The chapter on Handel’s oratorios from the book version of
the article (by Winton Dean) on Handel in the first, 1980, edition of The New Grove, and
an expanded version of the Wikipedia table of Handel’s oratorios.
Here is the chapter on Handel’s oratorios from the book version of
the article (by Winton Dean) on Handel in the first, 1980, edition of The New Grove.
[1]
Handel’s final achievement, which contributed more than anything else to his lasting fame, was the creation of the English oratorio.
It was a new form, only remotely connected with any of the continental varieties, and his single major innovation.
He evolved it by accident, thanks to his reluctance to abandon the theatre, the Bishop of London [Bishop Gibson]’s intervention against stage performances and the middle-class English public’s appreciation of familiar Bible stories treated in an epic style that combined entertainment with edification.
The evolution was gradual, though some of the advantages were obvious from the first:
Handel was freed from the expense of scenery and costumes, and later from dependence on costly virtuoso singers, and he could make much greater use of the chorus to extend the musical and dramatic range and vary the texture.
His chorus, all male, was small in numbers
(probably not more than 20, including six boys for the treble part), but they were professionals from the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey, and the soloists were expected to sing with them.
[2]
Handel carried into the oratorio many structural devices from opera, especially articulation by tonality, but could afford to relax such conventions as the da capo aria since there were no exits.
Nevertheless, especially in the first important oratorios, Athalia (HWV 52) and Saul (HWV 53), the da capo remained valuable as a threat; by leading the ear to expect it, and either breaking off or continuing with something else,
Handel could make dramatic points musically explicit.
In Athalia (based, like Esther, on Racine) he linked airs and choruses in a remarkable profusion of new compound forms; in Saul he used five orchestral symphonies, all in the key of the overture and final chorus, to mark changes of scene and the passage of time and to unify the musical structure.
Their strong mimetic quality
(each depicts an important event in the story) suggest that Handel thought of them a a musical equivalent of the spectacular scene changes in the opera house; they lend themselves easily to modern stage production.
[3]
Most of the oratorios are dramas
(‘oratorio or sacred drama’ was the regular description in the librettos), with the chorus, representing the Israelite nation and sometimes their opponents as well, playing a central part in the action and on occasion drawing a moral.
This double posture is a product of their descent from Greek tragedy through Racine’s Esther and Athalia, a link carefully preserved inmost of the later oratorios.
The moral is dramatic, arising from the conflict presented in the plot, not religious.
All the major dramatic oratorios have a central them derived from the facts of human experience: the undermining of judgment and sanity by envy or sexual jealousy, the clash of opposed cultures, the enfeeblement of the rulers’ will as an empire decays, the choice between betrayal of principle and martyrdom, man’s enforced submission to a higher destiny and the limitations of mortality.
These conflicts are enacted by individuals to whom Handel extended the profound sympathy for every human weakness that informs his operas.
If the oratorios are grander in scale, it is because the chorus adds an extra dimension.
Their national survival or rehabilitation depends on the fate of their leaders; they are personally involved in the struggles that engage Saul, Samson, Belshazzar, Theodora and Jephtha.
The greatest of the dramatic oratorios thus possess a double plot held together by a single theme.
To the intricate skill with which this is achieved Handel added an unusual power of characterizing nations as well as individuals.
In Athalia, Samson, Alexander Balus and Theodora, and in one scene in Deborah, he depicted two peoples in sharply differentiated music; in Belshazzar, the grandest of all the oratorios, there are three [Babylonian, Persian and Hebrew].
He did not load the dice; he gave the heathen races of the most ravishing music, especially in Athalia and Theodora.
This refusal to make the righteous more sympathetic than the unrighteous, evidence of his dramatic detachment and freedom from sectarian bias, has been a constant stumbling block to those who sought to turn him into a pillar of the moral establishment.
[4]
Not all the oratorios belong to this type.
The choral epic Israel in Egypt and Messiah stand apart.
Neither has a plot in the ordinary sense, and they ae the only oratorios whose words are taken exclusively from the Bible.
For this reason they became the most popular, ousting works of at least comparable merit, and distorted the image of the form.
Israel in Egypt is justly renowned for the grandeur of its choruses; but apart from the unevenness caused by the wholesale borrowings, it is not a well-balanced work owing to the slight proportion of solo music.
