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Handel: Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne
BGS-70661, cover from the first stereo release of this recording

George Frederick Handel composed the Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne in London in January 1713. He was then twenty-eight years old, a composer of ripe powers who, born in Germany, had traveled, absorbed everything that the Italian masters could teach him, and left his own mark on Italian music. His official position was that of Kapellmeister to the Elector Georg of Hanover, and he was on his second visit to England, the first having been a six-month stay in 1710. He was now overstaying his second leave, attracted by the bustling life and opportunities he saw in England, so different from the narrow horizons of a stuffy German principality. The Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne was well received at the Court, and after another celebration piece of the same year, the Utrecht Te Deum, the Queen settled on him a yearly pension of two hundred pounds.

In 1714 Queen Anne died, and Handel's Hanover master became George I of England. The monarch's annoyance at his Kapellmeister's extended vacation from his German duties soon wore off (although probably not, despite the colorful story about this, because of the attractions of the Water Music, composed for a royal river party). Handel sank deep roots in England. For audiences that found the heritage of Purcell (who had died in 1695) too quiet and unexciting, he provided a stream of operas full of lovely musical invention, set to Italian librettos, spectacular in scenery, and employing the talents of the most brilliant imported vocal virtuosi. Tunes from these operas became popular airs in the homes. Despite his financial ups and downs as the producer of his own theatre works, he won the solid affection of the public as the reigning composer in England. When George I died in June 1727, Handel composed a set of four Anthems for the coronation of George II and Caroline at Westminster Abbey. Three of these Coronation Anthems are presented on this record.

A notables aspect of both the birthday Ode for Queen Anne and the Anthems, along with the inspired beauty of the music, is that they were major settings by Handel of English texts, composed at a time when most of his vocal music was being written to Italian words. And if it was the great Biblical oratorios, from the middle 1730's to his death in 1759, that established Handel as the great "English composer" in the deepest sense, we can also find in these earlier works, like the Ode and Anthems, an important thread of Handel's development as an English composer. The matter is not simply genius for seizing on the spirit of a national occasion, and making something deep, grand and permanent of it. The birthday Ode for Queen Anne shows the Italian influences on Handel, but also lets us see the composer aptly taking up and expanding the form and style of the Purcell festival odes. And in the contrapuntal splendor of the Coronation Anthems, we can hear the ring of the great choral writing in the later oratorios. These Anthems were repeatedly performed in later years, not only at public events but also at meetings of amateur choral societies.

The motif of the Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, expressed in its bubbling, entrancing joyousness, is that of Anne as the creator of "a lasting peace on earth." The curiously contemporary ring of this is intensified when the last solo proclaims "Let the United Nations combine." One may call this parallel to the present an accident of words, and think ruefully of the wars that have taken place since 1713. Yet it is something to know that this vision was being born more than two centuries ago. And the mood of the Ode is that of the great relief in England over the end of the twelve-year "War of the Spanish Succession," which had involved all that nations of middle and western Europe and even the American colonies, (although the official signing of the Peace of Utrecht would take place some months later). As for the musical expression, it was a feat, which few others could match (like Purcell, before Handel, and J. S. Bach in his own time); to preserve throughout so intense a feeling of happiness, with the interest never flagging, and idea following on idea.

If the engaging floridity of the solo vocals lines suggests Handel's operatic style, and the choral writing is operatically simple, almost transparent, there is a definite link to the Purcell odes in the close marriage between solo lines and chorus. The Ode is beautifully conceived in terms of seven movements, each of which starts with one or more solo voices and closes with chorus. The repeated lines, "The day that gave great Anna birth," occurring in each movement, are each time given a different musical setting. The melodic fund is lavish. There are beautiful instrumental touches, as in the solo trumpet obbligato in the opening movement, and lilting dance rhythms, as in the siciliana in "Kind Health descends." In the last section, "United Nations shall combine," the chorus divides for fourteen bars into two antiphonal choruses.

Bach: Cantatas 54 & 170
BG-550, original LP cover

The two solo cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) presented here are ascribed by Spitta to his "Leipzig period," 1727-34, described by him as "the richest and most fruitful years of Bach's life." The small forces that Bach employs in these works give them a chamber quality, and like much chamber music literature, they reveal deeply introspective thinking.

The cantatas vividly illustrate two different sides of Bach's religious art: the close attention to details of the text, illustrating it with musical effects that have an almost pictorial quality, which Albert Schweitzer annotated exhaustively; and the profound intellectual qualities that Spitta so exalts.

In the Cantata No. 170 "Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust" (O Peace and Serenity, for which the Soul Lovingly Yearns), the timbre and rhythm of the very opening, with oboe and strings in a rocking rhythm, evoke a feeling of peace and contentment, while the entry of the voice adds a note of yearning; the balance of the aria is a beautiful working out of this conflict. Bach treats the following recitative so explosively that it seems the words, while part of religious tradition, were apt for his own time. With the second aria, there is a reversal of orchestral forces, as the strings drop to the bass, and the organ, which had formerly played the continuo, now rises to a brilliant obbligato part. How effectively the organ phrases illustrate "Wie jammern" (How I lament), the clamoring on the sympathy of the good by the misguided! The aria proceeds as a clash between the solo singer and the obbligato organ, a remarkable psychological portrayal of unrest and resolution. The following recitative, which is accompanied, is more peaceful. And in the closing aria, Bach shows that having made his own rules, he can break them. The words at the opening tell of how painful life appears, but the music belies this, expressing a robust joy in life. This music, like all great music employing words or story, embodies direct illustrative material but only as an element in a musical structure, and transcends words as it reaches the sublime.

The score employed in this recording of the Cantata No. 54 "Widerstehe doch der Sünde" is not that of the Bach-Gesellschaft, which was shown by Friedrich Smend (Bach Jahrbuch 1940-48) to be based on a rather carelessly made copy, but on a manuscript discovered later in the Bibliothèque Royale at Brussels. It opens with what Schweitzer describes as

The music, as it proceeds, also portrays, somewhat more tenderly, the anguish of the heart. Smend proved that this aria had originally been written for the lost St. Mark's Passion, on the text "Falsche Welt, dein schmeichelnt Küssen . . ." Thus the music that Bach had originally written on the theme of the kiss of Judas became a more general exhortation to withstand temptation and sin. The recitative that follows begins, in the words of Arnold Schering, in "an almost impersonally calm, declamatory style," with a touch of the "visionary" as the instrumental accompaniment makes itself heard. In the instrumental beginning of the final aria, Schering finds that "the chromatically descending quarter notes represent sin … the sixteenths continually circling about a single note represent the devil, while the bass stamps down in restless quarter notes." With the entry of the singer, a fugue begins its soaring flight, with searing dissonances, and with the appearance of the word "davongemacht," "the events develop at a breathless pace, and there is no end to the surprises, including overwhelmingly complicated canons, until the composition is at an end."

The Agnus Dei from Bach's Mass in b minor, composed in 1733, was remodeled from the alto aria in the Ascension oratorio, "Ach bleibe doch, mein liebstes Leben." As in the case of the adapted aria in Cantata No. 54, it perfectly fits the text of its new setting.

– S.W. Bennett

Originally released as Vanguard/The Bach Guild BG-661 (tracks 1-7) and BG-550

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