This holiday season there will be many performances of George Frederick Handel’s oratorio Messiah. Audiences love to stand when it gets to the Hallelujah chorus and sing along. December performances have been a U.S. tradition since 1818.
In the past few years, a new note has sounded from the New York Times down through tiers of liberals and progressives: you must always keep in mind that Handel invested in the slave trade. And each musician and listener today must make up for that.
We look at the details of the indictment below. First let us consider what racialized metaphysics pushes aside: a class and historical understanding of Handel’s music.
Through the medium of sound, music stirs charged thoughts about our life and society. Aspiring composers learn the grammar and vocabulary: melody, harmony, rhythm, volume, pitch, etc. Music speaks to people who work, or who exploit and govern, in a particular mode of production. Therefore, it is historical. Nonetheless, great music outlasts its original society. Ancient “Greek art and epic poetry are tied up with certain forms of social development [yet] they still give us aesthetic pleasure,” wrote Karl Marx. (Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)
The Music and Social Orders of Bach and Handel
Compare Handel (1685-1759) with another great German-born composer, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Despite the near-overlap of their years, they lived in different social settings and made different music.
Early in Handel’s London career, a group of aristocrats started a Royal Academy of Music and hired him. They were not about private performances in their castles; they staged Handel’s oratorios for profit. Later he had his own production company. The audiences included merchants, bankers, other capitalists, and better-off shop owners. England was the leading capitalist country, London its commercial capital. Handel gave them joyful, melodramatic music tied closely to a story. But his music lives on because he was serious about his chosen art; he had rejected his father’s entreaties to become an attorney who could expect a comfortable living.
Bach lived and worked in the small cities of backward Germany, a jumble of principalities and landed estates. High-cultural music resided in aristocratic courts and the church. Bach spent part of his career with a duke and a prince. They patronized the arts to coat their rule with a sheen of civilization, to grease relations with fellow nobles, and for their own pleasure, not to sell tickets for money. Among other duties, Bach tutored in music. In another chapter of his career, “As director of church music for the city of Leipzig, Bach had to supply performers for four churches.” Townspeople and nearby farmers heard his cantatas while sitting in church pews, encouraged to reflect on life, character, and behavior.
Unlike Handel, Bach could not depend on a fully staffed orchestra. He mastered counterpoint and other compositional techniques, relying less on the color of instruments. Many of Bach’s pieces enthrall us whether played on organ, violin, or harpsichord.
No period style of music remains fresh forever. Bach took baroque music to completion.[1] Music critics observe that his counterpoint turns and turns within limited circles. Handel broke out of the confines. He simplified the counterpoint, favored striking melody, and shortened the phrases. If this sounds like a loss, it was. But Handel opened new terrain. And then along came Beethoven.
Music Today
Now compare Handel with high-cultural music today. The latter has shrunk to insignificance. The controversial efforts of Arnold Schoenberg and the twelve-tone chromatic technique have not given us widely admired classics. His system and other streams of atonality fought key-centered composition. Although they achieved minor public attention in the work of Bartok, Webern, Boulez and others, none of it stands at the heights of human achievement like the masterworks of the baroque, classical and romantic periods.
Why? The capitalist class no longer needs nor wants the high-cultural arts. The mode of production is in decay, dragging what Marxists call the superstructure with it.
High-culture composers had always drawn on folk melodies. In contrast, Black working people of the U.S. South themselves gave us a new form of serious music. Coming off the share-crop farm and into the cities, living amidst vigorous industrial activity, they created jazz. It was one of the last musical advances within capitalism. Its rapid development through swing, bebop, and cool jazz created a new serious music. The creators found rhythms in the movement of trains and machines. Their toolkit included “bent” blue notes; their West African grandparents had been able to keep these when they were sold into slavery and taken to Southern cotton plantations. Neither aristocrats, tycoons, nor government supported the creators of jazz. Club owners, record corporations, and music publishers exploited them.
Comparison of Handel’s music with what went before and what came after suggests that we think about a new future, too. Lenin noted, “Marxism … has assimilated and refashioned everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development of human thought and culture. Only further work on this basis and in this direction … can be recognized as the development of a genuine proletarian culture.”
Handel Charged with Slave-Trade Profits
The capitalist class and its ideological agents do not want such thoughts in your mind while you stand up and sing the Hallelujah chorus. You may enjoy the Messiah but you must recoil, too, because Handel invested in the slave trade.
This charge against Handel has been around for years. It gets a new boost for the 2024 holiday season. Georgetown University professor Charles King recently published a book about the Messiah, setting off a new wave of dismay about Handel’s alleged profits. In a long review last month, the New York Times deemed it a “vivid social and cultural commentary.”
