Last week I gave my annual lecture on Handel to my students at UC Berkeley. In the course of said lecture, I bring up the delicate and dicey issue of Handel’s so-called “borrowings” — or, more crudely put, his plagiarism. Similar transgressions by lesser composers can be dismissed with a wave of the hand: dirty rotten thieves, we can say, and be done with it. But Handel is a different kettle of fish altogether. A very big kettle that holds a whopping amount of Anglophone pride. To wave away Handel marks one as a hopelessly insensitive clod, a bounder, and an utter mountebank. He’s too grand for that, too wonderful, too all-around important. So the game is on, and what to do about it? Apologists are to be found hither and yon for Handel’s not-so jolly practice of appropriating the music of other composers and passing it off as his own. We hear that plagiarism was a common practice in Handel’s day and nobody thought much about it. How convenient that all sounds, but alas, it doesn’t wash. Handel’s colleague Bononcini got busted for swiping a madrigal by Antonio Lotti and had to leave town. People cared.
Another argument has it that Handel improved his borrowed scores so much that in a way his appropriations almost make for altogether new music. That one’s pretty feeble, as well, but at least it offers consolation. Handel did improve his originals, often dramatically. Nonetheless, it was cricket then as now to cite your sources. When Bach transcribed a series of Vivaldi’s concerti grossi for solo harpsichord, he was scrupulous about indicating “nach Vivaldi” in his title. Would it have hurt Handel all that much to pop in an acknowledgement that such-and-such a chorus in Israel in Egypt was originally by Stradella or Krell or whatnot? But, no: Handel just grabbed the thing and ran with it.
Some forms borrowing are perfectly OK with everybody. First and foremost is borrowing from oneself. Let’s say I’m the Baroque-era composer of Attilio, an opera that unfortunately laid a big and stinky egg with the public. There sits my poor Attilio, scorned and despised, but nonetheless containing some dandy arias, not to mention a delightful overture. So when I’m hired to write a new opera on Giulio Cesare in Nova Scotia I ransack poor Attilio for gems. I wind up recycling not only the overture, but also several arias. Attilio’s rage-filled “I’ll stab you and behead you, you villain” becomes, with a bit of jiggering and a new text, the rousing “We’ll beat them and defeat them, you Romans!” and as such scores a massive hit with the audience. Before long everybody in Genoa is humming We’ll beat them and defeat them, even though just a few years previously they booed I’ll stab you and behead you right off the stage.
Maybe the piece in question wasn’t even a failure. Theatrical lore is awash in stories of composers trimming a song from one show during tryouts, then reworking the song for a different show. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro was the source for a song called “My Wife” that was initially dropped and consigned to storage, then eventually re-emerged in South Pacific as “Younger Than Springtime.” It replaced a song that eventually showed up in The King and I as “Getting to Know You.” Emile de Becque’s lament “Loneliness of Evening” was removed from South Pacific and flopped around in limbo for a while; eventually it found a home when R&H re-worked their television musical Cinderella for a version starring Leslie Ann Downs and Stuart Damon. Stuff like that happens all the time. It’s not plagiarism.
Handel did just that with his duet No, di voi non vo’ fidarmi from a charming Arcadian duet cantata HWV 189. Although it was just fine in its original setting, it was consigned to life in the Handelian shadows—Handel’s Italianate cantatas having a limited audience and very low visibility. But Handel reworked it in 1741 for Messiah, and in that capacity as For unto us a child is born it has become one of the glories of English choral music. The reworking is a bit awkward, given the heavy accent on “for” mandated by Handel’s strong downbeat on the word “No” in the Italian original. But those are small potatoes. The point is that a mousy, unknown Arcadian duet wound up becoming a repertory monument—just like Ruby Keeler going on for an indisposed Bebe Daniels in 42nd Street and coming back a star.
