English Oratorio Research Articles

Fielding, Opera, and Oratorio: The Case of Handel

It is generally stated without qualification that Fielding was a great admirer of Handel. This is understandable given that his works of the 1740s and 1750s are replete with praise of the composer. Curiously, however, during the 1730s, his compliments to Handel are few and far between. True, in his ballad operas from that period, he borrowed a number of the composer's melodies, but in multiple instances, he attached comic lyrics that mocked their seriousness. This paper contends that Fielding's apparent change in attitude in the 1740s was rooted in Handel's own change as he moved away from Italian opera and toward English oratorio. While Fielding was critical of the former, the latter genre aligned with his aesthetic ideal, which favored word-centric music performed in English with a minimum of “Tinsel, or . . . Ostentation.” Indeed, it is arguable that in his ballad-opera adaptations of Handel, which he often assigned to performers whom Handel also employed, Fielding was prefiguring on a lesser scale what would later make Handel his ideal of all an English composer should be.

The Morphology of Handel's Operas

Little scholarly attention has been devoted to the dramaturgy of Handel's operas, which seems secondary to musical and circumstantial matters of venue and performers. This article argues that important things can be learned by attempting to categorize, analyze, and assess the librettos in strictly dramaturgical terms. We need to ask whether there is coherence or development, and what Handel wanted in the librettos he set. Handel's operas have generally been categorized by date and/or venue. Winton Dean categorized them by “dominant temper,” characterized as “heroic or dynastic,” “magic operas,” and “antiheroic.” By implication, Handel approached each opera on a case-by-case basis, not much concerned with generic form. Ellen T. Harris critiqued Dean and offered a dialectical model, dividing the operas into “pastoral” and “heroic” groups. But if we ask “What is the ‘source of action’ within each plot?,” we find four largely distinct groups: (1) villain or villainess; (2) intrigue complexities; (3) situational donné; and (4) character display. After nearly fifteen years of plot structures driven by villains, Handel began to experiment with quite different plot designs (though he did not change librettists). Handel's operas comprise, structurally, a series of mostly static scenes in which intense feelings (ambition, lust, hope, fear, doubt, pain, remorse, etc.) are expressed. The happy-ending convention in opera seria renders plot resolution secondary. Handel's operas are essentially situational rather than plot driven. They use dramatic situations over and over (e.g., supplication, deliverance, abduction, remorse, enmity of kinsmen, self-sacrifice). Handel is far more concerned with intense expression of emotion than with telling a story. In all four types of Handelian opera, quasi-ideal heroes or heroines are featured. In (1) they are threatened by the machinations of a villain; in (2) they find themselves entangled in intrigue; in (3) they are caught in the toils of fate or circumstances; and in (4) the aim is mostly just display of heroic character. Handel's bent was for situation and emotion rather than narrative and resolution. Great and stageable as the best of Handel's operas are, the English oratorio offered him a genre ultimately more congenial to his talents and inclinations.

Understanding Handel’s operas

Some readers may be excused for thinking that there might not be much more to say about Handel’s operas following the achievements of Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp in two volumes (the second by Dean alone) first published in 1987 and 2006. While Dean and Knapp employ a chronological, opera-by-opera approach, offering a comprehensive study of the history, composition, structure and reception of each work, David Kimbell advances a different methodology. In a similar way to Silke Leopold’s Händel. Die Opern (Bärenreiter 2009), he takes a step back, presenting instead a guide to understanding Handel’s operas as a whole, drawing not only on his own experience of European opera studies, but also on a deep understanding of Handel’s musical dramas. Although the fundamental approach is similar to that of Leopold, Kimbell’s book places emphasis on different aspects of Handel’s operas, making it a unique contribution to Handel studies. His intended audience is made up of those ‘who wish to know a little more about Handel’s operas and to understand them a little better’ (p.ix), and he caters to this audience not only through his careful selection of examples drawn from across Handel’s output, but also by focusing on Handel’s early career. If we are to understand his London operas, a deeper understanding of how Handel developed as an opera composer in Germany and during his time in Italy, whilst he was learning his trade, is required. This is particularly evident in the opening chapter, which provides a biographical survey of Handel’s engagement with opera from his education in Halle through to his move away from opera in favour of English oratorio around 40 years later in London.

