Books › Musical Courier 1907-05-08: Vol 54 Iss 19, 1907 › scan 20
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Musical Courier 1907-05-08: Vol 54 Iss 19, 1907
18 lines. Read by computer on 24 September 2026, twice; the two readings disagreed in places. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1HANDEL—THIEF OR KLEPTOMANIAC?
2BY ERNEST NEWMAN IN THE BIRMINGHAM (ENGLAND) DAILY POST.
4Musicians have long known that Handel was in the habit of laying his predecessors and contemporaries under contribution, taking any theme of theirs that he thought would suit his own purposes; but few have realized the extent to which he carried this practice. Chrysander, the author of the standard biography of Handel, went fairly exhaustively into the question, and further brought out, as a supplement to his monumental edition of Handel's works, five volumes of compositions by other writers to which Handel was particularly indebted—Erba's "Magnificat," Uri's "Te Deum," a serenata by Stradella, a collection of duets by Cari, and some harpsichord pieces by Muffat. Max Seiffert, who continued Chrysander's work after his death, has added to those a reprint of an opera, "Octavia," by Keiser, who was director of the Hamburg Opera when Handel, as a very young man, played the violin in the orchestra there. These names by no means exhaust the list of musicians from whom Handel borrowed—to call the process by the most polite name one can apply to it. Dr. Crotch, in 1831, gave the names of twenty-six others—Josquin de Prez, Palestrina, Turini, Carissimi, Calvisius, Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Purcell, Locke, Caldara, Colonna, Cesti, Kerl, Habermann, Kuhnau, Telemann, Graun, Mondeville, Porta, Pergolesi, Vinci, Astorga, Bononcini and Hasse—and still had breath enough left to add an eloquent "et cetera." But the average modern amateur has naturally not taken the trouble to go to Chrysander's or any other collection and systematically compare Handel's works with those of other musicians; and if he has had a vague feeling now and then that Handel's procedure was hardly honest, he has been consoled by the plea of the apologists that these little tricks of annexation were really not looked upon as so very immoral in the eighteenth century, and that Handel really conferred a favor on the people he stole from—taking their dross, turning it into pure gold, and so giving the lucky victims an immortality they would otherwise have never possessed. A recently published book by Sedley Taylor, "The Indebtedness of Handel to Works by Other Composers" (Cambridge University Press, 12s. 6d. net), will dissipate these little fictions for any ordinarily candid reader. In the first place, by giving extensive quotations in musical type from Handel's works and those of the other musicians, Mr. Taylor, for the first time, makes it possible for the plain man to see the evidence for himself without the labor and expense that were previously involved in collecting it; in the second place, he reviews the question of Handel's moral guilt or innocence very calmly and judicially, and pronounces what will probably be the final verdict upon it. "As matters stand," he sums up, "the fact remains that Handel accepted, indeed practically claimed, merit for what he must have known was not his own work. That this was wrong can, it appears to me, be denied by those only who are prepared to estimate the morality of an act according to the amount of genius shown in performing it." one of two readings
5Musicians have long known that Handel was in the habit of laying his predecessors and contemporaries under contribution, taking any theme of theirs that he thought would suit his own purposes; but few have realized the extent to which he carried this practice. Chrysander, the author of the standard biography of Handel, went fairly exhaustively into the question, and further brought out, as a supplement to his monumental edition of Handel's works, five volumes of compositions by other writers to which Handel was particularly indebted—Erba's "Magnificat," Uri's "Te Deum," a serenata by Stradella, a collection of duets by Cari, and some harpsichord pieces by Muffat. Max Seiffert, who continued Chrysander's work after his death, has added to those a reprint of an opera, "Octavia," by Keiser, who was director of the Hamburg Opera when Handel, as a very young man, played the violin in the orchestra there. These names by no means exhaust the list of musicians from whom Handel borrowed—to call the process by the most polite name one can apply to it. Dr. Crotch, in 1631, gave the names of twenty-six others—Josquin de Prez, Palestrina, Turini, Carissimi, Calvisius, Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Purcell, Locke, Caldara, Colonna, Cesti, Kerl, Habermann, Kuhnau, Telemann, Graun, Mondeville, Porta, Pergolesi, Vinci, Astorga, Bononcini