14. Style and technique.

Handel's music consolidates the characteristics of the main European styles of his day. A solid foundation in harmony and counterpoint, derived from his early training in Lutheran church music, always underpins the daring melodic invention and mercurial brilliance associated with the best Italian composers, while the French influence is apparent not only in the overtures and dances that follow French models but also whenever a special stateliness of utterance comes to the fore. A specifically English influence is more elusive, but echoes of Purcell, perhaps mediated though his immediate successors, are present in the setting of anthems and canticles, and in the occasional harmonic inflections heard in the English choral dramas, notably Acis and Galatea and Semele. The greatness of the music lies in the assurance with which Handel unites these styles and often quite disparate thematic elements under the control of well-directed harmonic progressions, and fashions melodic lines that are themselves shapely and memorable.

The Handelian synthesis as a whole did not undergo radical transformation during the composer's career, so that his earliest music superbly exemplifies the then current styles (particularly Italian), while by the 1750s it was increasingly heard as possessing the virtues of an earlier age, especially in comparison with the harmonically simpler and melodically florid galant manner spreading through Europe and apparent in England in the work of Arne and John Christopher Smith. Handel was nevertheless alert to changing trends. The first stirrings of the galant in the music of Vinci and Pergolesi are absorbed into several arias in the 1730s, though Handel's repeated-note basses invariably have more harmonic movement than those of the younger Italians, and he still prefers the Corellian walking bass for most movements. His move to oratorio awakened an interest in the choral compositions of earlier generations, producing a mix of older and newer styles which he is sometimes able to exploit for purposes of characterization: archaic for Israelites, modern for heathens. An explicitly galant movement finally appears in his last oratorio Jephtha (the duet ‘These labours past’, with sprightly violin lines and dainty appoggiaturas). The music has that character because it was borrowed from a Galuppi serenata written less than a year earlier, perhaps hinting that Handel would have absorbed more of the latest mannerisms had he been able to continue composing. Indeed there are further touches of the galant in the arias added to the oratorios after 1754, though these may be the result of the creative collaboration with Smith.

Handel's gift for melody is displayed most boldly in arias from his Italian period which are simply unharmonized melodic lines, apart from cadential ritornellos. ‘Ho un non so che nel cor’ (La resurrezione and Agrippina) and ‘Bel piacere’ (Agrippina and Rinaldo) are examples, the latter given extra fascination by its inconstant time signatures. The strength of the melody is such that the absence of harmony is not noticed, or perhaps the melody implies the harmony so clearly it does not need to be realized. Mostly, however, Handel's harmony is explicit, and can support an eloquent major-key melody with simple purity (‘Lascia ch'io pianga’ in Rinaldo, ‘Verdi prati’ in Alcina) or grip the listener with minor-key chromaticism and suspensions in a great lament or heartfelt plea (‘Voi ch'udite’ in Agrippina, ‘Soll mein Kind’ in the Brockes Passion, re-used in Esther).

In choral and orchestral movements Handel was freed from the structural constraints of the formal aria and could make the sheer sonority of massed forces an essential element of the music, sometimes (in choruses) marking key points in the verbal text. Supremely typical of ‘Handelian’ style are the choruses in which elemental thematic tags are developed into extended structures through an innate confidence in the power of plain diatonic harmony. ‘Sing ye to the Lord’ in Israel in Egypt and the Hallelujah chorus in Messiah are deservedly well-known examples, as is the fabulous opening of the coronation anthem Zadok the Priest, in which the underlying harmony of the orchestral introduction is temporarily subverted to give maximum impact to the return of the tonic at the entry of the chorus. But minor-key and chromatic harmony in choruses are also just as congenial to Handel as in arias (‘Ye sons of Israel mourn’ in Esther is a fine early example of a choral lament) and can take unsettling forms, such as the quasi-recitative style and uncertain tonality of ‘He sent a thick darkness’ in Israel in Egypt, or the unexpected tonal shifts in the final section of ‘Tyrants now’ in Hercules, bringing out the sense of hopelessness in the words ‘The world's avenger is no more’. Handel's formal fugal choruses are most effective when they are related to a dramatic context (as in ‘He trusted in God’ in Messiah, or ‘And ev'ry step he takes’ in Belshazzar) but otherwise may display only worthy competence. The fact that several such movements are based on material by other composers suggest that exercises in abstract counterpoint did not hold the same interest for Handel as for his great contemporary. (He is not known to have written a formal canon: the coda to the G major Chaconne, hwv442/2, comes nearest, and like the occasional canonic points in the Italian cantatas, is only in two parts.) He did however make good use of ground basses, both for jubilation (‘The many rend the skies’ in Alexander's Feast and ‘To song and dance’ in Samson) and lamentation (‘Ah, wretched Israel’ in Judas Maccabaeus, ‘How long O Lord’ in Susanna – the latter using a chromatic bass similar to that of Dido's lament in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas).

Handel's technique in writing down his compositions can be studied in his autograph scores, the vast majority of which from about 1707 onwards are still happily extant. His practice in the case of large-scale vocal works, already set by the time he came to Italy, was to draft whole acts quickly and fluently, but entering only the words of the recitatives. He would then return to fill in the orchestration and set the recitatives. (This process of composition is recorded explicitly for later works in the dated notes made by Handel himself to record the progress of composition.) His writing is generally clear, but often untidy, and the process of preparing material for the performers to work from therefore always began with a fair copy of the autograph being made by a professional copyist, who would also (perhaps with assistance) prepare the vocal and instrumental partbooks. Before performance any of this material could be subjected to cuts, insertions, transpositions or other substantial alterations, which was not necessarily entered in the original autograph. Changes for revivals might be on a similar scale, but whereas these can usually be attributed to the requirements of new singers or other practical considerations, Handel's pre-performance alterations seem often to have been made for purely artistic reasons. There are cases of Handel developing sketches to produce a polished result (an example in Susanna is set out in Dean, G1959, pp.552–3) but in others the first draft may itself be radically amended, with new material being incorporated (Roberts, D1987, analyses a case in Serse). Several scores (including Tamerlano, Scipione, Saul and Solomon) show massive restructuring before performance. This kind of compositional upheaval sets Handel apart from his contemporaries (autographs of operas and oratorios by other composers, insofar as they are available for study, usually exhibit only minor pentimenti) and show a self-critical composer striving for ideals in overall form as well as in matters of detail. In alterations for revivals, when the enthusiasm of creation had abated, these ideals often seem compromised, perhaps in pragmatic recognition that performances and audiences did not always share them.

Handel, George Frideric