Handel: Solomon

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In 1712, following four formative years in Italy, German-born organ virtuoso and budding composer George Frederic Handel landed in England, where he would spend the rest of his career. He gained renown writing for Queen Anne and George I grand ceremonial anthems and exuberant instrumental music. Following the success of his “Te Deum and Jubilate,” written for the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, Handel received an annual salary from the Crown. In 1727, the same year that Handel became a naturalized British citizen, George II chose the composer over his official Master of the King’s Music to write for his coronation. One of the anthems Handel wrote for that event, “Zadok the Priest,” was such a sensation that it has been used at every British coronation since. In the commercial sphere, Handel dominated the London musical scene for more than two decades with operas written in the Italian language and style. These dramatic works created and sustained the superstar status of virtuoso singers from Italy by showcasing their dazzling vocal prowess.

In the 1730s, the appetite of increasingly middle-class London audiences for Italian opera faded, and Handel shifted away from opera toward oratorios—musical dramas centered on biblical characters rather than Classical or mythological ones. Handel’s oratorios differed from his operas in other ways: They were sung in English rather than Italian, and they employed a chorus—a vehicle capable, in the hands of the well-trained singers of the Chapel Royal, St. Paul’s, and Westminster Abbey, of significant complexity and strength. Winton Dean, a twentieth-century Handel scholar, described the creations of Handel and his oratorio librettists as “blood and thunder Judaism.” These works are alive with triumph and tragedy, brimming with the virtuosic vocal fireworks in solo arias familiar to opera audiences, and adding grand ceremonial pomp in the choruses, and dazzling orchestral effects. In the summer of 1748, having already created oratorios about Deborah, Saul, Samson, Hercules, Judas Maccabeus, Belshazzar, and Joshua, Handel turned to Solomon.

Musically, Solomon is a tour-de-force for chorus, soloists, and orchestra. Like the stupendously varied fauna of planet earth, Handel’s compositions display endless variety yet are built of almost identical DNA. His nucleotides are simple melodies, regular harmonic progressions, and straightforward rhythmic motifs that in his expert hands are sequenced into striking musical phrases, powerfully cohesive movements, and colossal works. Until the advent of musical minimalism, no composer was able to build so much musical mass with so little material.

Beethoven himself suggested that composers “go and learn from him how to achieve vast effects with simple means.” Save for the crack and rumble of thunder, artillery, or galloping cavalry, the gathered forces performing Solomon might well have been the loudest thing ever heard by someone living in the eighteenth century.

Handel scored most of Solomon’s choruses for eight voice parts (as opposed to the standard four), sometimes lobbing loud proclamations back and forth between opposing four-voice choirs, other times hopscotching a catchy motif among eight independent parts. Throughout, the orchestra (large, by Handel’s standards) functions independently from the chorus. Several of the choruses are shameless pomp and praise. There, the singers function as a declamatory bloc, the orchestra framing it with muscular fanfare or adorning it with quicksilver sixteenth- note filigree. The other choruses exhibit extraordinary variety. Act I ends with an evocative chorus bidding good night to Solomon and his Queen as they take the nuptial bed, surrounded by the song of nightingales and kissed by sweet-scented breezes. In Act III, when Solomon demonstrates for the visiting Queen of Sheba the power of music to arouse different emotions, Handel uses the orchestra to evoke “clanking arms and neighing steeds” in the heat of battle, the sound of lapping waves, and the pain of “hopeless love” and “wild despair.”

In the solos, Handel shapes melody, harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation to sharpen character and heighten atmosphere. Solomon’s first vocal lines are enmeshed in slow-moving scales from a pair of bassoons and a pair of violas, their burnished timbres lending solemnity to the king’s prayer. Later in Act I, when Solomon urges his Queen to “Haste, haste to the cedar grove, where fragrant spices bloom and amorous turtles love,” the skittering violins suggest that he can hardly contain himself. The judgment scene of Act II contrasts the two women claiming to be the infant’s mother. One fulsomely avows that “Thy sentence, great king, [to divide the baby in half] is prudent and wise,” as propulsive rhythms in the cello and bass echo her pounding heart, and as her coloratura reveals her conniving delight that “at least [she] shall tear the infant from [his true mother].” The other woman, undone at the thought of her infant being sundered with a sword, gasps, “Can I see my infant gored . . . and behold the purple tides gushing down his tender sides?” in an aria tart with winey dissonance, punctuated by lump-in- the-throat rests. Should a listener wish to peruse a catalogue of the mature Handel’s musical modi operandi in 1748, Solomon will more than suffice.

As with all of Handel’s oratorios, Solomon is more than just music. It’s a story. Its libretto is a selective synopsis of the biblical accounts of Solomon from the Book of Kings and the Book of Chronicles, spun into rhyming verse. Act I establishes Solomon’s religious and marital piety. His first full aria expresses humility about his own wisdom in the face of God’s might and omniscience: Though he can “trace each herb and flower,” such displays of knowledge are “vain” in the face of Jehovah’s power. Solomon muses: “Say what’s the rest but empty boast, the pedant’s idle claim, who, having all the substance lost, attempts to grasp a name?” The very first thing we hear him sing is a prayer asking Jehovah to grace with his presence the temple Solomon has built. The second scene of Act I comprises a series of loving flatteries and flirtations between Solomon and his Queen.