and Hasse—and still had breath enough left to add an eloquent "et cetera." But the average modern amateur has naturally not taken the trouble to go to Chrysander's or any other collection and systematically compare Handel's works with those of other musicians; and if he has had a vague feeling now and then that Handel's procedure was hardly honest, he has been consoled by the plea of the apologists that these little tricks of annexation were really not looked upon as so very immoral in the eighteenth century, and that Handel really conferred a favor on the people he stole from—taking their dross, turning it into pure gold, and so giving the lucky victims an immortality they would otherwise have never possessed. A recently published book by Sedley Taylor, "The Indebtedness of Handel to Works by Other Composers" (Cambridge University Press, 12s. 6d. net), will dissipate these little fictions for any ordinarily candid reader. In the first place, by giving extensive quotations in musical type from Handel's works and those of the other musicians, Mr. Taylor, for the first time, makes it possible for the plain man to see the evidence for himself without the labor and expense that were previously involved in collecting it; in the second place, he reviews the question of Handel's moral guilt or innocence very calmly and judicially, and pronounces what will probably be the final verdict upon it. "As matters stand," he sums up, "the fact remains that Handel accepted, indeed practically claimed, merit for what he must have known was not his own work. That this was wrong can, it appears to me, be denied by those only who are prepared to estimate the morality of an act according to the amount of genius shown in performing it." one of two readings
7The suggestion that in some cases it was not Handel who stole from his contemporaries, but they who stole from him, need hardly be considered. We have frequently indubitable external evidence that the other works were published or performed before those of Handel in which the resemblance occurs; and this is sufficient to make it a priori most probable that in other cases in which we have not this evidence it was Handel who did the annexation. It is far more likely that one man should steal the ideas of a dozen others than that the dozen should, by pure coincidence, unite in stealing from the one; while in cases of parallelism between Handel and composers already dead the imitation could not have been on the part of the latter. The theory of unconscious reminiscence is equally invalid. The popular notion is that Handel may have preserved in his memory, almost without knowing it, a few bars of a theme by some one else, which, years after, he would work up into a masterpiece of his own. What he really did was sometimes to utilize not fragments but whole pages of other men's work. A trio of Muffat, for example, became the trio in the overture to "Theodora." The march in "Joshua" is purely and simply a rigaudon of Muffat. A fantaisie by the same composer went to make the allegro of the overture to "Samson." Great stretches of "Jephtha" were stolen unblushingly from some Masses by Habermann, and long passages in "Theodora" from some vocal duets by Clari. A copy of Graun's "Oratorio Passionale" having come into the arch thief's hands, he cribbed from it right and left for his "Alexander's Feast," "Wedding Anthem," "Atalanta," "Giustino" and "The Triumph of Time and Truth." In "Israel in Egypt" are are embodied many pages from a serenata by Stradella, a "Te Deum" by Uri, a "Magnificat" by Erba, and an organ canzona by Kerl—the chorus "Egypt was glad when they departed," for example, being just a reprint of the canzona "with hardly any alterations beyond what were required to adapt an organ piece for performance by voices." None of these quotations—some of them occupying several pages—could be accounted for by the long arm of reminiscence, even if there were not a piece of evidence that is conclusive as to the systematic nature of Handel's thefts. In the Cambridge Fitzwilliam Museum are a number of his autograph books, the contents of which were at one time thought to be rough sketches for his own compositions. Many of these passages have now been identified as quotations from the works of other writers—stolen property of with Handel meant to make use when a suitable occasion should come. In the case of the chorus, "Theme sublime
9
11of endless praise," in "Jephtha," which was taken from an "Osanna in excelsis" in Habermann's first Mass, the words have actually been noted above the theme in the autograph book—showing that the appropriation was deliberate and the application of the theme a matter of calculation.
