G F Handel

Bring together Jean-Claude Malgoire, Philippe Jaroussky, Agrippina, and Haendel, plus three male countertenors (they could have been four) and you have the most surprising opera you can imagine with a future emperor just out of puberty trying to rape everyone he meets in all the corridors of the Imperial palace. The ambitious and murderous mother of this future emperor is absolutely up to her reputation. Enjoy that masterpiece and get one DVD of any production. The music is beautiful, provided the countertenors are where they are supposed to be, i.e. on the stage.

Michael Leoni, a leading singer in late eighteenth-century London, became famous for his role in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's anti-Jewish opera The Duenna. He was discovered, however, at the Jewish synagogue, where his singing enthralled non-Jews in the early 1770s. Tracing Leoni's public reception, this article argues that the performative effect of his singing had a multifaceted relation to his audience's psychology of prejudice, serving to both reiterate and reconfigure a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews. Leoni’s intervention through operatic singing was particularly significant – a powerful, bodily manifestation that was capable of transforming listeners while exhibiting the deep acculturation of the singer himself. The ambivalence triggered by his performances would go on to define the public reception of other Jewish singers, particularly that of Leoni's protégé, John Braham, Britain’s leading tenor in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the experience of these Jews' performances could not be easily deconstructed, as the Jewish performers' voices were emanating from within written, sometimes canonical, musical works. This representational impasse gave rise to a public discourse intent on deciphering their Jewishness, raising questions of interpretation, intention, and confession.

These extracts on music from the correspondence between Charles Jennens (1700–73) and Edward Holdsworth (1684–1746) reflect the authors' shared interests and (prohibited) political views. Though commonly known as the librettist of Messiah, Jennens was also a collector of music and art, and as such capitalized on Holdworth's travels as a tutor of young gentlemen on the Grand Tour. Many of the letters detail musical commissions and their fulfilment by a willing Holdsworth. In return, Jennens acted as Holdsworth's financial advisor, editorial consultant and publication adviser. Other discussions centre around the public and personal rating of singers and operas, in London and abroad, and include discussions of Handel's fortunes, his borrowing of music from Jennens's collection and his health. Mentions of personnel are not restricted to musicians but also encompass members of Jennens's family and of his and Holdsworth's social circles, many of whom were supporters of Handel.

This paper aims to discuss the role of Muzio Scevola sung by Senesino in the homonymic opera written in 1721 by Filippo Amadei, Giovanni Bononcini and Händel. The three composers wrote the music for each one of the acts of the opera. While Händel’s setting of the 3rd act has been already discussed by scholars, little attention has been paid to the former two. As the role of Muzio Scevola is an original one, I would like to show, by analysing it, how the composers approached Senesino’s vocality.

Baroque opera was invented on a deathly premise: reviving a tradition of sung ancient tragedy that had in fact never existed. Modern historiography has struggled with the notion of origins, focusing on relationships among the surviving textual sources to make sense of the proliferation of theatrical subjects. These relationships remain important—but there is also reason to delve deeper into the “haunted” status of early opera. With respect to three central works on the subject of Agrippina and her son Nero (Nerone fatto Cesare, Noris-Perti, Venice 1693; Agrippina, Noris-Magni, Milan 1703; and L’Agrippina, Handel-[Grimani], Venice 1709), the haunted status of performances was made explicit, both in the drama and in contemporary poems dedicated to the main singers.
Using terminology associated with the “spectral turn” in the humanities, this essay argues for rethinking operatic genealogies through the lens of hauntological intertextualities. In contrast to traditional theories of compositional influence, this study adopts a non-linear historiographical approach to performance genealogies, embracing text, music, and discourse about opera itself. Contesting the use of the concept of “origins” with respect to both the birth and subject matter of baroque opera, I argue that the genre developed as an already haunted narration.

It has become a commonplace in the twentieth century to view opera as the most hopeless of theatrical genres, impossible to deal with in any fresh or original way. Then comes Andrei Serban ready to tackle a whole series of classic operas and treat them like Chekhov, drawing out the most dramatic aspects of their essence, staging them in imaginative ways, and in general causing audiences to see them anew. After dealing in this way with The Marriage of Figaro and Traviata, Serban seemed to be taking on an impossible task in trying to bring freshness to Handel's ultra-Baroque Alcina, almost quintessentially a non-dramatic work with vast stretches of florid music sung by lone singers planted solidly stage center. Nevertheless, his rendering of this work at the New York City Opera, in con- junction with musical director Raymond Leppard, manages to be continually interesting, with surprising theatrical novelty throughout.

Victory and defeat, hope and despair, love and hate. In the operas and oratorios by George Frideric Handel, all aspects of life are explored. Spotlighting tenor Leif Aruhn-Solén, New Trinity Baroque present arias in an intimate chamber music setting.

