Handel and the English Chapel Royal

"Well, as there are so many books about Handel, I tried to choose ones that cover different bases. Jonathan Keates’s book is a wonderfully evocative portrait of 18th century London, as well as of Handel the individual. Donald Burrows is an absolutely world-leading scholar and academic, and this is a very serious scholarly book. Of course, they all have their part in trying to get a picture of the man. Burrows took about 25 years to write this book, I think because Handel’s career encompasses so many aspects of music, and of performance style and context. Inevitably, there are bits that have got more attention than others. The vast majority of his music was dramatic in one sense or another – either operas or oratorios – but for the entire time of his life in London, his whole adult life from 1712, he was paid as a member of the royal household as composer to the Chapel Royal, as well as a separate pension as music master to the royal princesses. “Handel was responsible for, if not inventing the oratorio, then fashioning it into its full form” This wasn’t like when Purcell or John Blow held the same post; their job was to run the choir and to provide church music on a regular basis – Handel never did that, he didn’t write a huge amount of church music. He essentially only worked out music for special occasions: weddings, baptisms, memorials, thanksgiving services, things like that. But the relationship with the Chapel Royal provided him not only with a regular income, but with a source of singers. It was a very well-organised institution that provided great training for singers, and also for composers, and provided him with a source for choruses for his oratorios, but also soloists. A number of the men singers in his oratorios had been, and still were, members of the Chapel Royal. So it was a very close relationship, and one that went on throughout his life. Donald Burrows has gone into the detail in a fascinating way. So it provides an important thread. Also, and this is something I’m particularly interested in, it links into the time before and indeed after Handel –because the Chapel Royal was the most important musical institution in England for many centuries, and it was the training ground for all sorts of people like Byrd and Tallis and Gibbons and Morley, and then after the English Civil War, you’ve got Purcell and Blow and others. It’s easy to think of the ages of Handel and Purcell as completely different, but Purcell died in 1895, which is less than 20 years before Handel arrived. So quite a lot of singers would have known Purcell, often as boys, who then worked with Handel – like John Beard, his famous tenor, and Bernard Gates. I find this really interesting, and I think you can hear it in the music. Some of the choices of text. For example: ‘O sing unto the lord,’ as an anthem, which sets the same text that Purcell set. Okay, it’s a psalm text, plenty of people set psalm texts, but I think you can hear the influence in his setting of the English prayer book words, which Purcell did so beautifully. The alternations of solos and choruses and little instrumental interludes… I think there’s a lot of Purcell in Handel’s writing. There’s a wonderful anthem called As Pants the Hart , which Handel – typically – wrote no fewer than five different versions of, often with overlapping music. There’s a movement in there which uses a ground bass in a repeating pattern, which is a real signature of Purcell’s, and otherwise fairly unusual in Handel’s work. Well, in many ways it is. You can’t oversimplify these things, but that’s a good way of putting it. I mean, the English 18th-century oratorio was a new thing, and Handel to a very large extent was responsible for, if not inventing it, then certainly fashioning it into its full form. You can see a progression of style through his English oratorios, I think. I’ve chosen Ruth Smith’s book on Charles Jennens – – but in addition she also wrote a very, very good book called Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought , which says that each of Handel’s oratorios is… not a new form, but a new iteration of that form in its own right. So yes, I think you’re right. They are to a large extent a combination of sacred music – choruses and solos, things like fugues, old-fashioned, rather academic type of things – with drama. Of course we should remember that a large part of the reason for the oratorio coming into existence at all was the simple practical consideration that the theatres were closed in Lent, and the public wanted something to listen to. They couldn’t go to the opera because this was frivolous. So composers turned the wonderfully dramatic stories of the Old Testament – Saul and Samson and all those sorts of things –into dramas. Because they are dramas, there’s no question about that. If you listen to the last scene of Saul , with Saul visiting the Witch of Endor and the death of Jonathan… They are fantastically dramatic, personal pieces. They have often been staged. Even at the time, there was a huge amount of controversy about the extent to which sacred words, the words of the Bible , should be turned into something as light-hearted and flippant as opera. There were lots of people who objected very strongly to this; Handel had to go through all sorts of contortions to pretend that he wasn’t writing opera, when basically that was exactly what he wanted to do! One of the things you need to remember about Handel is that he was absolutely a professional. This is what opera composers did, he was working to a market. In this, he is absolutely in distinction to a composer like Bach, who pursued what, even in his own time, was becoming a slightly old-fashioned model of having a job, and writing to the job. Bach did what all of his predecessors did, which was get a job with a nobleman, or at a court, or as a town composer, something like that, where the employer would tell you what to do, and you did that. “There was a huge amount of controversy about the extent to which the words of the Bible should be turned into something as light-hearted as opera” Handel was a freelance composer. And the fact is, by the 1740s, the fad for Italian opera was on the wane. That was for the usual reasons: it was partly to do with the factions within the royal family, who were always falling out with each other. If the king went to something, the Prince of Wales wouldn’t, and vice versa. It was also – that old standby in musical history – to do with money. Opera was very expensive, as it is now. You have these divas demanding enormous fees, you get various companies having financial crises from time to time and going bankrupt, one of the famous impresarios absconding with the profits and running off to Europe… That’s partly why."