The greatness of Messiah—Handel’s only sacred oratorio in the true sense and therefore untypical—derives on one level from its unique fusion of the traditions of Italian opera, English anthem and German Passion, and on another from the coincidence of Handel’s personal faith and creative genius to express, more fully than in any other work of art, the deepest aspirations of the Anglican religious spirit.
It remains nonetheless an ‘entertainment’ (Jennens’s word), on however lofty a level, not an act of worship.
[5[
The classical dramas Semele and Hercules, though performed in the manner of oratorios, were not so called by Handel.
Like Acis and Galatea they are closer to opera, with the chorus playing a smaller part than in the Old Testament works.
In Semele, where the moral is implicit in the action and never openly stated,
Handel’s affinity with Homer breaks free in one of the most perfect artistic re-creations of the classical spirit; gods and heroes operate on the same level and are subject to the same weaknesses and temptations as the man in the street.
Hercules re-creates the dramatic and moral force of Sophoclean tragedy in terms that underlie Handel’s whole conception of the oratorio.
In freshness of invention and imaginative scope the two have few rivals in Handel’s work and none in English musical drama outside it.
Some of the later oratorios, especially those with texts by Morell, are hampered by perfunctory plots, flabby diction and an excess of abstract moralizing.
[Evidently Dean considers the four “victory oratorios”, celebrating the defeat of the pretender in the 1745 uprising, of which the best known is Judas Maccabaeus, in that judgment.]
While this should not be regarded as automatically inhibiting Handel’s response, a certain weakening becomes apparent, and a greater resort to borrowing.
However, he recovered his powers in Solomon, whose hieratical double choruses are balanced by the casting of the principal soloists (including the hero) for women’s voices and the vivid treatment of the personal drama in Act 2.
In Susanna the balance is less successful; but the idyllic setting and the interplay of innocence and menace in the plot, comedy and tragedy in the characterizations, and opera, oratorio and pastoral masque in the style give the work a peculiar fascination.
The last two oratorios strike the profoundest note of all, inspired no doubt by the aging composer’s consciousness of infirmity and approaching death.
The mawkishness of the text of Theodora is entirely belied by the music, which draws a strong and subtle portrait of the Christian martyrs and makes the tragic end all the more moving by portraying the Romans (apart from Valens) as puzzled sensualists impressed despite themselves by the steadfast courage of the victims.
In Jephtha the mighty chromatic choruses, full of agony and despair, seem to identify the composer with the central figure’s enforced submission to an inexorable fate.
The contrived deux ex machina solves nothing; what remains in the mind is Jephtha’s heroic suffering [??] and the sonderfully tender portrait of his daughter Iphis.
If these two oratorios have a stronger Christian content than any earlier work except Messiah,
Handel celebrates to the last the precarious joys and sorrows of humanity.
The following table started as a copy of the one at Wikipedia as of 2013-02-15,
but was expanded by adding links to my posts on various oratorios,
and with embeds of videos when those were available but I had no dedicated post on the subject.
It is followed by a table of Handel’s odes and masques, closely related to the oratorios.
| HWV | Title - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | Premiere - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | Venue - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | Text - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | Videos or a link to my web page dedicated to this particular work (which contains links to videos) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 72 | Aci, Galatea e Polifemo | 19 July 1708 | Naples | Published on Oct 8, 2013 by Lang Les Arts Florissants Jonathan Cohen, direction; Christiane Karg, Aci; Delphine Galou, Galatea; Christopher Purves, Polifemo (1:33:53, audio-only) | |
| 49a | Acis and Galatea (masque) | probably 1718 | Cannons, near London | ||
| 49b | Acis and Galatea (Serenata) | 10 June 1732 | King's Theatre, London | Stanford | |
| 73 | Parnasso in festa | 13 March 1734 | King's Theatre, London | The King's Consort Conductor: Matthew Halls Published on Mar 21, 2012 by EssentialClassical, 2h11m52s | |
| 74 | Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne | 6 February 1713 | Royal Palace in London | ||
| 75 | Alexander's Feast | 19 February 1736 | King's Theatre, London | Stanford | http://kwhmusic.blogspot.com/2009/02/handel-alexanders-feast.html |
| 76 | Ode for St. Cecilia's Day | 22 November 1739 | Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London | Stanford |
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