Bach never hesitated to rejigger, rework, and repurpose earlier material. His glorious Christmas Oratorio is drawn from his secular cantatas. Well and why not? In their original venues those cantatas would have been heard once or twice then forgotten altogether. But recycled into the Christmas Oratorio they have become monuments of Western music. Ditto some of the cantata movements that wound up in the B Minor Mass—such as Wienen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen from BWV 12 that became that magnificent Crucifixus. No onus has ever been visited on composers reworking their own compositions.
Ditto on the practice of borrowing music for the purpose of creating variations or fantasies, as long as the original composer is credited. Would anyone pay much attention to Anton Diabelli’s dippy little waltz without Beethoven’s colossal treatment? Liszt’s Don Juan Fantasy is a wild romp on themes from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Examples are numerous and not one of them constitutes a violation of artistic codes of ethics.
Nope. It’s only that business of fobbing off somebody else’s work as your own. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what Handel did. Nonetheless, most modern-day commentators—myself included—aren’t inclined to condemn Handel for the practice. John H. Roberts, in The Cambridge Handel Encyclopaedia, puts it succinctly:
As early as 1722, Mattheson chided Handel in print for taking melodic ideas from arias by Lotti and himself, but it was not until the nineteenth century that the borrowings became the subject of widespread public discussion. Some British writers, equating any sort of borrowing with plagiarism, condemned him on moral grounds, and Sedley Taylor adopted a prosecutorial stance in his useful compendium of parallel passages (1906). In recent years a more historically enlightened view has taken hold, even as many additional relationships have been brought to light. It has increasingly been recognised that rather than posing a threat to Handel’s reputation his famous habit can help us understand more fully the complexity and creative power of his extraordinary musical mind.
A close reading of Roberts’ paragraph reveals that he has based part of his argument on a distinction between plagiarism and borrowings, although that latter word is mostly a fig leaf. Typically such whitewashes come into circulation when commentators are feeling squeamish about harder, more traditional words. Vide the oh-so-nice homeless that has replaced vagrant and bum in most publications. As the apologists have grown in number and insistence, an even nicer phrase than borrowing has been making the rounds: transformative imitation. It’s not hard to understand the impetus behind the coinage of such ethical disinfectants: a desire to counter nineteenth-century charges of downright plagiarism, perhaps best exemplified by the 1880 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry lamenting that “the wholesale plagiarism carried on by him is perhaps unprecedented in the history of music.”
Overall, the issue reminds me of the Shakespearean “authorship” controversy, at least apropos an underlying cultural bias. Shakespeare is, after all, a source of unimpeachable English national pride. Yet there has always been that issue of his humble, middle-class origins as the son of a glover and his life as a hard-working actor. For any number of class-conscious Brits, a plebeian Shakespeare has been a bitter pill to swallow. Thus the maelstrom of theories that posit the real author to be the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon or various other social superiors to good ol’ Will. When you get right down to it, the Oxfordians and the Baconians aren’t so much hot on their respective candidates as they are profoundly squeamish about the real Shakespeare. They want good ol’ Will—publicly educated, tradesman and actor, possibly bisexual—to go away. They want somebody else.
And that’s where I see the similarity. The very notion that the sainted Handel might have had ethical kinks is intolerable. If Handel is England’s musical pride and joy (as I think he is, even more so than Purcell) then brickbats tossed his way regarding ethical lapses border on treason. Since the appropriations can not be made to disappear, they must be incorporated into a general theory that absolves Handel of any ethical taint.
So here I sit, an American professional musician and music-lover who appreciates, reveres, and loves Handel but has absolutely no investment in Handel as cultural icon or exemplar of national identity. I have no patriotic axe to grind, no feathers to ruffle. Thus my overall response is quite simple: I really don’t care whether he borrowed or not, or whether his borrowings are transformative imitation or plain old plagiarism that nowadays would land him on the receiving end of a fat lawsuit. It’s all water under the bridge now. What we have is Handel, Handel in all his immensity and his scope and his breadth and his fertility.
That’s more than enough for me.