God's thunderous command breaks through the mournful slumber of death:
"Arise!" cried His voice. And the young man arose.
Or again, in the Funeral Anthem, the intoxicated cry, almost painful in its joy, of the immortal soul that puts off the husk of the body and holds out its arms to its God.[1]
But nothing approaches in moral grandeur the chorus that closes the second act of Jephthah. Nothing enables us better than the story of this composition to gain an insight into Händel's heroic faith.
When he began to write it, on the 21st January, 1751, he was in perfect health, despite his sixty-six years. He composed the first act in twelve days, working without intermission. There is no trace of care to be found in it. Never had his mind been freer; it was almost indifferent as to the subject under treatment.[2] In the course of the second act his sight became suddenly clouded. The writing, so clear at the beginning, is now confused and tremulous.[3] The music too assumes a mournful
- ↑ The chorus "But His glory endureth for ever" alternates with the funeral chorus: "His body has gone to rest in the tomb." The motive was borrowed by Händel from a motet by an old German master of the sixteenth century,—his namesake Händel (Jakobus-Gallus): Ecce quomodo moritur justus. But a single change of rhythm suffices to give wings to the old chorale; an ecstatic impulse which suddenly breaks off, breathless with emotion, unable to find further utterance. Eight times this cry rises in the course of this composition.
- ↑ Several of Iphis' airs are built upon dance rhythms: in the first act The Smiling Dawn, on the rhythm of a bourrée (an Auvergnian dance), and in the second act, Welcome as the Cheerful Light, on a gavotte rhythm.
- ↑ The progress of the malady may be followed exactly on the autograph manuscript, the facsimile of which was published by Chrysander in the great Breitkopf collection in 1885.
