Every note that Handel ever composed has been placed under the microscope by musicologists; every detail of his biography has been examined by scholars, thinkers and poets from every conceivable angle, and they have recorded their findings in countless books and articles - intellectual, naively admiring, critical, reverent, sober and emotional. But all this learned activity has not brought us any closer to the centre of Handel's work, namely Man himself: this is something that completely eludes the academics. We have lots of information about all manner of potential influences, but what use is this knowledge if we don’t know the nature and shape of the vessel into which it all flows?
What we really want to know is: who actually was George Frideric Handel? If only we could ask him in person! Only one of his contemporaries had the initiative to ask him directly: Johann Mattheson. It goes without saying that the avid and omnipresent polymath of Baroque music did not fail to ask Handel for an autobiographical contribution to his contemporary history of music, Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (1740). But Handel refused to testify. Would everything really have been clear if the composer had cooperated? He might have responded with comments like: “Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it, I know not. Cod knows.” In his oft-ridiculed English with its strong German accent, this is what he said about his work on the Messiah, which he composed between 22nd August and 14th September 1741. And once he had finished the Hallelujah, he declared with tears in his eyes: “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself seated on His throne, with his Company of Angels“. His faithful servant Peter le Blond, to whom Handel left all his clothing and £ 300 in his will, was witness to these statements. Unfortunately, some present-day scholars have voiced doubt as to the authenticity of the composer's comments, which they feel are rather naïve. This question must remain unanswered, but one thing is certain: whoever thought up these utterances must have been an artist. The first of these quotations describes, as precisely as was possible in Handel's day, the creative act, which takes place on the borderline between the conscious and the unconscious. The fact that God plays a central role in the utterances quoted above does not tell us anything about the depth of Handel’s religious faith. In Handel’s day, God was an integral part of everyone’s life - 150 years before the invention of psychoanalysis, God was in fact the embodiment of and the sole possible explanation for the inexplicable nature of the creative process. The second quotation gives us an insight into Handel’s personal creative experience and his strong visual sense, expressed for example in his well known love of painting.
But even if we assume that these utterances attributed to Handel and these anecdotes have been handed down accurately, they are still too scanty for us to be able to draw a picture of the composers personality.
We are left, then, with his music. "In composers’ biographies, the author often attempts to deduce the composer’s character from his oeuvre. It goes without saying that this is a thoroughly unreliable method" - thus one musicologist, struggling for objectivity. On the other hand, can the comments of others ever say more about an artist’s personality than the innermost utterances of his soul? Can anything give us such successful direct insight into a composer's inner life as his music? Was it not Goethe who said that the essence of things is to be found not behind them, but within them?
Music is the mirror that reflects our soul. And the human soul can see its reflection in this mirror because it has two sides: through the music, the composer’s soul is reflected in our own. The question is how can we decipher this reflection and put it into words? And in a way that helps us understand the music better? The composer himself can only write down what moves him in rough and incomplete fashion. Perhaps Handel really did see Heaven, with God on His throne surrounded by angels, while he was working on the Hallelujah. And he certainly put these vivid impressions (and much more besides) into his music. But we cannot actually read it in the score. Only when the music is played and sung can we experience what it was that moved the composer so, and only when the music is played and sung does it affect our own souls. Of course we shouldn’t expect to see angels sitting on clouds ourselves when we hear the famous Hallelujah chorus. What the listener does experience is the music’s spiritual and emotional effect: Handel’s music moves us in the way that the composer himself was moved when he imagined the kingdom of Heaven. "The kingdom of the world is become the kingdom of our lord and of his Christ." Handel's Hallelujah is a picture of Heaven painted in music.
But what are we to do if we do not have a text that gives us something to go on, and we do not have a quotation allegedly from the composer’s own mouth? The music itself is never unambiguous - perhaps this is what the scholar who called music an unreliable key to the composer’s personality was trying to say. And I, too, would probably be reluctant to trust my ears alone if there was not a second parameter that can let us into Handel's personality from another side. For in addition to music, there is another direct projection of the human psyche that we can use to help us decipher the psychological content of the music. Something that reflects Handel's inner life just as reliably and distinctively, albeit in quite a different way: his handwriting.
Like the music itself, a composer`s handwriting contains information about the personality of the author. Concentrated, complex - and encoded in no less complicated a fashion. But when deciphering the handwriting, we can fall back upon an empiric and scientific tradition that does not (yet) exist for music’s psychological content.
The first impression of Handel's handwriting is one of striking simplicity. Radically pared down to the essentials in both form and ductus, it seems at one and the same time both old-fashioned and modern. It could easily be read by any schoolchild. Handel forms and joins the letters of the alphabet in the English style. But Handel was born in Germany, where he went to school and learnt to write German script, as did his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach. What prompted him to make England his home, to adopt the lifestyle and the script of that country - and even to transcribe his own name, turning Georg Friedrich Händel into George Frideric Handel? The English national character and Handel's personality must have exercised a strong mutual attraction on one another. Was the Teutonic character too complicated for Handel's taste? Even for his time and his level of schooling, his handwriting displays an unusual degree of simplification. Where we normally find loops, e.g. in the small l o h, Handel just draws a straight line. Always leaning to the right, betraying a certain tension, the letters placed close to one another and with a fairly heavy but very irregular pressure, the script pushes ahead, and a little upwards too, e.g. in the capital T. His will, penned when Handel was 65, only hints at this forward motion, while in the letter of 29th July1735, apparently written on an impulse and in a hurry, it can be almost physically felt. The letters are hardly joined, and are pressed up against one another, as are the words themselves. Notwithstanding, there is still space for ends that suddenly break out towards the top right, the line thinning to a point in the process, The writing is unusually large, but the size of the script changes and, upon closer inspection, many features turn out to be less regular than the overall impression might lead one to think. The penstrokes are not straight, they are almost always slightly hollowed-out and then bend downwards at the end, as if there were not enough space for the writer to say everything he wants to say. Every i is carefully and precisely dotted, the dot pressing into the paper. With the simplest resources, Handel achieves the utmost individuality. But that should not be taken to mean that he was a simple person. Indeed, Handel's contemporaries certainly did not find him an easy character. Nor did he have a good sense of humour, if one understands humour to denote someone's general disposition. On the contrary: he was fond of irony and trenchant wit, and often gave offence with his biting sarcasm. "He trusted in God that He would deliver him: let Him deliver him, if He delight in him."