Handel's use of plucked instruments

Three central features of Baroque music encompass a large portion of questions about the performance of this particular repertory: its improvisatory aspect, the use of basso continuo, and the instrumental color and variety. Teorbo and lute solos, aside of playing a role as a continuo, filled in the intermissions of oratorios in Italy since late 17th century, while organ concertos provided the same function for English oratorios in the early 18th century. It is from Handel's early period ‒ his first trip to Italy in 1707 ‒ that teorbo and archiliuto start to appear in his vocal music. Handel employed either the teorbo or archiliuto (or simply liuto) in twelve vocal works and in one instrumental Ouverture. A complete examination of the circumstances that involve this particular aspect of Handel's music is the subject this paper.

Handel’s Samson

HANDEL'S SAMSONGeorg Friederic Handel. Samson: Oratorio in Three Acts, HWV 57. Herausgegeben von Hans Dieter Clausen. (Hallische Handel-Ausgabe, Ser. I, Bd. 18). Kassel, New York: Barenreiter, 2011. [Teilband 1: Partitur von 1743. Pref. and ed. policy in Ger., Eng., p. vii-xxx; table of versions, p. xxxi-xxxiii; concordance HWV-HHA, p. xxxiv; comparison of the texts of Hamilton's manuscript wordbook and the corresponding lines in Milton's Samson Agonistes and other works by Milton, p. xxxv-lxvii; facsims., p. lxviii-lxxv; repr. of 1743 libretto, p. lxxvi-lxxxv; text in Ger. trans., p. lxxxvi-xcvi; texts of arias added later, in Eng., Ger., p. xcvii; scoring, p. 2; index of scenes, p. 3-5; score, p. 7-328. Teilband 2: Anhange und Kritischer Bericht. Anhang Ia: original version, p. 329-86; Anhang Ib: mvts. from intermediate 1742 version, p. 387-96; Anhang II: variants and additions, p. 397-424; Kritischer Bericht (abbrevs., p. 426; RISM sigla, p. 427; sources, p. 428-50; Einzelnachweise, p. 450-526). Pub. no. BA 4099; ISMN 979-0-006-55011-1. i585.]Georg Friederic Handel. Samson, HWV 57. Klavierauszug nach dem Urtext der Hallischen Handel-Ausgabe = Piano Reduction Based on the Urtext of the Halle Handel Edition, by Andreas Kohs. Kassel, New York: Barenreiter, 2011. [Ensemble, p. iii; pref. in Ger., Eng., by Hans Dieter Clausen, p. iv-ix; index of scenes, p. x-xii; table of versions, p. xiii-xix; score, p. 1-325; appendix 1A: original version, p. 328-89; appendix 1B: mvts. from intermediate 1742 version, p. 392-401; appendix II: variants and additions, p. 404-32. Pub. no. BA 4099-90; ISMN 979-0-006-54127-0. i49.95.]The musicologist in search of a particular year through which to illustrate musical activity in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century could hardly do better than 1741. Marking the end of an era, we can note the deaths of the composer and theorist Johann Joseph Fux on 13 February, and of Antonio Vivaldi on 27/28 July. Tomaso Albinoni retired. Notable publications issued that year include Johann Sebastian Bach's Clavierubung IV, which we now know as the Goldberg Variations. In France, Jean- Philippe Rameau issued Pieces de clavecin en concerts. Meanwhile, in London, George Frideric Handel directed the last staged versions of his own Italian operas. Thereafter he focused his compositional attention-in terms of large-scale works- on English oratorios, a form that he had pioneered and had included in his performance seasons for nearly a decade.Having taken his typical late-spring and early-summer break, Handel began writing Messiah on 22 August, finishing it on 14 September. Soon thereafter he began Samson, completing the initial drafton 29 October. We can be this specific because Handel dated his scores. In November Handel leftLondon for Dublin, where his actor friend James Quin had gone in June. Quin was joined on the stage of the Aungier Street Theatre in mid-December by another of Handel's friends, Susannah Cibber, who traveled to Dublin in order to repair her theatrical reputation. On 23 De - cem ber Handel led the first of the concerts in two subscription series of six concerts each. On 13 April 1742 he directed the first performance of Messiah, at which Cibber gave a most affecting performance of He was despised. Having returned to the London stage the following season, Cibber was given the lead female role of Micah in Samson. Though not performed today with anything like the frequency of Messiah, Samson, from 1743 to Handel's death in 1759, was in the top four, with over fifty performances among the oratorios on sacred themes.The story of Samson derives from the Old Testament Book of Judges, but the version set by Handel is hardly recognizable as such. As Deborah Rooke puts it in Handel's Israelite Oratorio Libretti: Sacred Drama and Biblical Exegesis (New York: Oxford Uni ver - sity Press, 2012), The biblical Samson is a wild, uncontrolled loner who despite being styled a national hero is really acting in accordance with his own impulses to satisfy his own desires (p. …

