Handel was a notorious plagiarist. He didn’t give a second thought to pinching pieces penned by other composers, retrofitting them to his own purposes, and plopping them down in his works as if they were his own invention. As a graduate assistant I once caught an undergrad in a music theory class plagiarizing on his final composition project. I think he failed the class. It was December. Merry Christmas.
Handel lived in different times and the idea that your work must be fully original or else the bits you borrow must be fully and correctly cited (thanks, Kate Turabian) came later.
What we may indignantly call theft, for Handel is a badge of honor. Donald Francis Tovey put it this way: “Handel, like Bach and other great masters, differs from his predecessors and contemporaries in that he is a composer, as most of them are not.”[1] By this he means that the composer doesn’t merely put notes down because, by golly, we’ve got to have some music. Rather a composer takes musical ideas and materials and shapes them into something grand. A composer starts with an eye for what is possible and then goes to work. Tovey demonstrates that it is this je ne se quoi that in have made Handel, Bach, and the other greats rise to the top in history while scads of their contemporaries have been lost in obscurity.
Tovey makes these observations in a discussion of Handel’s Israel in Egypt, which he says is “found to be perhaps one of the most composite and heterogenous works of art in the history of music.”[2] This oratorio, if we can call it that, is generated from so many influences it doesn’t really surprise us that—kitchen sink included—there are hymn tunes in there, and Lutheran ones to boot.
Johann Sebastian Bach is really the champion of using Lutheran chorales in his compositions. Probably the most striking example comes with the discovery of hymn tunes imbedded in the chaconne of the D minor Violin Partita. But other composers got caught up in the act as well. Handel used Lutheran hymns frequently in his works and, what is interesting to me, did so without the audience having the foggiest idea that it was happening. Put a piece in front of a German audience and they’d catch the references. An English audience? Probably not.
So why refer to Lutheran church music in a piece for Londoners? To move people. Tovey insists that Handel “must be judged as a rhetorician, exactly as we would judge of a master of prose or a speaker.”[3] Handel’s music is nothing if it isn’t understood as an eloquent oration intended to persuade listeners of something. In the Baroque period—and other times too—musicians developed all kinds emotionally evocative musical effects, often referred to as the Doctrine of Affections. Handel used musical figures to fantastic effect, knowing what ideas would move an audience which way. Thus when it came to recycling melodies Handel resourcefully used materials he determined would invoke a desired, appropriate result in the listener.
One of my mentors once pointed out that the opening chorus in Israel in Egypt paraphrases the first phrase in Luther’s “Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands.” The text of the chorus samples from Exodus chapters 1 and 2:
And the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage;
And their cry came up unto God.
They [the Egyptians] oppressed them with burdens and made them serve with rigor.
The effect is at once a lament and cry for mercy. Handel takes advantage of the minor key to portray languishing and exhausted Israelite slaves. To him—and this shows his Lutheran upbringing—the hymn tune is the perfect vehicle for the idea of bondage, which is really the whole point of the hymn in the first place. But for Luther, and Handel too, the bonds are just a set up. Israel’s slavery is an opportunity for Moses to liberate the people. Crucifixion leads to the possibility of Resurrection.
This hymn tune, placed in medias res-style at the beginning of the oratorio, foreshadows the final deliverance at the end, when after Pharaoh is drown, the people sing “the horse and his rider has He thrown into the sea.”
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