O Sing unto the Lord by Andrew Gant

Author:Andrew Gant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile

Part of one of Handel’s several settings of As Pants the Hart. The words are from Tate and Brady’s ‘new’ version of the psalter, the music, unusually for Handel, is for voices and ‘continuo’ alone, without orchestra. The ‘ground bass’ is another unusual feature: a tribute to his predecessor at the Chapel Royal, Henry Purcell, perhaps? A delicious touch of theatricality intrudes in the interjections of the chorus, as if from behind a pillar: ‘where is now thy God?’

Almost all of Handel’s sacred music required an orchestra. This added colour, certainly, but also length and expense, aspects which by no means went unremarked in his day. Among the Chapel Royal music is a setting of the psalm-text As Pants the Hart, which avoids these problems by casting the accompaniment for organ alone, with a cello doubling the bass, an arrangement known as a ‘continuo’ anthem. The scholar Donald Burrows has forensically filleted Handel’s settings of this text and identified no fewer than five separate versions (though even something as apparently straightforward as counting them is complicated by Handel’s habit of borrowing and reworking music from one to another, making it difficult sometimes to say where a ‘version’ of an existing piece turns into a discrete new work). But, whatever its parentage, the Chapel Royal setting works beautifully. Intriguingly, Handel combines parts of Tate and Brady’s metrical rendering of this psalm from their New Version of the Psalms of David, still something of a novelty, with the ‘prose’ text from the Book of Common Prayer, allowing the measured elegance of enlightenment verse to flow seamlessly into something more impassioned and earthy, just as the music moves from suspension-laden chorus to solo and duet and back again. The piece is in several short sections (not really ‘movements’), including a charming little accompanied recitative for treble solo, with a written-out right-hand part for the organ, like a mini-symphony. It’s a delightful piece. When modern church choirs perform Handel’s music, organists often find themselves wrestling with the problem of how to adapt an orchestral conception for voices and organ. Here, Handel set out to solve that problem himself – and succeeded.

We have noted before that the presence of a great genius tends to make everyone else look a bit like also-rans. In the age of Purcell this may have been unfair on everyone else. In the age of Handel it probably wasn’t. England’s own Georgian composers were a bit like their Hanoverian masters: competent, admirable, and generally a bit dull.

In the first quarter of the eighteenth century William Croft continued to preside as the best Handelian who wasn’t Handel. He wrote much of the music for the coronation of George I in 1715, which indicates what a forgettable occasion it was, at least as far as the music was concerned. Croft’s most enduring music is his Funeral Sentences, written to provide a complete prayer-book burial service when sung alongside the single movement left by Henry Purcell, and the hymn tune ‘St Anne’, sung to the psalm-paraphrase ‘O God, our Help in Ages Past’ by his near-contemporary Isaac Watts.

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