“I vanni occulti: Sonatas, Op. 2 by G. F. Handel, between lyricism and fury”. Notas musicológicas para el CD Georg Friedrich Händel. Trio Sonatas op. 2. Al Ayre Español, Eduardo López Banzo, director. Challenge Records, CC72797, Amersfoort (Holanda), 2019, pp. 6-10 (inglés) y pp. 17-21 (español). //

Under the title I vanni occulti, ensemble Al Ayre Español, led by maestro Eduardo López Banzo, offers us its personal vision of Handel’s Sonatas Op. 2. The phrase comes from the oratorio Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion, 1707). The reference to this aria is not anecdotal, because Sonata No. 1 in this Op. 2 contains references to this music — an aspect that, hardly surprisingly, constitutes a characteristic element of the composition technique of the maestro from Halle. //

Over the course of his life, Handel composed 20 trio sonatas, 12 of which were published in London in two different collections: six sonatas were published in 1733 as Op. 2 (HWV 386–391) and another seven printed in 1739 as Op. 5 (HWV 396–402). In a disguised allusion to the vanitas allegory and the fleeting passage of time, Al Ayre Español presents, just three years after its recording of Op. 5 [Challenge Classics, CC72663], an introspective version of Op. 2, which completes and, at the same time, complements the group’s first rendition of Handel’s trio sonatas. The two recordings form a single project that offers the listener a passionate and impassioned, southern and Mediterranean version of this exquisite chamber music. This version is marked by the emergence, with particular expressive intensity, of the two aesthetic poles present in the chamber music universe of Handel (and of López Banzo himself): the most contained lyricism combined with the most explosive fury.

The Music Libel Against the Jews is a wide-ranging study of the historical Christian exclusion of the Jews, accused as producers of noise in a musical universe dominated by harmonious sounds.  Associating harmonies with divine grace, Christians interpreted "Jewish noise" they heard in medieval synagogues as a sign of divine abandonment. Ruth HaCohen traces the manifestations and roots of the noise accusation to a variation on the famous blood libel that spread in Europe during the Crusades, alleging that Jews kill singing Christian boys in order to silence their “intolerable” hymns and canticles. Stemming from two diametrically opposed performing practices of handling sound in ritual space, the book argues that the noise accusation records the two adversarial communities’ reciprocal rejection of each other’s sonic world.

Surprisingly, a focused study of the subject from historical, musical, aesthetic or theological perspectives has never been undertaken. Nor was it even diagnosed as a pervasive cultural phenomenon that may account for a host of texts, contexts, and subtexts addressing the mutual perceptions of Jews and Christians, in various domains and periods. Thus the book examines the dissemination and impact of this music libel from  medieval through modern times, in a variety of artistic and political contexts. Transcending the confines of church and synagogue, this study investigates the opening up of the musical sphere towards the Jews' inclusion in the wake of the Enlightenment. Acculturated Jews indeed made great efforts to integrate in that sphere, but as it turned out, they were not actually so welcomed, as old libels began to resurface. Pivotal to the Jews' struggle for aural accession are certain art works—musical, literary and pictorial—created by both "invaders" into that common audial space and by those considered its privileged "inhabitants. “ From Bach through Lessing, Handel,  Mendelssohn, and Heinrich Heine, to Richard Wagner, George Eliot, and many others, expressions and rebuttals of the noise accusation are traced and compared.  No less crucial to the story of the “noisy Jews” are modern ethnographic records of synagogues’ vocalities, by both Jews and Christians.  These records are analyzed against the massive reshaping of synagogal practices in both reform and traditional communities, all through the 19th century, in Germany and beyond. Simultaneously, the often intuitive Jewish project to emancipate noise and dissonance in the sphere of art, is viewed in this study as an integral part of European literature and music, consummated by Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Kafka and other creators of Jewish origin. The noise accusation reached a peak in Nazi propaganda films which also marks its final historical stage. The book exposes the often neglected, however crucial, role of the sonic in shaping modes of religious, communal and ethnic experience, self-perception and perception of the Other, which reinforce, if not determine, major political trends in human culture.

The article examines the first Italian translation of Ursula Kirkendale's studies about Handel's Roman years and how influential her work has been until now - Prince Ruspoli Musical and Musicological Prize being one of its most welcome effects. The translation was issued by LIM in 2017 and it is a thoroughly revised and updated version of the groundbreaking writings by Ursula Kirkendale, carefully commented by her eminent husband Warren Kirkendale. Moreover, the article proposes a new answer to an old question: why biographers (before Ursula Kirkendale) did not say much about the composer's Roman years and his departure from the Eternal City.

