Music and Sense in Handel's Setting of Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso

Abstract

MORE THAN ANY OTHER BAROQUE COMPOSER, Handel has provided us with fortunate conjunctions of music and English poetry. Among his successful unions of voice and verse, none is more ambitious in its attempt to advance poetic meaning than his setting of Milton's L'Allegro and II Penseroso. But even to recognize such ambition, to employ music to advance the meaning of a text, compels us to acknowledge our distance from what the eighteenth century understood to be the power of music in conveying extramusical meaning. To modern judgment, nothing is more surprising than the confidence with which seventeenthand eighteenth-century discussions of music assert its ability to portray a reality outside of itself. Not only emotions and states of mind but often landscapes and even ideas are held to be accurately depicted in musical compositions. Music is an abstract art, modern theory objects, and its elements do not signify outside of the patterns and structures into which they are set. A theme or a melody may suggest a certain emotional state about which listeners may generally agree. But even music with a program works toward impression rather than specific meaning, and the necessity of its accompaniment by verbal description perhaps betrays most tellingly the abstract nature of the art itself. Music achieves its effects by a psychologically complex process of alternately fulfilling, suspending, and exceeding a listener's expectations. This process may be said to involve making sense, but only metaphorically, as sense here would mean conforming in some way to the auditory structures which the music itself leads the