to London. In that city, these travelers went on, there existed something one could find no place else on earth: a large and prosperous merchant class – people with leisure for entertainment and money to spend on it.

London . . . Was it possible that there a composer might make his own way? Handel begged Georg Ludwig for a short leave of absence.

His noble master granted it with misgivings. “For a reasonable time,” he cautioned his composer.

The reasonable time stretched into 50 years.

Still not 30 years old, he found himself the most popular composer in England. Noblemen struggled to have this brilliant keyboard player at their parties. Queen Anne commissioned music from him for state occasions.

Above all, the public, that strange new phenomenon, took him to their hearts.

The quality of his music was all the more amazing because he was composing in the thick of business pressures musicians had never faced before. Working for no master, Handel had to raise the money to mount his operas himself – woo investors, rent the theater, hire and rehearse musicians, conduct personally from the harpsichord. To lure an audience he would even throw in a harpsichord concert between acts.

Then Queen Anne died, Imagine Handel’s consternation when Georg Ludwig of Hanover – a distant relative of Queen Anne – arrived in London as George I of England. The story is told that Handel, fearing to show his face at court, wrote the exquisite “Water Music” and arranged it to be played by musicians aboard a barge as the new king was rowed up the Thames.

“What is that heavenly music!” George exclaimed. “I must meet the composer.”

Handel was soon again receiving royal commissions. But Handel’s chief output continued to be operas for the public.

In 1728 a composer named John Gay staged a hilarious take-off on Italian opera. The Beggar’s Opera was an instant success, and Italian opera in England was dead. At last, deep in debt, Handel admitted defeat.

He turned to concert-giving. He composed ceremonial pieces for the court. And he found himself remembering a form he had experimented with years before in Rome.

Oratorio. A story told in music alone. No need for expensive costumes and staging. No high-priced imported stars. If he set texts in English, he could use local singers. As for the dramatic situations necessary to spark his creativity – what richer source could there be than the Bible?

It was a new kind of music – so very new, in fact, that Handel himself seems not to have grasped its true potential. Though the oratorios were well received, Handel kept returning to the outmoded medium of Baroque opera. One after another, his operas failed, until in 1737, exhausted from overwork and disappointment, he suffered a paralyzing stroke.

With his right arm useless, he seemed to have reached the end of his performing days. Doctors sent him to the continent to take the hot baths.

All over Europe music lovers grieved. “Handel’s great days are over,” wrote the prince who was to become Frederick the Great of Prussia. “His inspiration is exhausted.”

In fact, Handel’s greatest music lay in the future.

Doctors have ever after been at a loss to account for Handel’s amazing recovery. All that is known is that one day the nuns at the rest home heard coming from the harpsichord what seemed the playing of an angel. Handel, the use of his arm unaccountably restored, was improvising ecstatic music.

He returned to London in 1738 to compose Saul and Israel in Egypt, the most profound oratorios he had yet written. Once again he returned to opera, borrowing heavily in the winter of 1740–41, for two new productions.

Both failed upon opening. Handel had reached the low point of his career. Once again he owed immense sums of money, which somehow must be paid off.

It was at this despairing moment in the summer of 1741 that he received an invitation to write an oratorio for a charity concert to be held in Dublin the following spring. As mysterious as his recovery from an “irreversible” stroke is the fact that, at this time of his own great need, Handel should have accepted a commission that would pay almost nothing. But accept he did, setting to work on August 22.

Handel had always been a prodigious worker, but in the writing of this music something more than his own immense energy seemed to take over. Removing Handel’s untouched supper one evening, his servant saw tears streaming down the composer’s cheeks. The music on the table before him was the “Hallelujah Chorus.”

The entire enormous work was complete on September 14, only 23 days after he began. Handel stared at the bulky manuscript unbelievingly, as though he himself did not know where it had come from. “I think,” he said at last, “that God has visited me.”

Perhaps it was this awareness that prompted him to waive even the token payment – the Irish sponsors had offered. As he rehearsed his musicians and singers, word of the music’s beauty spread through Dublin. The audience at that first Messiah were not disappointed. “All classes of society are touched,” reported one writer. “Tears are visible on every cheek, enemies are for a time reconciled.”

“The world should know,” added another, “that Mr. Handel generously gave the money arising from this grand performance to be equally shared by the Society for Relieving Prisoners and the Charitable Infirmary.”

With the thanks of Dublin echoing in his ears, Handel returned to London to find creditors knocking at his door. Surely the music God had given him should go now to relieve his own need? Going still further in debt, so sure was he of this music’s worth, Handel hired a hall, paid choristers and instrumentalists, and advertised that Messiah could be heard in London on March 23, 1743.

Perhaps Londoners were annoyed at being offered a work secondhand. In any case, the churches of London united to attack the proposed concert. Did Christian people, preachers thundered from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey, intend to hear the truths of their religion mouthed from the stage of a theater?

In fact, the “foreign showman” was a deeply believing Christian, a churchgoer and student of the Bible all his life. But the campaign of indignation had done its work, and the London performance of Messiah was a dismal failure. Handel was not only a devout man, however, but a stubborn one. Year after year he persisted in rehearsing and presenting his rejected oratorio. Year after year Messiah was boycotted.

Meanwhile he had retired his debts with new compositions and a grueling concert schedule. And still he could not forget Messiah.

When he had given the oratorio away, in Ireland, people had listened to it. What if he were to give it away again? Handel, childless himself, had a special love for children. He gave Messiah to London’s Foundling Hospital. Not only a manuscript in his own hand (proudly displayed there today) but a performance conducted by him from the organ in the hospital’s chapel – the first time any of Handel’s oratorios had been heard in a church.

It was moderately well-attended, enough so that Handel repeated the charity performance the following year . . . and the next.

The yearly performance became the highlight of the London season. By age 67 the composer was blind, but every year until his death at 74 he continued to rehearse and conduct Messiah for the Foundling Hospital. As he was led by two children to the organ, the audience would weep with pity. As he began to play, they would weep with joy.

Handel was buried among other national heroes in Westminster Abbey in a grand state funeral, the word “foreign” long forgotten. And still the popularity of Messiah grew. Twenty-five years after his death it was performed before thousands in the great Abbey where clergy had once opposed it. In the succeeding 200 years it has been sung everywhere, the most universal music of all.

For much of that time the rest of Handel’s vast output was forgotten, his other oratorios rarely performed. Only Messiah, the music he gave away, kept his name a household word. And it led, gradually, to the rediscovery of his other works.

For that pioneering man trying to make his own way in music, his greatest creation was his greatest failure. It earned him never a penny; it gave him immortality.

By Elizabeth Sherrill