Handel's life was not a long and gently-flowing river. He possessed great energy and perseverance, but this energy flowed irregularly, and so did his life. He was neither relaxed nor easy-going. He was under constant tension - sometimes unbearably severe, sometimes less so -, but he was never completely relaxed. Maybe his fondness for eating should be seen as the only way he could find relaxation, as he otherwise tried to rein himself in: he seems to have repressed his sexual urge for the most part. He was stubborn, impulsive, passionate and impatient, and often irritable with outbursts of violent temper. He also tended to be aloof and taciturn. In other words, not an easy person to get on with at all.
How can the music of such a difficult and unsociable character unite the entire world in peace and harmony? The answer lies in Handel's basic approach to the world. Unlike Bach, for example, who rarely strayed beyond his subjective and often enigmatic inner world, all Handel's thoughts and energies are directed at the real world outside himself. Handel possessed an incredible sense of reality. But he doesn’t capture this reality rationally, by thinking in the stricter sense, but irrationally, using his instinct and his intuition. And this is presumably the whole secret of his music’s universal appeal through the ages and across national boundaries. It strikes home at Man’s collective reality - both the conscious and the sub-conscious reality. Using the specific filter of his time and his very personal approach to life, he instinctively portrays the world in such a way that we can recognise it as our world 250 years later.
Handel’s own inner life and thus his music, too, are marked by the contrast between the thirst for experience and the fear of this experience. Handel strives to move forward, but at the same time he is afraid, and to keep his fear at bay he heads straight for his goals. When we listen to the Messiah, we can feel Handel’s courage and determination, his unerring instinct and intuition, and we cannot help but be infected by it. We feel the density and urgency and intensity that went into its composition - it is close to impossible to imagine how the entire work could be written in the space of just three weeks! Handel possessed consummate mastery of his craft in a way that is hard for today’s music-lover to grasp. He did, it is true, use material from earlier works. There is immense density in the score, but it is not chaotic or impenetrable: it is a density organised with instinct and intuition. The creative process that produced the Messiah was a continually flowing process, as was the case with Bach, or even moreso with Mozart. No, Handel’s creative process consists of a series of brilliant ideas, one following the other with a density that fends off any disturbance from outside. Handel gave everything here - he exhausted every possibility.
Was he satisfied with the result? Handel was not a vain man, but he possessed a good self-awareness; he was ambitious, but his ambition was directed at proving himself. He needed outside recognition in order to survive - not only financially, in his capacity as a freelance composer and musical entrepreneur, but also psychologically. Even though he was convinced he was right during the creative process, this was purely an instinctive feeling that he was unable to back up with reasons: he suffered frorn self-doubt and his self-esteem, which was usually strong, fluctuated. He needed recognition from outside to maintain his inner balance.
Musicologists regard the Messiah as a completely atypical work for Handel. What follows the simple E-minor opening chord expresses the composer’s character in perfect and complete fashion, in the same way as the St. Matthew Passion, likewise atypical of its composer, expresses Bach’s character in perfect and complete fashion. When the Messiah was first performed in England on Handel’s 58th birthday - 23rd February 1743 in London`s Covent Garden Theatre -, one Lord Kinnoul wanted to pay Handel a compliment and praised the work as "a noble entertainment". "My Lord", Handel replied, "I should be sorry if I only entertained them. I wished to make them better."
The Letters. Many autograph scores of Handel’s music have survived. But even where they contain handwritten text, this cannot be used to analyse the author's psychology: the conditions of composition impose too great a restriction on the freedom ofany text that might be added. The graphologist can only use freely-written texts, first and foremost letters, for his analysis. Handel lived to be 74, but from this long life only some 30 handwritten letters have survived, and these are scattered and mostly inaccessible in museums, library archives and private collections: little scholarly attention has been paid to them, as they contain little information of biographical relevance. Not a single facsimile ofone of Handel’s letters has ever been printed in a publication about the composer. I have based my analysis on six handwritten documents covering a space of some 15 years, five of these written in English: two letters written by the 50-year-old composer on 18th and 28th July 1735 to Charles Jennens and Johann Mattheson respectively, the latter in French; three letters written to Charles Jennens dated 29th December 1741, 9th September 1743 and 9th June 1744; and the composer’s will, written at the age of 65 on 1st June 1750. This last-named document is the source of Handel’s most frequently reproduced signature. He wrote the will shortly before he had a serious accident on the way from London to Germany, where he was planning to visit Johann Sebastian Bach. One year later Handel went completely blind, and this ended his career as a composer.