UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Virtue Rewarded: Handel's Oratorios and the Culture of Sentiment Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/65b4q1d2 Author Lee, Jonathan Rhodes Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Virtue Rewarded: Handel’s Oratorios and the Culture of Sentiment by Jonathan Rhodes Lee A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Davitt Moroney, Chair Professor Mary Ann Smart Professor Emeritus John H. Roberts Professor George Haggerty, UC Riverside Professor Kevis Goodman Fall 2013 Virtue Rewarded: Handel’s Oratorios and the Culture of Sentiment Copyright 2013 by Jonathan Rhodes Lee ABSTRACT Virtue Rewarded: Handel’s Oratorios and the Culture of Sentiment by Jonathan Rhodes Lee Doctor of Philosophy in Music University of California, Berkeley Professor Davitt Moroney, Chair Throughout the 1740s and early 1750s, Handel produced a dozen dramatic oratorios. These works and the people involved in their creation were part of a widespread culture of sentiment. This term encompasses the philosophers who praised an innate “moral sense,” the novelists who aimed to train morality by reducing audiences to tears, and the playwrights who sought (as Colley Cibber put it) to promote “the Interest and Honour of Virtue.” The oratorio, with its English libretti, moralizing lessons, and music that exerted profound effects on the sensibility of the British public, was the ideal vehicle for writers of sentimental persuasions. My dissertation explores how the pervasive sentimentalism in England, reaching first maturity right when Handel committed himself to the oratorio, influenced his last masterpieces as much as it did other artistic products of the mid- eighteenth century. When searching for relationships between music and sentimentalism, historians have logically started with literary influences, from direct transferences, such as operatic settings of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, to indirect ones, such as the model that the Pamela character served for the Ninas, Cecchinas, and other garden girls of late eighteenth-century opera. Some scholars have cataloged musical features that comprise a sentimental style. Others have found philosophical, aesthetic, and historical links between sentimental culture and Italian and French opera, north German keyboard music, and the chamber music of Boccherini. What has been curiously passed over is musical sentimentalism in England (site of so many of the culture’s landmark products) and its influence on the country’s most famous adopted son. My dissertation addresses this lack, focusing on relationships between oratorio, contemporary theater, and religious philosophy. In Part 1, “Sentimental Oratorios, Sentimental Heroines,” I show that we can speak with confidence of a sub-genre of “sentimental oratorio” that can be defined through comparison with both the sentimental drama of Handel’s London and the Italianate sentimental opera that other musicologists have identified as emerging in the last third of the eighteenth century. In addition, I demonstrate that it was not only the aesthetics of contemporary drama that affected the - 1 - oratorios’ libretti; the performance practices of the sentimental theater also informed the earliest realizations, with the expectations and demands that the theater placed on its personnel (particularly its women) affecting both singers and Handel’s composition and ir revision processes for them. Part 2 discusses “Empathetic Men & Religious Sentimentalism,” topics that have not yet been considered in any serious way by scholars of the oratorio. Handel’s librettists James Miller (1703–1744) and Thomas Morell (1703–1784) were clergymen as well as men of the theater, and they aimed throughout their religious writing — including their texts for Handel — to inculcate virtue by privileging emotional over rational means. Both their devotion to the moral understanding of mankind’s natural “sensibility” and the gentle men they created as heroes for their libretti influenced Handel’s musical settings, which in turn reinforced their thematic and dramatic thrusts. I use these perspectives to show that Handel’s oratorios were situated at the intersection of the most current dramatic and religious trends of the mid-eighteenth century. Handel was sensitive to his Men and Women of Feeling; he adapted his oratorios to suit singers who specialized in sentimental dramatic “lines,” and he displayed a keen understanding of his colleagues’ attempts to move their spectators more than to astonish them, endeavoring that listeners’ hearts (in Morell’s words) “should be made better; moved with a compassion unknown before, and charmed with an opportunity of doing good.” - 2 - For my teachers, and especially for Joscelyn, who did his best to warn me - i - TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Music Examples iii List of Figures v Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Virtue Rewarded 1 PART 1 – SENTIMENTAL ORATORIOS, SENTIMENTAL HEROINES 1 Per Pietà: Sentimental Oratorios & “Sensibility Style” 19 2 “The Part, That is by Nature Thine”: Sentimental Heroines, “Fallen” 59 Women, & Handel’s Oratorio Revisions for Susanna Cibber PART 2 – EMPATHETIC MEN & RELIGIOUS SENTIMENTALISM 3 “The Ligaments of Love”: Men of Feeling, Religious Sentimentalism, & 101 Joseph and His Brethren 4 Sensibility & Passive Heroism in the Work of Thomas Morell 145 Appendix 2.1: Calendar of Susanna Cibber’s Professional Activities, 1732-174 193 Appendix 4.1: Thomas Morell, “A Modern Conversation,” with nnotations 210 Works Cited 9 220 A - ii - LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES (HANDEL) Example 1.1: Vocal openings of arias from Theodora 30 Example 1.2: Theodora, “The pilgrim’s home,” opening 32 Example 1.3: Pastoral arias sung by sentimental heroines in Susanna, Jephtha, and 34 Solomon Example 1.4: Vocal openings of arias from Solomon, Jephtha, and Susanna 36 Example 1.5: Solomon, “Can I see my infant gor’d,” opening 51 Example 2.1: Samson, “O mirror of our fickle state,” mm. 36–38 and 78–82 86 Example 2.2: Samson, “Torments, alas” and “O mirror of our fickle state,” openings 87 Example 2.3: Hercules, “Oh Hercules,” “See, with what sad dejection,” and “No longer 93 fate,” openings Example 2.4: Samson, “Return, O God of hosts,” mm. 59–77 97 Example 2.5: Samson, “The holy one of Israel,” mm. 9–12 and 50–56 98 Example 3.1: Joseph and His Brethren, “Be firm my soul,” opening 124 Example 3.2: Joseph and His Brethren, “Be firm my soul,” mm. 66–85 125 Example 3.3: Joseph and His Brethren, “Where are these brethren,” opening 132 Example 3.4: Joseph and His Brethren, “Remorse, confusion, horror, fear,” mm. 17–32 133 Example 3.5: Joseph and His Brethren, “O pity,” opening 137 Example 3.6: Joseph and His Brethren, “O gracious God, we merit well 141 this scourge,” opening Example 3.7: Joseph and His Brethren, “Thou had’st, my lord,” opening 142 Example 3.8: Joseph and His Brethren, “Give him up the lad,” mm. 9–16 143 Example 4.1: Theodora “Racks, gibbets, sword and fire,” opening and “For ever thus 148 stands fix’d the doom,” opening Example 4.2: Theodora, “Descend, kind pity,” mm. 16–36 150 - iii - Example 4.3: Theodora, “The raptur’d soul,” mm. 9–15 and “Kind heav’n, if virtue be 174 thy care,” mm. 25–39 Example 4.4: Theodora, “Fond, flattering world, adieu,” mm. 7-12 and “Angels ever 175 bright and fair,” mm. 35–40 Example 4.5: Theodora, “To thee, thou son of glorious worth,” ritornello; “Streams of 177 pleasure,” mm. 4–8; and “Thither let our hearts aspire,” mm. 29–38 Example 4.6: Jephtha, “Virtue my soul shall still embrace,” mm. 15–23; “If, Lord, 183 sustained,” opening; and “His mighty arm,” mm. 15–26 Example 4.7: Jephtha, “Deeper and deeper still,” mm. 14 ff. 187 Example 4.8: Jephtha, “Waft her, angels, through the skies,” mm. 7–12; “Tune the soft 188 melodious lute,” mm. 9-13; and “Welcome as the cheerful light,” mm. 26–33 - iv - LIST OF FIGURES Figure 0.1: Dramatic oratorios with sentimental themes 9 Figure 0.2: Advertisements in Joseph and His Brethren (London, 1744) and Theodora 15 (London, 1750) Figure 1.1: Sentimental female protagonists in plays and other literature 25 Figure 1.2: Fragmentation. Expressive dashes of varying lengths and other graphic 29 devices in S. Richardson, Pamela, 1740 and L. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, 1768, and Barbarina’s “breathless” cavatina “L’ho perduta” from Le nozze di Figaro, 1786 Figure 1.3: Frasi’s London activities, 1742–1746 38 Figure 1.4: Pergolesi, “Tremende oscure attroci,” GB-Lbl H.348.e.(6) 39 Figure 1.5: Saint-Germain, “Per pietà bell’idol mio,” from Favourite Songs in the Opera 42 Call’d L’Incostanza Delusa (London, 1745) Figure 1.6: Brivio, “Io sento che in petto,” from Favourite Songs in the Opera Call’d 43 L’Incostanza Delusa (London, 1745) Figure 1.7: Frasi’s London activities, 1746–1752 45 Figure 1.8: Saint-Germain, “Figlio, se più non vivi,” from Musique raisonnée (London, 47 1749) Figure 2.1: Cibber’s dramatic roles, 1736–1738 64 Figure 2.2: Cibber’s operatic roles, 1732–1733 65 Figure 2.3: Heroines’ arias in English operas of 1732–33 67 Figure 2.4: Cibber’s new roles in spoken theater, 1742–49, arranged chronologically 75 Figure 2.5: Cibber’s appearances as announced in London and Dublin newspapers, 78 1742–1749 Figure 2.6: Cibber’s appearances grouped by “line,” out of 341 appearances 78 advertised in Dublin and London newspapers, 1742–1749 Figure 2.7: Ranges of Cibber’s arias and accompanied recitatives 83 - v - Figure 2.8: Revisions for Micah before Samson premiere 84 Figure 2.9: Correction in Hercules autograph, British Library RM 20.e.8, f.