For my forthcoming essay on Margherita Durastanti I have prepared a list of all the known operas, in which she sang and acted, and here comes the first part, 1700 to 1719. This is list is subject to change, as the research is still going on. Titles in red means I do not have the libretto myself. When a whole line is in red, it means that research needs to be done.

Recent musicological discourse, while frequently considering issues of historiography and canonicity, has seldom critically engaged with biography as a genre of documentary significance to reception history for its attempts to shape public opinion of its subjects. In consequence, modern musicology has often taken for granted many tendencies and preoccupations that accumulated in musical biography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This thesis presents a historiographical examination of the precedents for and accretions of these assumptions, in terms of the role played by biography both in the establishment and maintenance of ideological canons and in the resultant ‘top-down’ conception of music history as dominated by an elite handful of exalted composers. Exploration of the ways in which biographies constructed their subjects as ‘great’ and ‘exemplary’ – insofar as these concepts were idealized within the communities of readers for whom they were originally written – is conducted through two major studies of the published texts to c.1950 on canonical composers including J. S. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. The first investigates the elaboration and distortion of a set of some twenty-five of the most famous myths of musical biography, from their origins in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Continental European texts to their fullest development (and, in many cases, their refutation) in English-language biographies up to the mid-twentieth century. In contrast, the second critically analyzes the twelve volumes of the original ‘Master Musicians’ series (1899-1906) as exemplars of the biographical and musical paradigms of composer life-writing, and as late Victorian period pieces of significance to canon formation for their conception as a closed set of monographs of historically-important subjects appropriated to English ends. The conclusion provides a preliminary assessment of the implications to modern musicology of the findings of this thesis through re-evaluation of elements of recent biographical and hermeneutical scholarship, and proposes that the discipline might usefully adopt a more inclusive, self-reflexive approach to the study of musical biography in the future.

This paper examines, for the first time as a whole, the twenty-plus instrumental variation sets that Vivaldi wrote, focusing on issues of genre, chronology, formal structure, and melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic detail.  The research finds that Vivaldi’s variation sets draw elements from both concerto and variation traditions but they combine them in ways that are rare, and perhaps unique, among variation sets of the early eighteenth century. Whereas many of his contemporaries emphasized the aesthetic value of individual variations, Vivaldi’s sets signal a shift towards a firmer conception of the set as a whole.
Contrast on the foreground level (between the individual variations) is
carefully arranged to enhance coherence on the background level (the set taken as a whole).  Of particular interest, also, is Vivaldi's use of variation-rondo hybrid structures and codettas featuring an independent part for a soloist before a final ritornello.  Finally, the cataloging of these works demonstrates the remarkable range of contexts where Vivaldi used variation technique as a rigorous formal device.  Published in Studi vivaldiani 6 (2006): 53-75; reprinted in Vivaldi, edited by Michael Talbot. Farnham (UK): Ashgate, 2010. pp. 365-386.

«Al canto, al ballo, all’ombre, al prato adorno». Derive pastorali del melodramma tra Sei e Settecento, in La tradizione della favola pastorale in Italia. Modelli e percorsi, a cura di A. Beniscelli, M. Chiarla e S. Morando, Bologna, ArchetipoLibri, 2013, pp. 517-537.

Opera, it would appear, has developed a taste for sadomasochism. For decades now, radical stage directors have repeatedly dressed canonical operas—from Handel and Mozart to Wagner and Puccini, and beyond—in whips, chains, leather, and other regalia of SM and fetishism. Deviant Opera seeks to understand this phenomenon, approaching the contemporary visual code of perversion as a lens through which opera focuses and scrutinizes its own configurations of sex, gender, power, and violence. The emerging image is that of an art form that habitually plays with an eroticization of cruelty and humiliation, inviting its devotees to take sensual pleasure in the suffering of others. Ultimately, Deviant Opera argues that this species of opera fantasizes about breaking the boundaries of its own role-playing, and pushing its erotic power exchanges from the enacted to the actual.

The Musical Archive of the Cathedrals of Zaragoza possesses an interesting early source for
the study of the music of Georg Friedrich Händel (*1685; †1759). It is a manuscript volume,
carefully copied and professionally and luxuriously bound in parchment, containing
a copy of the Suites de pièces pour le clavecin, which the Anglo-German musician would
print for the first time in London in 1720. This copy, made in Rome on 26 March 1727,
only seven years after his editio princeps, and owned by Francisco Xavier Nebra, bears witness
to the early knowledge of the best European music of the time in Spain as well as the
fluid musical connections between Italy and Spain.

The genre of oratorio was properly founded in Italy in the mid-16th century by Carissimi and then expanded to Protestant audiences in Germany by composers like Schütz and Bach, and it reached peak commercial success through Handel in England by the mid 18th century. Over this period of time, the musical, theological, and social aspects of oratorio shifted and developed, and they prove that even today, worship style often reflects the culture it exists in.