In Act II, the librettist highlights the king’s great wisdom through the famous story of his judgment: Two women appear before him, both new mothers. One of their infants has died, and each claims the living child as her own. Solomon discerns the identity of the real mother by proclaiming that the baby should be cut in half with a sword. The lying mother approves the plan, but the real mother cannot bear to see her child harmed. The librettist transforms the twelve biblical verses into a richly textured scene that draws out both the false mother’s heartlessness and the true mother’s willingness to sacrifice on behalf of her child’s life, imbuing a straightforward story about Solomon’s wisdom with deep humanity. In closing, the chorus asks, “From the East unto the West, who so wise as Solomon?”

In Act III, the Queen of Sheba visits to verify claims about Solomon’s great wisdom and wealth and is overwhelmed by the splendor of his Temple and palace. Handel’s librettist embroiders the biblical narrative, having Solomon display his accomplishments with a lavish entertainment demonstrating the many powers of music. In appreciation, the queen leaves him with gifts of gold, gems, and timber. The two monarchs sing a duet in which they deem each other worthy of their subjects’ unreserved praise: “May thy people sound thy praise—praise unbought by price or fear.” After the adieu, the oratorio closes with a pithy maxim: “The name of the wicked shall quickly be past, but the name of the just shall eternally last.”

As a conductor, I’m awed by the grandeur and emotion of Handel’s music. As a music historian, I’m fascinated to contemplate how Handel’s audiences, accustomed to allegorical representations in the theater and aware of their own national political debates, might have heard and processed the story presented to them by Handel’s librettist. Scholar Ruth Smith’s summary of the three acts of Solomon helps reframe the story in those terms:

In broad outline, the first part of the libretto presents the king’s investment of funds in the promotion of national religion and major building programs (the temple and the palace) and his securing of the dynasty in a satisfactory marriage; the second establishes his claim to the throne and demonstrates his wisdom (the judgment of Solomon); and the third shows the king and nation, rich, cultivated, virtuous, powerful and at peace, receiving the admiring tribute of the foreign world (the visit of the Queen of Sheba).

Several debates animating the political sphere during this period might have colored audience interpretations of Solomon. One concerns the balance of power between the Crown and the Constitution, much at issue in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and still on the minds of British subjects in the 1740s. The librettist adapts his source material to portray Solomon as decidedly anti-despotic and anti-absolutist. The librettist introduces the judgement scene with an imagined attendant, who asks Solomon if he can bring in the two disputing women. This elicits Solomon’s revealing response: “Admit them straight, for when we take the throne, our hours are all the people’s, not our own.” Yet the libretto preserves the biblical presentation of Solomon as both judge and jury, making no reference to any law of the land. Another debate concerns the relationship between Crown and Church: Though political acts in the seventeenth century had established Anglicanism as the state religion, during the decades when Handel was writing his oratorios, some Anglicans warned against encroaching Deism and freethinking and promoted mutually beneficial relations between Church and Crown, similar to the kind portrayed in Solomon.

More incongruous, perhaps, is the librettist’s transformation of Solomon’s political marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter into a celebration of marital piety, ignoring the biblical account of the king’s 700 wives and 300 concubines. It also omits the story of how some of them led him away from Jehovah to worship their own gods, even leading him to build places of worship for them. (In the Bible, this impious behavior ultimately leads to the dismantling of Solomon’s great kingdom and the destruction of his Temple.)

The libretto’s conspicuous omissions and extra-biblical embellishments portray Solomon in the best possible light. Did an audience member in 1748 relate Solomon to George II, either positively or negatively? We’ll never know. Then, as ever, good leadership lay in the eye of the beholder. Handel and his librettist knew how to craft an engaging entertainment that, if it harbored any political content or comment, kept it below the narrative’s surface. The success of their dramatic craft is that the story remains compelling in any era. Today, we are hearing a 3,000-year-old story adapted into 270-year-old verse and music. If you’re thinking (and who is not?) about our own national political turmoil, hearing Solomon might raise questions. What makes a great leader? What do we value in a head of state? Wisdom? Wealth? Piety? Humility? How do leaders expurgate or enhance the narratives they share with us?

Of course, it’s possible that Solomon’s libretto is nothing more than hagiography in the service of spectacular music, with an eye on box office receipts. Handel very rarely engaged in public political activity and focused his efforts on his (largely successful) business endeavors. The degree to which this oratorio succeeded in making a definitive statement about Hanoverian politics (or engaging us in our own) is ultimately overshadowed by the forceful statement it makes about the power of music. Nothing sparked Handel’s creative fires like the project of writing about music itself, and the sequence in Act III, like the oratorio as a whole, is musically as shimmering and splendid as Solomon’s Temple. The Temple’s magnificence remains legendary, but the structure itself was destroyed in 587 BCE. Precious few monuments have withstood the erosive and corrosive impacts of thousands of years of elapsed time. Some, like Versailles, have survived for centuries. Others, by contrast, are ephemeral: New York City’s own Beaux Arts urban temple, Penn Station, whose vast, vaulted interiors and expansive colonnades were guarded by stentorian stone eagles, was reduced to rubble and replaced with a dismal subterranean maze. Grandeur guarantees neither permanence nor preservation. Following its 1748 premiere and just two or three additional performances, Handel’s Solomon all but disappeared. Although it lay buried, unperformed, its blueprint—the score—remained. Music’s ephemerality is at once its limitation and its advantage. Of the countless magnificent musical works created before the invention of audio recording, all that remains is their silent blueprint. Unlike structures of stone and steel, which exist as physical realities but are subject to decay, musical works like Solomon are temples of sound whose splendor can be experienced only when revivified by communities of musicians and listeners. The celebration of music’s power in Act III extolls of the effects of live music—of sounds produced and heard in real time. By connecting us to each other in the present while engaging a musical past, such treasured artifacts prove to be the most durable and valuable of all.