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Alexander's Feast
BG-666/7, original LP cover

Alexander's Feast
or the Power of Musick
Wrote in Honor of St. Cecilia By Mr. Dryden
Set to Musick by
Mr. Handel
With the Recitativos, Songs, Symphonys and Choruses for Voices & Instruments

Alexander's Feast, or The Power of Music, a setting of a poem by John Dryden written in honor of St. Cecilia, was completed by George Frederic Handel (1685-1759) on January 17, 1736 and produced at Covent Garden in London on February 19. Much interest must have been aroused by the announcement of this work, for the London Daily Post reported:

The work became one of Handel's most admired. It was produced once more in February, and three times in March. Later Handel repeatedly revived it whenever, with his audiences diminishing, he wanted a "sure-fire" attraction. Altogether it was given eighteen times between 1737 and 1743, and eight times in the following decade. It was published in full in Handel's lifetime, a notable distinction accorded to only one other of his choral works, Acis and Galatea. Testimony to its continued appeal is the fact that it was one of four choral works by Handel which the Baron van Swieten in Vienna, between 1788 and 1790, commissioned Mozart to re-orchestrate to fit Viennese tastes. Today it ranks with Handel's greatest masterpieces. Used in the present performance, of course, is Handel's original scoring.

As an ode in honor of the patron saint of music, Handel's work is the climax of a long tradition. In 16th century France poets and composers created such odes, generally to be performed on St. Cecilia's birthday, November 22, and Orlando Lasso won a prize for such a composition. In 1683 a London group, The Musical Society, began a series of annual musical celebrations of St. Cecilia's day. Henry Purcell composed four odes for these occasions (the most splendid of which, Hail Bright Cecilia (1692) and Welcome to All the Pleasures, were recorded by Vanguard with a roster of early music pioneers including Alfred Deller). The poem by Dryden which Handel used for Alexander's Feast had been written specifically for setting to music, as a St. Cecilia's day celebration, and it had been set as such by Jeremiah Clarke in 1697 and Thomas Clayton in 1711. The version Handel used in 1736 was slightly rearranged by his librettist, Newburgh Hamilton.

Perhaps the interest aroused in London at the announcement of Handel's Alexander's Feast was due to the fact that the public was familiar with the earlier settings by other composers, and was eager to hear what Handel would do with the poem in a "new" or "modern" style. Handel more than fulfilled the expectations with a work of broadly varied emotions, intense drama, and exalted beauty, and a spaciousness and grandeur such as had never been heard before in odes for St. Cecilia. It was also his most splendid setting up to that time of an English text, and exhibited the rich and profound choral writing that was to be a distinctive aspect of his later English oratorios. Alexander's Feast is not to be confused with a much lesser composition by Handel composed in 1739, called Ode to St. Cecilia's Day, and also using a Dryden poem.

Handel, born in Halle in Germany, and musically educated in Germany and Italy, had taken up permanent residence in England in 1712. The times knew nothing of the distinction that (unfortunately, perhaps), exists today between "classical" and "popular" composers. A composer was on the one hand supposed to be a complete master of his art, aiming at its highest standards, and was also supposed to improve on the past in order to please the listeners of his time. In no country so much as prosperous, mercantile England was the composer so much in the center of public life, both thriving in the stature accorded him and receiving the buffets and blows of changing fashions, even of political quarrels. Music was both "art" and "business," with the latter term not having the invidious connotations it has today, when the "popular" composer feels himself often an operator on the machine belt of an "entertainment factory". Handel organized his own company of singers and produced his own works, much as Shakespeare, a little over a century before, had been a stockholder in his own acting company and so a producer of his own plays for the London public. Handel, no shrinking violet in either physique or temperament, enjoyed this hectic life dependent on box-office, in which a man could hear the merry jingle of coins one year and go bankrupt the next. His first successes in England had been with a stream of works aimed at filling the demand, largely Tory and aristocratic, for operas on pseudo-classical themes and given in Italian. The form had its severe limitations. The most important musical unit was the aria, with its opening often repeated, da capo, at the close, thus enabling the prima donna singer to add showy vocal embellishments. The ensemble and chorus played a minor role. And while Handel's lovely melodies were much appreciated, the attention of the audience was focused on the spectacular stage effects and even more on the virtuosity of the singers, who were imported "stars," many of them castrati, with astounding if often mechanical technical powers (judging from contemporary descriptions).

