Handel was a complete man who had endured the
sickening sense of the worthlessness of a struggle that he was bound
to continue to the end. But these personal confessions are scarce.
After all, in oratorio Handel's best music is that in which he seeks
to attain the sublime. In his choruses he does attain it: he sweeps
you away with the immense rhythmical impetus of the music, or
overpowers you with huge masses of tone hurled, as it were, bodily at
you at just the right moments, or he coerces you with phrases like the
opening of "Fixed in His everlasting seat," or the last (before the
cadence) in "Then round about the starry throne." It is true that with
his unheard-of intellectual power, and a mastery of technique equal or
nearly equal to Bach's, he was often tempted to write in his
uninspired moments, and so the chorus became with him more or less of
a formula; but we may also note that even when he was most mechanical
the mere furious speed at which he wrote seemed to excite and exalt
him, so that if he began with a commonplace "Let their celestial
concerts all unite," before the end he was pouring forth glorious and
living stuff like the last twenty-seven bars. So the pace at which he
had to write in the intervals of bullying or coaxing prima donnas or
still more petulant male sopranos was not wholly a misfortune; if it
sometimes compelled him to set down mere musical arithmetic, or
rubbish like "Honour and arms," and "Go, baffled coward," it sometimes
drew his grandest music out of him.
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