HANDEL AND THE FRENCH STYLE

Abstract

HANDEL was one of the most eclectic of all composers, absorbing most musical influences which presented themselves to him, whether of his own or any other time, from the canzonets of Morley to the street cries of Georgian London. So thoroughly and successfully did he assimilate the music of other times, lands and men that even his numerous direct plagiarisms have often passed completely unnoticed, until the chance discovery of some forgotten original has suddenly revealed the source on which he had drawn. In general his style was Italian and remarkably consistent, of that period which music historians sometimes call the Late Baroque. In his Saxon youth he had encountered various influences; the traditional Lutheran church music, itself an amalgam of many influences, both native and foreign; the new Italian style, brilliant, melodious, facile, full of strikingly novel vocal and instrumental effects and forms; and the rather more conservative French style, derived from Lully, based largely on the dance, and very popular at the courts of various francophile princes, from Brunswick in the north-west to Passau in the south-east. Of all these styles the astonishingly direct mind of the youthful Handel quickly recognized the Italian as being the one most akin to his own extrovert temperament; his visit to Italy itself confirmed him in his decision, and for the rest of his life his music was in general almost as Italian as that of Corelli or Alessandro Scarlatti, no matter what influences he encountered, with none of the deep Teutonic introspection of J. S. Bach and only a moiety of the would-be Gallic flippancy of their mutual friend Telemann. Yet even so, there are quite distinctive elements of the French style in many of Handel's works, and I believe that in performing such frenchifyed pieces, we should pay at least some attention to the peculiar conventions of that style. First, and most obvious of all, his overtures. There are something like fourscore of these, in all, dating from his early days at Hamburg to his last years in London. They fall roughly into three classes: (i) true French ouvertures, based on Lully's slow-fast-slow pattern; (2) single-movement Italianate sinfonie, of which the introduction to 'Acis and Galatea' and the so-called 'Arrival of the Queen of Sheba' are obvious and typical examples; and (3) works of the Italian da chiesa pattern, called variously ouverture, sonata or even