13How are we to explain this singular dishonesty—for all attempts to make it out to be anything else but dishonesty have failed. It is clear that even in Handel's day the musical thief was despised as a thief; it was for claiming a madrigal of Lotti's as his own that Bononcini had to leave England in disgrace and something like ruin. That Handel, knowing Bononcini's fate, should still have gone on seizing other men's property does not prove, as some apologists will have it, that the practice was not really reprehended in that epoch, but simply that Handel was, in this respect, as in others, a man of more than average audacity and self confidence. He was a man of the world as well as a musician, a cool and courageous gambler with fortune. It will not do, either, to argue with Mr. A. J. Balfour that Handel would not have left these incriminating extracts among his papers at his death if he had felt there was anything immoral in his actions. Mr. Balfour forgets that Handel copied the quotations into his autograph books without the composers' names, and that in an age when so little music was published the chances were very remote of any casual reader of the books recognizing the real authorship of the extracts. Nor can we believe for a moment, with Chrysander that Handel's object was to "save from perishing musical ideas which he saw lying half developed or in an environment foreign to them." If Handel had generously wished to make Habermann and Muffat and the rest of them mortal he would surely not have taken every pains to conceal their co-operation from the audiences of his own time, and have left it to musicians a hundred years later to discover the act of benevolence, sometimes by sheer accident. There can be no doubt that when Handel stole it was for his own benefit, not for that of his victims.
15A possible explanation is that he was often compelled to turn out an oratorio or an opera at short notice, and so would be glad of the labor saving devices offered him by his well stored autograph books. His hurry, indeed, is accountable for many of the sins he committed against art. The good souls who think the chorus, "All We Like Sheep," in "The Messiah," to be truly devotional music, as well as those who regard it as a nonsensical perversion of the meaning of the words, will be glad to know that the absurdity comes from Handel having set the words to the music of an old duet of his own, of which the poetic subject was "a defiance of blind love and cruel beauty, whose tyranny and deceits are roundly denounced from personal experience." If we inquire why there should be such a florid run on the word "purify" in the chorus, "And He shall purify the sons of Levi," we learn that the music was originally set to the words, "L'occaio ha nell'aurora, e perde in un soldi la primavera," where the run was quite appropriate to the word "primavera" ("spring"). "For unto us a child is born" was taken from another Italian duet, "No, di voi non vo fidarmi." People who have smiled at the ludicrous emphasis given to "For" each time it occurred will understand it when they see how appropriate that emphasis is to the word "No." Why, again, the curt and jaunty detached phrases to which "Unto us—a son is given" are set? Merely because the original words made not one but two phrases—"Cieco Amor, crudel belta ("blind Love, cruel beauty"). The "grotesquely inappropriate" run, as Mr. Taylor rightly calls it, on the word "easy" in "His yoke is easy, His burthen is light," is explained by the fact that in the original setting it came on the word "ride" ("laughs")—the whole sentence being "Puel fior che all'alba ride il sole poi l'uccide, e tomba ha nella sera," which does not mean anything like "His yoke is easy, His burthen is light," but simply "The flower which laughs at dawn is killed by the sun and finds a grave in the evening." The music of the duet, "O death, where is thy sting?" actually came from an earlier duet on the subject of "an exhortation to abandon love." Handel, in fact, was pressed for time, and was not always too particular as to the congruity between his words and his music.
17This haste, then, may account in part for some of his thefts from other composers, but, after all, it really leaves the whole problem just where it was. Handel could not always have been in a desperate hurry; while the autograph books are damning evidence of the systematic way in which he used to collect long passages which in some cases he would not employ until years later. On the other hand, it is absurd to suppose that Handel needed to tap other men's brains in this way. He had more music, and better music, in him than any of the men he robbed; we are bound to think that had he chosen to do so he could have built his oratorios just as well out of his own material as out of that of other people. Is the final explanation just this—that we are face to face with a perversity of the moral sense indeed, but one that deserves to be called not so much immoral as unmoral—i.e., Handel found a peculiar gratification, which it is impossible for us now to understand, in this quite unnecessary filching of other men's ideas and subsequent manipulation of them into ideas of his own? Can we employ a modern distinction of criminal psychology and call him not a thief but a kleptomaniac? A thief steals because he really needs what he steals, and paradoxical justice punishes him for it; a kleptomaniac steals because he is not in need of the article he takes, and the moralist therefore does not punish him, but sympathizes with him and explains him scientifically. The parallel is complete in Handel's case, for whereas the whole world shrieks "plagiarist" at the poor little composer who happens to put a theme from a bigger man in a work of his own, people smile indulgently at the colossal impudence of Handel's thefts. He resembles not the shop girl who takes a sealskin jacket belonging to her employer because she has not a jacket of her own to wear, but the lady of independent means who slips a packet of hairpins or a silk blouse into her muff when no one is looking. He is not so much a music thief, in fact, as a music lifter of depraved tendencies. No one ever stole so systematically and so extensively, yet at the same time so needlessly. The passion for the
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