From stage to sepulchre

Abstract

There is little doubt that any list arranging the multifarious genres of early music according to the practicalities of reviving newly discovered works for modern audiences would be headed by solo keyboard pieces. The precise order of precedence in the middle ranks would be open to debate, but that opera would be relegated to the lowest place of all—far below even oratorio, let alone even the most colossally monumental of sacred liturgical pieces, or the most exorbitantly extravagant wedding festivities mounted by the Florentine court—is beyond dispute. Because it is seen as well as heard, opera has always been an extortionately expensive entertainment, as well as an ‘exotic and irrational’ one, and the manifold risks attendant on staging a full-length piece by a little-known composer, whether living or long dead, which could all too easily to be a disastrous flop, are very high. Given that the process of bringing Handel’s...