Handel's own political leanings were more Whig or middle-class than Tory, and by the 1730's he was finding himself under attack from two sides. His more Tory-minded antagonists were sponsoring a rival operatic theatre. And on the other hand Whig journalists like Addison were engaging in a running criticism of the low intellectual level and sensationalism of the operatic stage, pointing up the added senselessness of performing drama in a foreign language. Nor would a turn by Handel to the writing of works in English make the middle-class public entirely happy. For there was here a Puritan and Calvinist current which looked on any kind of theatre, and on music itself with the exception of presumably old style hymns and liturgy, as suspicious and even morally dangerous.

Something of the arguments and even mud-slinging that went on at the time can be gathered from a defense of Handel written in 1734 under the pen name of Hurlothrumbo Johnson, Esq. This lengthy satire lists various accusations against the composer:

Regardless of such defenses, the party battles over opera were only helping along the ruin of the form itself, so far as England was concerned. A letter written in 1735 reports: "Handel, whose excellent compositions have often pleased our ears, and touched our Hearts, has this Winter sometimes performed to an almost empty Pitt."

In this context, the success of Alexander's Feast, in 1736, could be called an historic turning point. Handel had written works to English texts, such as the Chandos Anthems (1717-20), the splendid Coronation Anthems for George II (1727) and various wedding, birthday and funeral odes and anthems for the royal family, and he had made tentative moves in the direction of English oratorio, or Biblical music-drama, with Esther (1732) and Deborah (1733). But the public approbation of Alexander's Feast, plus the fact that in it a new, more lofty and profound approach to music found a triumphant expression, made it the first high peak in the musical mountain range consisting of works like Saul (1739), Israel in Egypt (1739), Messiah (1742), Samson (1743) and Belshazzar (1744).

Alexander's Feast is not listed today, nor was it spoken of in Handel's own time, as an oratorio, a form looked upon in some circles as a disguised form of theatrical music. But aesthetically it belongs with the great oratorios. While it does not call for scenery or stage action, it is an intensely dramatic and pictorially vivid work. And more important, the new and grander style of writing is here fully formed. Although fine solo voices are required, there is less emphasis on sheer virtuosity and the move is away from the da capo aria form. Its first performance introduced Handel's "find," the English tenor John Beard, who would be an important performer in the later oratorios. The chorus now plays a big role, and its music has a rich contrapuntal texture. Replacing the chain of arias, great blocks of musical form take shape, integrating recitative, aria and chorus. Balancing the arias there are powerful accompanied recitatives, quite different from the dry secco recitative. These recitatives accompanied by the full orchestra attain the melodic beauty and strength of arias, and at the same time their comparative rhythmic freedom enables the composer to explore, musically, reflective inner moods. The orchestration, perhaps inspired by the theme of the "power of music," is unusually rich and colorful. Basically it employs the standard Handel orchestra, with violins violas and oboes, and cellos and basses in the continuo. But in various sections Handel adds flutes, bassoons, trumpets, and horns, calls for obbligatos by solo instruments including the cello, divides the violas, and indicates where he wants and doesn't want organ and .bassoons to be added to the continuo.

In form, Alexander's Feast can be said to combine the spaciousness and heroic-tragic drama of an oratorio with the musical concentration of an ode. It is an almost symphonic conception which can be said to consist of five "movements," each combining recitative, aria and chorus. The first expatiates on the mood of a happy celebration. The second is tragic. The third is sensuously lyrical. The fourth is in a mood of dramatic unrest. The fifth is a resolution of conflict in a grand and transcendental joy.