Händel, njegovi sodobniki in zgodnji angleški oratorij

Pregled razvoja angleškega oratorija od prvih javnih uprizoritev Händlovega oratorija Esther (1732) do 1740. Obravnava vpliv Händla na njegove angleške sodobnike glede na slog, obliko, izbiro teme in alegorično vsebino, ter prikaže bolj celovito podobo angleškega oratorija v 30. letih 18. stoletja kot kdaj koli doslej.

‘HEE-HAW … LLELUJAH’: HANDEL AMONG THE VAUXHALL ASSES (1732)

ABSTRACTThe discovery of a satirical list from 1732 helps us revisit Handel's affairs during the early 1730s. Placing the composer among elite guests at the opening night of Vauxhall Gardens in 1732, the new document predates his known links with the venue by six years, offers a rare description of him as subservient to John James Heidegger and possibly alludes to his medical condition prior to 1737. It also invites an exploration of hidden affinities between English oratorio and John Henley's much-abused Oratory, including a hypothesis about the strictures applied to Esther by the Bishop of London. Much more important, it helps launch a re-examination of Handel's role in the ‘Second Academy’ as a court composer in an entrepreneurial milieu.

Sociétés chorales et Renaissance de la musique anglaise, 1840-1910

The great English choral tradition as we know it today was born along with the Industrial Revolution with the development of choral societies like the oldest, the Halifax Choral Society in 1817, while the Birmingham Choral Society, founded in 1843, was to provide a chorus for the town’s Triennial Music Festival. Those societies were fostered so as to tame, civilise and educate the potentially unruly new unskilled labour force who manned “the dark Satanic mills” of the expanding northern industrial cities and to lead them away from drink or the profanities of the nascent music-halls. Their favourite repertoire was the English oratorios of Handel and Mendelssohn, a genre which flourished all century long in the wake of the great religious awakening of the late eighteenth century and provided English and foreign composers with work in an opera-shy kingdom. Various social reformers, like John Curwen of Tonic Sol-Fa fame, developed methods to teach the untrained choristers how to read music, thus permitting their exposure to high-brow culture, to which the policy of the music publisher Novello greatly contributed. Paradoxically, the Renaissance of English music in the late 19th century benefited from the craze for choral singing but also somehow triggered its demise when native composers, who had assimilated the lessons of their foreign competitors and raised their standards of composition, required more from their amateur choristers, gradually forced to give up in favour of professionals, increasing the gap between popular and high brow culture.

Handel at a Crossroads: His 1737-1738 and 1738-1739 Seasons Re-Examined

The years 1738 and 1739 saw a dramatic reversal in Handel's life and career. Wide popularity, admiration, and financial success in the spring of 1738 gave place to unexpected competition and performance clashes with the Italian opera party a year later, spoiling Handel's first oratorio season and exhausting his current account. New documentary evidence culled from a variety of sources allows us to reconsider this period, probe its central episodes, and reveal new ones. Among the topics explored in this essay are a hitherto unknown attempt by female aristocrats to produce Italian operas in 1739, Handel's long-standing interest in musical innovation, a Frenchman's eyewitness account of key Handelian events in 1738, a reconsideration of Saul's and Israel in Egypt's reception in 1739, and the earliest attempt to promote English Oratorio as a British national genre.

The Rape of Lucretia, premier « opéra anglais » de Britten ?

