A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Handel

“The master of us all. The greatest composer that ever lived”. Who could this be? Who wrote this? You may be surprised to find out that Beethoven wrote this about Georg Friederich Händel, who was born in 1685, the same year as Bach. I have often remarked that this was an extraordinary coincidence, that the two greatest Baroque composers were born not very far from each other in the same year. What unusual alignment of the stars was responsible for this strange occurrence? It would have been such fun if these two giants had ever met, and as I pointed out in my article about Bach, it nearly happened in 1719. Handel (he deleted the umlaut later in life) was visiting his hometown of Halle in Saxony, and Bach, learning of this, decided to go to see his illustrious colleague. What has never been explained is why Handel left Halle the day before Bach arrived. Was it just a simple mistake, or a quirk of fate, or did Handel decide that this meeting of famous composers was to be avoided? We shall never know, but it is intriguing nonetheless. It is certainly true that the two men were quite dissimilar, as Bach was the epitome of German rectitude with a stable family life and many children, while Handel roamed far afield, lived the second half of his life in England, and, as they say, never married!

I sang several times in the Handel Festival in Halle and got to know that fascinating little town quite well. My first visit was very soon after the Wende, the dramatic end of 45 years of Communist rule in East Germany, and it was amazing to see the emergence of a democratic consumer society grow out of the drab greyness of the old German Democratic Republic. It, of course, had not been democratic at all, and by all accounts was a grim place, whose economy had stood still for over 40 years. Modern comforts were hard to find, although talking at length to many former East Germans, I learned that there were serious positives to life under Communist rule. Everyone had a home, education and the health service were provided free to all, and the bare necessities were available to all citizens. If you kept your nose clean, and made no trouble, life was tolerable, and abject poverty unknown. However, there was no modern infrastructure, food was dull and uninspiring, and life was pretty tedious for most people. Enterprise was frowned on and innovation treated with suspicion, although music was accorded some significance in society.

By the time I arrived for my first visit in 1996, Halle and Eastern Germany were beginning to emerge from decades of neglect, and modern infrastructure was being put in place. Roads, railways and communications were being supplied at a fantastic rate, as the old state was quickly brought into the late 20th Century. It was a fantastic experience to sing Handel’s music in his hometown. I first sang the role of Araspe in his opera ‘Tolomeo’ in the Halle Opera House, conducted by Howard Arman with a fabulous cast, directed by Anthony Pilavachi.

It was an interesting production, with continual costume changes, and we had the best and most fun photo shoot of my career in the Halle Municipal Baths (see photo). I went back the following year for a reprise of the production as well as performances of ‘Judas Maccabeus’ with Arman and ‘Acis and Galatea’ with Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert. While there, I teamed up with a local baroque ensemble Chursächsische Capelle Leipzig, several of whose players were in the Halle Festival Orchestra which played in ‘Tolomeo’, and was invited back to Germany by them to sing Polifemo in Handel’s early Italian version of ‘Acis and Galatea’, a role which covers a huge range from bottom D to top A, neither of which were really in my range. We performed outside in the grounds of a former lunatic asylum in Leipzig and had to compete with the joyous sounds of children playing in a nearby play park! Their squeals and yelps probably covered for my attempts at the very low and high notes! It was a good experience nonetheless, and I was invited back by the ensemble the following year to sing a programme I had devised called ‘Wondrous Machine’ of music by Handel and Purcell which premiered in Schloss Rheinsberg north of Berlin, and was sponsored and promoted by Deutschland Radio Berlin. After the Rheinsberg concert, we all decamped to Halle, where we repeated the programme in the Concert Hall of the Handel House, the newly created museum and concert venue located in the house where Handel was born in 1685. It was a thrill and privilege to sing my last concert in Halle in that splendid house. His father had been a barber-surgeon, and was reasonably well-off, and it was fascinating to think of the young Georg playing in this house.

Talking about ‘Acis and Galatea’, the English language pastoral opera that Handel wrote to a libretto by John Gay (he of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’), reminds me that it was the work by Handel with which I have been most associated, other than ‘Messiah’.  It was first premiered as a one act Masque in 1718 but went through various transformations until it reached the version we now know, in two acts, in 1739. The two acts contrast remarkably, with Act 1 being a delightful pastoral idyll of happy shepherds and their lasses frolicking in rustic simplicity, while Act 2 introduces the menace of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus in pursuit of the comely nymph, Galatea, and the eventual tragedy of his jealous murder of Acis. Handel wrote music of spell-binding beauty for this piece, and the songs and arias for the tenors Acis and Damon and the soprano Galatea are among the finest music he wrote. The introduction of Polyphemus in Act 2 gives free rein to the vocal and theatrical skills of the bass, and I was very lucky to sing this role frequently. The giant’s first appearance, the recitative ‘I rage’ and the aria ‘O Ruddier than the Cherry’ are perfect examples of Handel’s skill in vocal writing and orchestration. The blustery and irate outbursts of the bass are contrasted with a sopranino recorder in counterpoint. The absurdity of the sweet, high-lying recorder playing with the loud bass voice is exquisite, and I found that the more ridiculous the singer’s coloratura the better. This was no time for subtlety in performance, and I had a ball.