The three-part orchestral overture is followed by what can be called, in a Handel work, a "vocal overture," of a tenor recitative and a brightly florid tenor aria, taken up by chorus. The secco tenor recitative then introduces the musician Timotheus and the theme of music. The accompanied recitative for soprano, with strings, expands on the power of music, and in "The list'ning crowd" there is a mighty depiction of the shouts of the crowd echoing in the vaulted hall. The chorus here is divided into seven parts (two soprano, alto, two tenor, two bass), with striking opposition of male and female voices, until all coalesce. The high notes of the following soprano aria, "With ravish'd ears" attain an ethereal quality, enhanced by the subtle instrumentation of a tutti: strings and oboes, alternating with four solo violins playing in unison. The secco tenor recitative then introduces the rollicking air and chorus celebrating Bacchus, adorned with oboes, horns and bassoon. This ends what might be called the "first movement."

The touching mood now set by the secco tenor recitative, "Sooth'd with the sound," is developed by the beautiful soprano recitative, "He chose a mournful Muse," accompanied by violins and violas. This leads to the great tragic aria, "He sung Darius, great and good," in an instrumental frame of haunting rising and falling figures played by the violins in thirds, with the violas later adding their voice. The soprano recitative over sustained string chords continues the mood. This reaches a climax with the splendid Larghetto contrapuntal chorus, "Behold Darius great and good," in which the rising and falling figure of the preceding aria reappears but set for a richer orchestral sound of oboes added to strings.

The tenor recitative, "The mighty master smiled to see," is a short transition to a "third movevent," celebrating love in sensuously lyrical music. Notable is the lovely cello obbligato to the tender soprano aria, "Softly sweet in Lydian measures," and this is followed by the sparkling tenor aria, "War, he sung, is toil and trouble," with a skipping and leaping accompaniment by the violins in unison. The chorus enters, "The many rend the skies," with noble, sustained lines over exited strings, and then a blaze of counterpoint. The happy soprano aria, "The prince, unable to conceal his pain," is again accompanied by leaping unison violins. There is a change to a more tender mood in "At length with wine and love oppressed," and then the chorus returns with "The many rend the skies" to end the "third movement" and Part One of Handel's ode.

With a Beethoven-like sense of drama, Handel constructs Part Two with two sharply contrasting movements. Agitated, ominous unrest is followed by a mighty outburst of jubilation. The first of these movements is eloquently analyzed by Winton Dean in Handel's Dramatic Oratorio's and Masques (London, 1959)-

Handel may now be accused of treating the sense of Dryden's text rather freely, in order to build up his glorious finale. The accompanied tenor recitative, "Give the vengeance due," is a transition to a more peaceful mood, although the orchestra illustrates "how they toss their torches on high." The ensuing lively tenor aria expresses a heartfelt "joy," but not the "furious joy" of the text. Even more tranquil and lovely is the soprano aria and grand chorus, hardly evoking the "firing" of "another Troy," but rather, in the beautiful orchestral figure, subtly evoking a memory of the rhythm of "none but the brave" from the very opening of the ode. All this of course is no oversight on Handel's part, but a matter of his own feeling for the kind of emotions he wants to arouse in concluding this mighty tribute to the power of music. Following this, text and music join hands again. In the tenor recitative, "Thus long ago," the flutes whimsically illustrate the "heaving bellows" and "breathing flute"; the following chorus, "At last divine Cecilia came," could well serve as a great finale, with its splendid prelude and then, fugue on "with nature's mother wit, and art's unknown before." Certainly in Handel's mind must have been the thought that fugal counterpoint was one of the "arts" not known in ancient times. But splendor follows on splendor, with the short tenor and bass recitative then introducing a truly mighty closing double fugue, begun by the soloists and taken up by the chorus, "Let old Timotheus yield the prize."

— S. W. Bennett

Originally released as Vanguard/The Bach Guild BG-666/7

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