• A reviewer in the Guardian chips away at Handel: “By revealing the murky circumstances in which it was created, Charles King’s fascinating history of the oratorio shows it in a new light. … Britons … happily profited from the enslavement of others. Both Jennens and Handel were clients of the South Sea Company, whose ‘signature money-making venture’, as King notes, was ‘the involuntary transport of human beings’ from Africa to the American colonies.” Notice that Handel is not directly accused of being happy from profits, but you get the message.
• David Hunter, the academic who supplies the material for indicting Handel, states that his investments represent “an appalling conjunction of the finest art and the worst of humanity.”
• The director of a choral group lectures us, “When performing historical pieces without any contextual framing, [what] … we’re buying into is the context that people have assigned to it historically, which is that this is a ‘master’ work of Western European society. This comes with all sorts of baggage – racist baggage, classist baggage. By being deliberate about a contextual focus, we can stop buying into that.”
Ah, context! Not the context of class, not change from then to now and on to the future. No, the director sneers with quote marks at Handel’s “master” work. Obeying a rule of racialized metaphysics, he puts racist baggage and classist baggage on the same level of social essence.[2]
Since we thrill at the music, we share the guilt and must expiate it. Mr. Hunter advises, “Concert organizers could, through charitable donations, raise awareness of how Handel’s works were entangled with slave-trade profits, explaining that ‘a portion of tonight’s/today’s revenue/collection will be donated to [charity name] as a reparation for the use of the profits of slavery to fund this work’s initial creation or performances’.
And so it shall be. The music director of the National Philharmonic pleads, “New scholarship reveals that Handel made handsome money investing in the slave trade, so the question is: how do we in the 21st century respond to having learned that? Do we stop playing his music? Or is there some more constructive way of moving forward?” At his order, the philharmonic will donate half of the proceeds from Messiah concerts to an A.M.E. Zion church.
Dutifully learning from the Handel case, the artistic director of the period-instrument ensemble Apollo’s Fire wants to avoid guilt for her retirement savings: “I try to see what can I learn from Handel and how can I try to make a difference here and now. We can take this news about Handel’s investments and look into our own 401(k)s or whatever we each have. Many people are not paying that much attention to how their investments are specifically allocated.”
Racialized metaphysics looks radical and angry, but it reduces history to court trials on moral charges.
The blather about Handel’s investments in the slave trade is like the dust-up over the fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. It buries historical understanding of the 1776 Revolution. The war was a national uprising against Britain, but it was based on broad progressive ideas. Jefferson took the concept of the equality of all people forward, tossing out feudal ranks and privilege. Regarding slavery, he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the English king “has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere … This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold.” The continental congress excluded this passage from the final document.
Jefferson helped open the way to a new mode of production, capitalism. Today, capitalism is as reactionary and decayed as feudalism was in the 1700’s. Our task is to overthrow it and proceed to the socialist-communist mode of production. The slanderers of Handel and Jefferson cannot stand that we will make this history.
Handel Did Not Invest in the Slave Trade
It also turns out that Handel did not invest in the slave trade. The alleged shareholdings were in fact a pro forma device to pay Handel salary that was in arrears. Historian Ellen T. Harris spent years poring over his account books. She discovered:
“Handel’s South Sea Annuity similarly existed solely for the payment of his salary from the Royal Academy of Music. … Handel … held no property, enslaved no people, and controlled no interest in any slave-trading activity… Handel’s 5% annuity at the Bank of England … was created by an Act of Parliament in collaboration with the Bank of England in order to pay the arrears on the Civil List (the salaries and pensions owed to civil servants and pensioners). Handel was paid his royal pension of £200 by Walter Chetwynd, the Paymaster General of his Majesties Pensions, by having an account set up in his name in that amount. By selling the stock two days later, Handel obtained his payment.” The same pattern explains Handel’s brief account at the Royal African Company. He quickly withdrew the money since it was salary and not investment.
But truth does not matter to those who promote racialized metaphysics. A leader of the campaign against Handel could not refute Harris’ evidence. So he retreated to insisting that whether you are a capitalist financier or a hired professional is “a distinction without a difference … That he became invested in the slave trade through the actions of his employers does not relieve him of responsibility for those investments.”
No, we will not smear responsibility across class lines. We will prepare to toss the capitalists and their exploitation into the garbage can of history.
Charles Andrews is the author of The Hollow Colossus and other books.
This article originally appeared at https://newworker.us/culture/handel-and-the-slave-trade/
A list of his occasional essays is at http://www.hollowcolossus.com/moreCA.htm
[1] Yet Bach’s “old” music sets off new vibrations in us today.
[2] Metaphysics, as Engels put it, is “the old method of investigation and thought … which preferred to investigate things as given, as fixed and stable.” It cannot see that all things consist of opposites in some kind of motion and are always changing, whether visible to us or not. Racialized metaphysics as used here decrees fixed racial judgments on society and music without regard to their development.
