George Frideric Handel

The 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.

It is known that George Frederic Handel often reworked own compositions or works of contemporary or earlier composers. In his oratorios, the oldest reworked composition seems to be the final chorus of Giacomo Carissimi’s Jephte from the middle of the 17th century. A well-known work, it was praised by Athanasius Kircher in his Musurgia universalis (1650) as an outstanding example for the „affectus doloris”. Handel reworked it in his Samson as „Hear Jacob’s God”.
With his reworking, Handel took recourse to an early period of the genre; he went back to an older style in order to obtain archaic moments with which to characterize the Israelites. He transferred the music of the Roman and Catholic oratorio to the modern English oratorio which was established by him, and that was aimed at a nationally conscious Anglican audience. Handel did not just copy his model. Rather he rearranged Carissmi’s composition, orchestrated it and employed a different text, putting it into a completely different context. He thus transformed not only the musical but the rhetoric, semantic and expressive construction of the chorus.

The vocal duets of G. F. Handel are distinguished by a greater musical and dramaturgical diversity compared to the duets of his contemporaries, but this diversity has not yet been systematically examined in different contexts. This study investigates them in two genre traditions, that of the chamber duet and that of the so-called “dramatic duet”, a component of genres such as opera, cantata and serenata. It concentrates on London in the period 1706-1724 in order to explore to which extent Handel's treatment of duets differs from the contributions by his Italian contemporaries, who were either active in London at the time (e. g. G. Bononcini) or whose works were performed parallel to his.

Nell'opera di Händel Amadigi di Gaula (1715) si combinano elementi di diverse culture europee: un soggetto spagnolo ricavato dal romanzo cavalleresco Amadís de Gaula di Montalvo; un impianto dram-maturgico francese, basato sull'opera Amadis de Grèce di La Motte; un genere teatrale italiano, concepito per il pubblico inglese. Oltre a illustrare alcuni effetti di tale sinergia di elementi (narrativi, spettacolari, estetici), nel contributo si discutono le opere seicentesche basate sul romanzo spagnolo, l'assenza del soggetto nella produzione operistica italiana, e la scelta del libretto francese come testo fonte di Amadigi. Infine, analizzando le modifiche apportate alle sezioni chiave dell'opera francese, i divertissements, nell'opera italiana, si riflette sulle peculiarità delle relative poetiche drammaturgiche.

Handel's opera Amadigi di Gaula (1715) combines elements of various European cultures: a Spanish subject derived from the chivalric novel Amadís de Gaula by Montalvo; a French dramaturgy, based on La Motte's Amadis de Grèce; an Italian theatrical genre, conceived for the English audience. In addition to showing some of the effects of this synergy of elements (narrative, spectacular, aesthetic), this paper discusses the seventeenth-century operas based on the Spanish novel, the absence of the subject in Italian opera production, and the choice of the French libretto as source text for Amadigi. Finally, analysing the changes made to the key sections of the French opera (divertissements) in the Italian one, the article reflects on the peculiarities of the two dramatic poetics.

John Mainwaring's "Memoirs" (1760), the first major biography of a composer, capture the lofty reputation and immense impact of George Frideric Handel in Georgian Britain. This first modern transcription of the text incorporates comments and criticism from Handel's surviving friends.