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Halifax Judas, The
Musical Times, Spring 2002 by Cowgill, Rachel
An unknown Handed arrangement by Mozart?
Is a newly discovered manuscript a fifth Handel-Mozart arrangement? RACHEL COWGILL considers the evidence.
THAT MOZART STUDIED the music of earlier eighteenth-century masters, encouraged by Baron van Swieten (`Lord Fugue' in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus) has been well known for generations.1 Evidence of his familiarity with Bach and Handel can be traced through his music of the 1780s, and still be heard in his last works - in the austere duet for the Men in Armour from Die Zauberflote, for example, and the Kyrie fugue of the Requiem, for which Mozart borrowed his subject and counter-- subject from the closing fugue of Handel's Dettingen Te Deum (Handel himself having reused them for the chorus `We shall rejoice' in Joseph). This was by no means mere pandering to an influential patron's taste for the antique: the depth of Mozart's creative involvement with these earlier models was such that he even `contemplated writing oratorios in the style of Handel', according to his son.2 And it is intriguing to think that Mozart might have anticipated Haydn's move into that genre, had he lived longer.
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Further, more substantial evidence of Mozart's Handel studies survives in the additional wind and brass parts he composed for four of Handel's large-scale choral works. These arrangements -- of Acis and Galatea (1788), Messiah (1789), and the Ode for St Cecilia's Day and Alexander's Feast (1790) - were commissioned by van Swieten for the Gesellschaft der Associierten Cavaliere, a group of noble enthusiasts dedicated to sponsoring performances of oratorios in Vienna. From today's perspective, the willingness of this circle to introduce new elements into Handel's scores seems to contradict the spirit of historicism these performances represent. Its reasoning, however, was quite pragmatic. The Viennese penchant for the timbres of `die Harmonie' (a band of mixed wind and brass instruments) had enhanced the development and significance of these sections of the standard orchestra considerably since Handel's time. Mozart's addition of new wind and brass parts to Handel's scores, at van Swieten's instigation, was therefore a means of enriching the orchestral textures, and modernising Handel's orchestration to suit contemporary expectations. Moreover, musical language itself had altered considerably in the space of two generations, and for late-eighteenth-century audiences the services of an arranger were helpful in making sense of by then unfamiliar modes of expression.
Mozart's version of Messiah achieved particular celebrity, following its publication by Breitkopf & Hartel in 1803: it catalysed performance traditions of Handel oratorios in the German-speaking lands, and many of Mozart's ideas were carried over into Ebenezer Prout's edition of 1902 - the standard version in use among British choral societies for much of the last century. All four of Mozart's Handel arrangements, their authenticity uncontested, were published in the Supplement of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe between 1961 and 1973, in editions by Andreas Holschneider.
RECENTLY, what purports to be a fifth Mozart arrangement of Handel - a manuscript full score of Judas Maccabaeus, in three volumes, `mit Begleitungen fur Blasinstrumenten Von W: A: Mozart' - has come to light, in Calderdale District Archives, West Yorkshire, among the scores of the Halifax Choral Society.3 The manuscript was presented to the Society in 1850, by one of its founder members - William Priestley (1779-1860), an affluent wool clothier, amateur musician, and collector of an extensive library of choral works.4 Bound into Volume I is a statement of provenance from Priestley himself, a copy of a letter he had written to a local clergyman, describing how he had obtained the manuscript `about 25 years ago' from one of the German settlements of the Moravian Church situated to the north-east of Dresden - `whether from Gnadenthal, Niesky, or Gorlitz in Lusatia, I do not now recollect'.
The protestant Moravian Church traces its origins back to one of the earliest, pre-Lutheran dissents from Catholicism - the ancient church of the Bohemian Brethren, or Unitas Fratrum. Religious persecution during the Counter-Reformation prompted the Moravian diaspora, and an early settlement was founded by refugees at Herrnhut in Saxony, which remains the hub of the church to this day. The Moravians flourished during the eighteenth century, establishing settlements across Europe and the colonies. Their influence was strongly felt in the West Riding of Yorkshire, thanks in part to the support of the itinerant Anglican evangelical, Benjamin Ingham. Communal houses were opened in Lightcliffe, Priestley's village, before the Moravian settlement of Fulneck was founded near Leeds, in 1744.5 Priestley's musical scrapbook, which is also preserved in Calderdale District Archives, contains a handbill for a concert given by the Moravian musicians of Fulneck, featuring German choral music by composers who were unfamiliar in Yorkshire, but well represented on the shelves of Priestley's musical library.6 His connections with the Moravians were probably commercial as well as musical, since many of the brothers and sisters at Fulneck, a working community, were involved in wool production.