My first production was in the delightful back garden of a lovely suburban house in Ealing, where two Australians, David and Lorelle Skewes, set up, with Alan Privett, Jenny Miller and David Roblou, the miracle that became Midsummer Opera, a little festival that punched well above its weight for many years. They used the backdrop of the house with its quaint water feature to act as the set for the opera, as if in an English country house in the 1920s. Galatea was a cute tennis playing gal, while Acis was the neighbour who popped in for a set or two. I was cast as a wealthy cigar-smoking, brandy drinking businessman, who had been playing cricket on the local village green. Still wearing my pads and sporting a W G Grace beard, I was suddenly enamoured of Galatea, and determined to pluck her away from the dull local lad, Acis. Advice from the house butler, Damon, about the ways of women, while plying me with more cognac, failed to help me much, and I was reduced to despatching Acis with a solid square cut to the forehead. As Galatea was transformed into a fountain, the aforementioned water feature was switched on, to beautiful effect.

We toured this production several times, once to the lovely theatre under Blackpool Tower, and once to the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, so far my only appearance at my home city’s opera venue. Sadly, it didn’t really transfer from the intimate garden in Ealing to the widest stage in Scotland and failed to impress the ‘Scotsman’ newspaper’s critic, although he liked my singing!

I have not sung many Handel operas – like Puccini’s operas, the bass is usually treated as a minor character, with all the best music written for the castrato and soprano voices. There are a few exceptions; for example ‘Ariodante’, which is bizarrely set in mediaeval Scotland, has a decent role for the King of Scotland, and I always fancied the idea of singing my nation’s monarch, even though the setting in Scotland could actually be the Moon for all its Scottishness. Sadly, it never came along, and my voice no longer has the flexibility of youth. It’s a shame because I was lucky enough for most of my career to have a very clear coloratura and could sing fast runs very easily.

Indeed, I sang Handel’s ‘Messiah’ on numerous occasions, and my major recording of some of the bass arias, on DG Archiv with Marc Minkowski, is a demonstration of that flexibility, as both my arias (‘The people that walked in Darkness’ and ‘Why do the Nations’) are the fastest on record!

Handel famously composed ‘Messiah’ for performance in Dublin in 1742, at the invitation of the Duke of Devonshire, and no one could have imagined that this work would surpass any other of his compositions, indeed surpass all oratorios in history. The story of Christ’s prophetic birth and his tragic end by crucifixion, only to be redeemed by resurrection, giving hope to mankind, is one of the most perfect musical creations, transforming a standard style of the baroque genre into something timeless and wonderful. Even dull performances of ‘Messiah’ can be made special due to the extraordinary skill with which Handel dealt with the material at his disposal.

He had already written an oratorio with text by Charles Jennens, a wealthy landowner with literary pretensions, and their ‘Saul’ met with great success in 1739. I have sung Saul on several occasions and found it rather good, but the next venture they undertook was in a different league. Jennens was a keen student of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, and his use of that part of the Bible with its prophesies and quasi- mysticism, allowed Handel free rein to use his imagination to create a work unlike any other. There is no characterisation or personification but its journey through the foretelling of Christ’s birth, the actual birth, his life and death, and the redeeming nature of his resurrection, all fit together to form a coherent whole which is quite remarkable. Handel composed various alternative arias and choruses for different voices, and most performances are cut, because the whole work uncut is almost Wagnerian in length. I wrote in ‘A Singer’s Life’ about one concert I sang in Tewkesbury Abbey many years ago, when the conductor insisted upon every chorus and aria with every repeat, which was one of my best performances since I was so angry, but I also sang a full uncut version with John Butt and the Dunedin Consort in the early 2000s in the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, which was absolutely fabulous in telling the story in an utterly cohesive way. I felt like I was part of a storytelling group and the time passed extremely quickly both for the performers and the audience (I hope!).

My first acquaintance with ‘Messiah’ as a soloist was in my second year at St Andrews University, when the town organist Tom Duncan asked me to sing the solos in the first part of the work, the Christmas section. Ever since, I have returned to the piece over and over, and it never ceases to thrill.  It is also much easier to sing at Baroque pitch (down a semitone), especially the cruelly high ‘The Trumpet shall sound’, and I have had some magnificent duels with some of the best trumpet players in the world in this wonderful aria. A personal favourite was in the Hackney Empire in East London, playing to an audience who were not very familiar with classical music. There was a bar at the back of the theatre which remained open throughout the concert, and, as the concert proceeded, the audience, many of them friends of the chorus who were all local, got involved in the show, The famous Hallelujah Chorus, which usually observes the old tradition of the audience standing (supposedly because the King at one of the first performances decided to stretch his legs, necessitating the immediate leaping to their feet of the audience), was in reverse. The audience remained seated throughout but jumped up to give a standing ovation after the final Hallelujah. Not content with this, they were so excited by my competition with the trumpet in the Trumpet Aria that they gave that a standing ovation as well. A never to be forgotten moment!

I always found Handel’s music easier to sing than Bach’s, as he seemed to have more understanding of the human voice. His runs usually go somewhere logical whereas Bach follows his own inner logic, which is often beyond the ken of mere mortals!

I must concur with Beethoven’s views about Handel. Perhaps he wasn’t the very greatest composer that ever lived, but he was jolly good!