The Rape of Lucretia is Britten’s second opera, composed in the wake of the popular success of Peter Grimes and amidst the composer’s difficulties in sustaining his ambitious project to restore English opera and to set up his own opera company despite the dire post-war economic context. As Britten’s first chamber opera and the only one that retells a story from Roman Antiquity it stands apart in the Britten canon. But the collaboration of designer John Piper for the scenery and of Ronald Duncan for the libretto, the resort to dramatic verse, the borrowings from Blake, Donne and Shakespeare, as well as the musical references to English oratorio and Purcell and to Britten’s own personal questioning contribute to making it Britten’s first “English opera”.

"Parsifal" as English Oratorio

"Parsifal" as English Oratorio

COMPREHENDING THEODORA

Handel’s Theodora (1750, libretto Thomas Morell), an oratorio about a Christian martyr, does not have the religious-political import of his other English oratorios or the literary-critical stature of his English secular dramas and odes. A ‘sport’ among Handel’s oratorios, until recently Theodora resisted whole-hearted appreciation and elicited widely differing summaries of its meaning. This is the first extended study to be published since the chapter in Winton Dean’s Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques of 1959. Drawing on guidelines proposed in the appendix ‘Approaches to Oratorio’, the article examines the libretto’s sources, dramatization and relation to the librettist’s interests; positions the work with regard to the religious ideas of its time, identifying its religious-historical standpoint; and describes its kinship with contemporary drama, fiction and aesthetics. Connoisseurs among Handel’s audience appreciated Theodora but ‘the Town’ did not. It is suggested that both Morell and Handel were aiming for inclusiveness, comprehensiveness and breadth of appeal, and in so doing produced a work – more ambiguous and conspicuously open to interpretation than the biblical oratorios – that demands the listener’s active and discriminating engagement.

The Song of Moses (review)

Thomas Linley Jr. The Song of Moses. Edited by Peter Overbeck. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Classical Era, 58.) Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, c2000. [Acknowledgments, p. vii; introd., p. ix-xi; text, p. xii-xiii; 2 plates; score, 260 p.; crit. report, p. 261-65. ISBN 0-89579-451-9. $85.] When we think of English oratorios, we inevitably think of George Frideric Handel. Moreover, we assume that a Handel oratorio is supposed to be sung in a concert Setting, unstaged, and performed by professional musicians. Yet it is less widely known that these conventions developed somewhat by accident--and contrary to Handel's own intentions. In 1718, Handel wrote Esther, his first oratorio in English, and in 1732, a privately staged production of the work was mounted in honor of the composer's birthday. This performance took place at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in London, and the singers included the boy choristers from the Chapel Royal. Pleased with the result, Handel began arranging for a public performance of Esther at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket. The Bishop of London (who also served as Dean of the Chapel Royal) got wind of the plans, however, and raised various objections. Since opera houses were, by his estimation, immoral places, it was unconscionable to allow children to sing there; moreover , he felt it was improper to present a staged production of a sacred work in such a venue. As a compromise, advertisements for Esther, performed By His Majesty's Command, assured the audience that There will be no Action on the Stage (the Daily Journal, 19 April 1732), and Handel employed professional singers only. Unstaged versions of Deborah and Athalia in 1733 followed in the wake of Esther's success, thus cementing the performance tradition of the English oratorio. In England, oratorios did not function merely as substitute operas, since in contrast to the restrictions of many continental cities, opera was permitted on London stages during Lent. More to the point, throughout the year, English opera houses were forbidden to present operas on Wednesdays and Fridays--thanks to a statute intended to protect spoken drama from competition. Since oratorios were not operas, however, managers of opera houses found that they could use this loophole to continue earning profits. Nevertheless, the subject matter of the oratorios often seemed most appropriate for performances during the Lenten season, and it was during this pre-Easter period that most oratorios were presented. Enjoying royal patronage as well as substantial public approval, Handel's oratorios grew to be a regular London feature during Lent, and his contributions to the oratorio repertory also became a mainstay of the many preexisting summertime musical festivals held around the English countryside. Through these wide spread and perennial performances, the Handelian oratorios were attaining the status of classics, and the revival of this canon continued on a regular basis after Handel's death in 1759. So why did no real school of oratorio composers follow in Handel's footsteps? Historian William Weber opens his study of the developing English canon by observing that Eighteenth-century England was the first place where old musical works were performed regularly and reverentially, where a collective notion of such works--'ancient music'--first appeared (The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology [Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], vii). Musical societies and concert series arose to feed the English hunger for this older repertory--the Academy of Ancient Music was founded in 1726 as the Academy of Vocal Music, and fifty years later the Concert of Ancient Music began its performances at the Tottenham Street Rooms in London, requiring that all its repertory be at least twenty years old. Handel's works, including his oratorios, were a mainstay of the concerts. …

