Getting a Handel on Beethoven

Toward the end of his life, Beethoven regarded Handel as the greatest composer who ever lived. Listeners hear Handelian greatness in the "Gloria in excelsis Deo" vocal fugue in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

Look at the final bars of the "Gloria":


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Especially look at the final two syllables -- they ring out unaccompanied and then cut off abruptly by the fermata rest in one of the most thrilling moments in all of music! Extraordinary, and Handelian!

Other scholars swear they hear a sort of simulation of the Messiah bass aria "The people who walked in darkness" in Beethoven's "Agnus Dei." I myself don't hear a reasonable connection.

Musicologists hear and see Handel throughout numerous other parts of the Missa. Some, for example, hear a quotation from the "Hallelujah Chorus" in the life-changing "Dona nobis pacem" of Beethoven's Missa, before the high trumpets herald the advancing ghostly Armies of War in the closing bars (as the Chorus cries "MISERERE!").

Beethoven told a fellow musician that he would bow low before Handel, were Handel to stand before him. When that person replied that Mozart could have improved on Handel by composing a new accompaniment to the Messiah, Beethoven raised his eyebrows and replied with acerbity:

"Handel would have survived without it."

A month before he died, as he lay in bed, contorted in pain, Beethoven received a gift: a bound quarto edition of Handel's complete works. Visitors to his sick-room saw him swell with joy and his eyes fill with water. "Look! these were given to me to-day! These works have given me great pleasure. For a long time I have wished to have them; for Handel is the greatest, the most capable of composers; there is still much to be learned from him. Just hand me those books again!"

His hands turned over the pages, one after the other. He paused periodically to ponder some passage, and after many hours, laid the heavy books aside. His head turned, and he spoke, almost to himself: "I wanted to write more music: a Tenth Symphony, a requiem, the music to Faust, even a piano school [a teaching method]. Now time is out."

In the final bars of the "Gloria" of the Missa mentioned above, Beethoven and Handel fuse into one!

Gloria Ending.mp3

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What else of Handel's magnificent output might Beethoven have been influenced by? There are his operas, dozens of them. Julius Caesar is one of them, and it has an aria called "Piangero la sorte mia," which undeniably left its mark on Beethoven -- especially when he wrote the hymnlike main theme of the Op. 109 Piano Sonata.

Here's a piano rendition of the Handel aria from one of my piano books.



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The influence on Beethoven in Op. 109 is profound here, I think, particularly in bars 19 and 20, and again in bars 35 and 36.

Beethoven wrote an overture in the early 1820s -- in fact, at the almost exact time he was writing the Missa -- called "The Consecration of the House," which is the single most overtly Handelian thing he ever wrote. You may know it or have heard it. It was performed at the famous 1824 concert in Vienna where the Ninth Symphony was publicly premiered in Austria -- this was the concert dramatized in the movies Copying Beethoven and Immortal Beloved. Beethoven was commissioned to write it for the opening of a theater, so today it's often played at theater or concert hall openings.

Thus the important link between Handel and Beethoven: a musical and spiritual link of the utmost transcendence.