Alexander’s Feast Programme Notes
“Arts unknown before”
Alexander’s Feast is set around the victory feast table of Alexander the Great after his defeat of the Persians led by Darius, corresponding to historical events circa 330 BCE. The focus of the scene is the fabled musician at the feast, Timotheus “…plac’d on high / Amid the tuneful choir.” Timotheus evokes a variety of moods and thus influences Alexander: to revelry, to pity, to love, and to vengeance.
Handel composed Alexander’s Feast in 1736 at a time when he first began focussing on creating large-scale works in English. It was a success and laid the foundation of his mature form of English oratorios, like Israel in Egypt, Saul, and Messiah, which followed in subsequent years.
The libretto is the text of the 1697 poem of the same name by John Dryden, a poet, playwright, and public intellectual, most famous for having been England’s first Poet Laureate. Dryden’s poem had contemporary political resonance: England’s king, William III, in a manner parallel to Alexander, had just achieved a major military victory. William was a powerful figure, having taken the throne of England with his wife Mary after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and having led the allied effort against the French in the costly and bloody Nine Years’ War. Dryden would not pledge allegiance to William and Mary, and so lost his title and his influence at court. Timotheus embodies the kind of role Dryden previously enjoyed under the Stuarts. The political allegory of Alexander’s Feast — the idea that a monarch’s power was significantly tempered by his artists — would have had resonance at a time when basic public freedoms were nascent and tenuous.
At the end of Alexander’s Feast, St. Cecilia is evoked and compared with Timotheus. Cecilia, as the inventor of the organ and the inspirer of “arts unknown before” was an important literary or cultural motif in England from the late 17th century. Annual festivals in honour of St. Cecilia’s Day, November 22, were perhaps England’s most important public artistic events from 1683 to 1703, featuring commissioned works by the first rank of musicians and writers. The memory of these festivals was by no means lost by the time Handel wrote Alexander’s Feast, and there was by then a strong association between Cecilia and British national identity, as well as the spirit of public arts and the free exchange of ideas.
Handel’s setting of Dryden’s poem was written in the context of a country which had enjoyed years of political stability, economic prosperity, and broadening public freedoms. Handel’s work was understood as a grand musical celebration as well as a championing of English culture. Where Italian opera was once the dominant musical form in public concerts in London, public tastes were moving back to a balance with homegrown attractions. For Handel, coming from a career in Italian opera, a major work in English celebrating Cecilia was a new direction, one which would inform the rest of his working life.
By 1736 Handel had honed his stylistic influences and expanded his technique to the point of a mature synthesis: here is Handel’s voice, unmistakably recognizable and extraordinarily brilliant. The orchestration for Alexander’s Feast was ambitious for the time, with four- and five-part string writing, organ, continuo, oboes, trumpet, and horn (and recorders as well in the original version, though not in our presentation). It requires three soloists who must master advanced vocal writing, and a large chorus split sometimes into six parts and singing with expressive breadth. Handel relishes the opportunity to showcase his compositional prowess, capturing the many moods and feelings exploited by the mythical Timotheus. The sequence at the end of Part One runs the gamut: the lushly gorgeous “Softly sweet in Lydian measures” (note the cello feature), the stirring and jaunty “War, he sung, is toil and trouble”, the sensitive “The Prince unable to conceal his pain”, all concluding with the reprise of the impressive chorus “The many rend the skies with loud applause”. The bass rage aria “Revenge, Timotheus cries” in Part Two is another highlight with its raw emotion and contrasting evocative middle section. The two movements at the end of the work, “At last divine Cecilia came” and “Let old Timotheus yield the prize,” are grand choruses on the scale of his most ambitious choral writing. Where other composers might have quailed, Handel seems comfortable embodying the spirit of Timotheus and Cecilia. Alexander’s Feast was a new style of music, a concert-length ode imagined on a large scale, the blueprint for choral-orchestral masterpieces to follow.
If Alexander’s Feast describes limits to political power, The King Shall Rejoice, our opener, celebrates the monarch with ardent enthusiasm. One of the set of the four Coronation Anthems composed for the coronation of George II in 1727, it has remained in the repertoire of coronation ceremonies in Britain and elsewhere ever since. Handel chose the texts for the anthems himself, brusquely refusing input from the nation’s bishops. His chosen text for The King Shall Rejoice is drawn from Psalm 21 and focuses entirely on the earthly prestige of the King, leaving out, as with the other three anthems, any direct praise of a heavenly authority. In the original version of Alexander’s Feast Handel included a harp concerto and an organ concerto, pieces which are incidental to the action but intended to celebrate the variety and richness of music. Those pieces are not some of Handel’s more inspired works and are not well-known: they are filler, really, and would have been more suited to an 18th-century audience, which was more inclined to chat over the music, or mill about seeking refreshment. Following Handel’s prescription of celebrating the variety of music, The King Shall Rejoice is more apropos to our skills, and it is also a masterpiece in its own right.
— Alexander Cann, November 2024