Haendel et la Bible : mise en mots, mise en musique, mise en scène. L’oratorio anglais entre expansion et concentration, substitution et addition

This paper analyses the different modes, literary, musical and dramatic, at work in Haendel’s composition of his English oratorios. Using the Bible as a really flexible narrative material, Haendel’s librettists and Haendel himself achieved complex adaptations whose basic components -the Bible, the libretto, music and finally the stage -interact in a variety of ways. Using specific examples with studies of the literary rewriting at work and musical illustrations, this paper tries to establish the specificities of three such relational modes. Expansion, both in words and music, will be studied in Israel in Egypt (1739) -where Haendel’s «depiction » of the plagues, while interestingly anticipating Burke’s theory of the sublime, gave full vent to the seemingly endless possibilities of musical dilatation. A second example of such mode will be taken from Solomon (1749) with the arrival of the Queen of Sheba. Concentration is most visibly at work in Samson (1743) whose libretto itself resulted from the dramatic compression of Milton’s «sizeable » poem (itself, as everyone knows, the result of a spectacular, if not quite theatrical, expansion of only a few lines from the biblical source text, the final scene in chapter 16 of the Book of Judges). The new dramatic impact of this -only apparently -static oratorio will be studied here, as well as the musical «economy » (concentration here again) at work when it comes to make Samson ’s fall be heard. Addition is the third mode to be defined. The creation of new «characters, » such as new nations, will be dealt with in terms of ideological construct, dramatic efficiency and musical invention. Belshazzar (1745) and its musically impressive «dialogue of the nations » will serve as an emblematic case. These various examples will all be used to define some of the central stakes in the tense relationships between words, music and performance, be it truly dramatic or not, which Haendel and his oratorio librettists experimented upon for twenty years.

L’allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato de Haendel : une contradiction réconciliée ?

This paper aims at analysing the various principles underlying Haendel and his librettists’ adaptation of Miltons twin-poems “L’Allegro” and “II Penseroso.” Paradoxically, the new structure of James Harris’s text reinforces the dialogic nature of the diptych, while depriving the two poems of their paradigmatic essence. Besides, Charles Jennens’s addition of the third part “Il Moderato” seems to synthesise the two incompatible opposites, the fundamentally open and baroque nature of Milton’s initial work being transformed into the rational compromise that one tends to associate with the classical age. However, Haendel’s music infuses ambiguousness into the new text, restoring the basic contradictions erased by Jennens’s words. The final work also lends itself to a reading according to which the tension between the two extremes of the human mind can be seen as Handel’s own artistic and aesthetic hesitations, at this stage of his career, between the lure of Italian opera and the call of - and for English oratorio.

Handel's Hercules and Its Semiosis

Modern scholarship is almost unanimous in its praise of Handel's English musicodramatic anomaly Hercules. While there may be no consensus regarding its genre-it has been deemed a secular oratorio (Herbage), a classical drama (Dean, Staged), a choral opera (Hicks and Abraham), an English opera (Charles Jennens, quoted in Abraham), and a mythological oratorio (Larsen)-It has been called 'the highest peak of late baroque music drama' (Paul Henry Lang), 'perhaps Handel's greatest achievement' (Pruniares), and 'the culmination of the Handelian musical drama, and indeed one might say of the whole musical theatre before Gluck' (Romain Rolland).l Along with this praise, collected by Winton Dean in 1959, came Dean's lament that Hercules was then so seldom heard and his suggestion that the culprit was, in the England of the late 1950s, the oratorio tradition: The most popular London revivals are least conspicuous for accuracy, good taste, and artistic sensitivity.2 Although Hercules is surely better known and better performed today than it was before 1959, have yet to come to grips with the fact that Hercules' dismal failure dates back to the composer's lifetime, not just to the nineteenth century. As Ruth Smith has stated in an appraisal of modern criticism of Handel's English oratorios as a whole, we have not discovered why our estimate is often contrary to that of Handel's audience.3

