Handel

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OUR great composers have sometimes presented a rough exterior to the people about them. The artist’s sensitivity, poetry, and vision are often hard to discern except in his music, and begin to be perceived there by a slow-witted public only in his old age or after his death. Handel at first sight was a corpulent, irascible bachelor like his contemporary Dr. Johnson, living in an age addicted to heavy eating. His letters — matters of obligation and elaborately correct —reveal little: most of those who have described him knew him only as a public figure. He was often smiled at in London for his thick English and his lumbering ways.

A successful Life of Handel could not come from a biographer too fertile in imagination and in glib rhapsodies. Herbert Weinstock, who not long ago did a signal service for the overromanticized and much falsified Tchaikovsky, has now given us a clear, authentic, and thoroughly honest Handel. The author shows us (not too discursively) the colorful London of George II, of Dr. Arne, John Gay, Hogarth, Pope, who praised Handel, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who attacked him enviously.

Handel first visited London in 1710 as a young man of twenty-five, and two years later returned to make that city his home until his death at seventy-four. Over the years he wrote and put on forty operas, mostly as his own ventures, and almost as many oratorios. Some brought patrons flocking, others were ignored. Some brought in gold and others left him bankrupt. He was both lauded and derided by the factions of the King and the Prince of Wales respectively. There were opera wars more bitter than a modern political campaign.

When the Italian opera, which was never wholeheartedly accepted in England, was ridiculed in The Beggar’s Opera, Handel, who by hard necessity knew the public pulse, gradually veered away from the Italian language, the imported Italian castrati and other stars, and wrote oratorios in English. And so Handel’s story is told in this constant struggle to make his music prevail. His pertinacity, his faith in his art, his unostentatious, kindly acts — these delineate in the end the true and lovable Handel.

Similarly, his English public, after having treated him for many years with a good deal of shabby neglect, awoke fully to his genius when he was aged, blind, and practically helpless. The British have sung, played, and listened to Handel with increasing devotion through two centuries, “In the Abbey and in the throats of Englishmen,” writes Mr. Weinstock, “he has been best memorialized.” But other parts of the world, the United States included, hear no more than the merest fraction of the rich treasure Handel left: The Messiah, a few arias, a concerto or two, and the “endless malformations” of the “Largo.” “When the rediscovery of Handel takes place,” so the author predicts, “his whole voice will break on the musical world at once familiar and new, one of the most majestic, tender, and human voices ever lifted in praise of life, of love, of beauty, and of the art of music.”

JOHN N. BURK