Musings on Handel, Style, and Ideology

I recently returned to Gary C. Thomas’s classic essay ‘Was George Frederic Handel Gay?’ in the context of preparing to conduct an LGBT+ choir in the Hallelujah Chorus. For those who haven’t read it, the answer to the title’s question is: it is significantly more likely that he was gay than that he was straight. There’s a nice summary the reasons for that conclusion, including reference to research done by others since the original publication here.

Thomas writes not just about Handel’s homosocial social circle and activities, but also about how those have been discursively closeted off from his role as celebrated composer. Both in his own lifetime and since, there has been a general attempt to ‘normalise’ him as a properly manly (heterosexual) man, based largely on assertion, along with some invented evidence of ostensible female love interest.

Rainbow Voices use learning materials associated with a BBC project some years back for the Hallelujah Chorus (archived here; and if anyone asks what use a public service broadcaster is, point them to this). As I listened to the learning tracks, I was struck by how rumpty-tumpty (technical term) the approach to delivery was. This isn’t in itself a surprise, it is entirely representative of how I heard it sung repeatedly in my youth.

But having not been directly involved with this piece for a while, my fresh ears made me wonder why the British choral tradition takes such a syllabic, detached approach to style here. The point of Handel’s oratorios, as I was taught, was to provide music you could listen to during times of year such as Lent when it was considered inappropriate to go to the opera. They were essentially unstaged operas with religious texts, that is. You would never sing an Italian aria of the 1730s, even one written by a German based in England, in such a marcato style.

But if one wished to masculinise the music, actually this is exactly what you would do – from about 1800 onwards, at any rate, though possibly not in Handel’s own time. Emerging in around the 1790s, there came to be a clear stylistic distinction between musical features along gendered lines. Text, and rhythm came to be seen as masculine attributes, melody and ornament as feminine, These associations can be found both in music written for gendered characters in opera, and in the gendered metaphors used in music theory and aesthetics. These distinctions were also, to an extent, mapped onto a distinction between the musics of northern Europe (France, Germany), as opposed to a feminised Italian style.

(That last paragraph is a very brief summary of my PhD, by the way. I am very confident about gendered musical styles between 1790 and 1830, and can point to ways they have persisted since; earlier music doesn’t seem to play by the same rules –neither, interestingly, do constructions gender - but I don’t have the depth of research experience to say what it does instead.)

So, if British choral singers were attempting to masculinise Handel’s music by taking a syllabic approach to it, that would stylistically true to our own time, although probably not his. And I think it is probably more than just whimsy to suppose that this indeed is part of the approach to contemporary performance style of Handel, because it is quite noticeable that it is the bass and tenor parts in the BBC learning tracks that take a particularly rumpty-tumpty approach. The upper voices do to an extent, but they retain more of a legato line. The female singers, that is, participate in the general performance tradition of the piece, but don’t feel the need to make such a big deal of being manly about it.

And once you’ve started noticing this gendered distinction in the individual lines here, you start hearing it in other performances. In this recording by the English Concert and Choir, for instance, the sopranos and altos definitely take a more legato approach than the tenors and basses. It is easiest to hear in the fugal entries from ‘And he shall reign’ onwards, though once you’ve clocked it, you can hear how in the homophonic passages the upper voices’ smoothness is draped over a more detached delivery from the lower voices. We’ve only got the last section from the choir of Methodist Central Hall here, but it shows a similar profile.

Other performances are more consistent between voice parts. The Royal Choral Society has everybody punching out the syllables in pretty much the same way, except perhaps the ‘King of King’ pedals which the sopranos connect up a bit more than the lower voices. King’s College Cambridge, meanwhile, has a uniform approach to performance across the parts in a uniformly gendered choir. There is a more legato approach to vocal line here, though the rhythm still tends to treat each crotchet with similar levels of accentuation.

Anyway, this has all got me thinking about how you might choose to perform this piece if you weren’t carrying with you the baggage of the performance tradition we have grown up with in the UK. If you approached it like, say, Italian opera, in which line matters, as does expressivity. And in which you tend not to accent every crotchet, but sing in sentences rather than syllables, finding connections in the compound melodies that carry you through the phrase rather than atomising the notes into separate events.

I can understand to an extent how a chorus that is all about kings and reigning and omnipotence might lend itself to a somewhat militaristic delivery (all those trumpets and drums!) but I still think there is momentum and excitement to be found by going for flow. And I think it will be kinder to the voices too to calm down the jaw and tongue and stop articulating everything in such an exaggerated way. Grace and poise seem to me to be 18th-century virtues we could usefully aspire to if we could just get over our inherited habits of homosexual panic.