‘DRAMA OF AN INFINITELY SUPERIOR NATURE’: HANDEL'S EARLY ENGLISH ORATORIOS AND THE RELIGIOUS SUBLIME

IN 1740, John Lockman described the oratorio first and foremost as 'drama', but one 'of an infinitely superior nature' because of its sacred theme.' In the twentieth century, many British and American Handel scholars have not given this contemporary assessment, one not unique to Lockman, the credence that is due to it. Promoting images of Handel as opera composer and quintessential man of the theatre, these musicologists have largely disregarded or made too little of the religious elements of English oratorio, giving priority, instead, to its dramatic qualities.2 By creating such a dichotomy between devotion and drama, they have tended to ignore the integral role of religion in eighteenth-century culture and hence to misrepresent the meaning of oratorio in its original context. However, recent endeavours to reconstruct the intellectual frame of mind of eighteenthcentury audiences have begun to remove these conceptual blinkers -the products of twentieth-century values -and have permitted a more sensitive perception of the

Marketing the American Song in Edwardian London

As the musical hallmark of late nineteenth-century England, the owed its popularity in Victorian society largely to promotional endeavors by music publishers.' Beginning in 1867 with the weekly Saturday afternoon Boosey Ballad Concerts and continuing into the Edwardian era, ballads were brought before the public at concerts initiated and supported by publishers with large song catalogs. Firms solicited famous singers to introduce new titles and paid them royalties as inducements for singing their songs.2 Enthusiastic reports of these concerts in the press generated a demand for sheet music from the amateur music-making public, creating a veritable ballad industry. At the height of its popularity, it was said that the was a moneymaker for over fifty London companies.3 Such a commercially successful market presented an attractive business opportunity for the energetic and enterprising Boston music publisher, Arthur P. Schmidt, whose efforts to introduce and popularize his American song catalog in England in the years between 1893 and 1910 are the subject of this paper. The typical concert was composed of folk songs or pseudofolk songs, selections from English oratorios, an operatic aria or two, an occasional early English madrigal, and many modem songs of an undemanding nature, usually dealing with love, God, or nature.4 These royalty ballads usually consisted of three verses; the accompaniment not too difficult, the voice part not too high. Although the musical language was similar to European art music, giving the songs an aura

MOZART'S INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH MUSIC

BY the end of the eighteenth century the galant style of J. C. Bach, strengthened and enriched by Haydn, had become the everyday idiom for all instrumental music in England. The effect of Haydn's symphonies had been immense. Probably it was their orchestration which above all astonished an audience accustomed to the lightweight scoring of J. C. Bach, Abel, and the Italian operas popular in the 1780's. Haydn's popularity had been established partly as a result of two highly successful visits to London. It was vastly increased, in the eyes of the English, by the flattering facts that he first wrote twelve important symphonies specially for London, and later composed an oratorio on what was regarded as the English model. 'The Creation' was, indeed, the only work for over a century that was conceded a place beside Handel's oratorios, though it is an odd fact that after the first few performances it became the regular practice to perform only the first part. Several English oratorios were written in imitation of 'The Creation' and 'The Seasons'.' The few symphonies of the early I8oo's, notably those by S. Wesley2 and Crotch, imitate the plans and dimensions of Haydn's London symphonies, their tonality, and above all their orchestration. His piano sonatas were also a good deal imitated around the turn of the century. His chamber music had less direct influence, for English string quartets and piano trios were a rarity at this time. Haydn has remained a popular composer in England ever since. His music has never been difficult to listen to, and the attitude to it has not, on the whole, changed a great deal since I8oo. Naturally there was a decline in popularity as other composers became more fashionable, but his symphonies held their own all through the nineteenth century, while his chamber music increased in popularity with the advent of the chamber concert in 1835. He was thought of as the father of the modem school of instrumental music, and the senior member of that great trio of symphonists with whom all other composers were compared.