Of course, singing 'Where e'er you walk, Freezing Hurricanes Shall Blow Away Miss Glade' in a hallful of bored-to-tears brown-clad schoolgirls clutching fast-wilting daffodils once every year until the age of 17 might have something to do with it - since then I've never had much stomach for Handel. The school I attended happened to be on the site of Cannons Palace where Handel lived for, er, a year or so in 1717-18. The Founders' Day celebrations wouldn't have been the same without him. Oh, and sitting through an early reconstruction of Rodelinda in Cambridge, also reconstructing baroque staging techniques (walk to centre, strike wooden symbolic attitude, hold while singing until replacing with new wooden symbolic attitude) which went on for the better part of 4 hours on a very hot night (it felt like 8 hours) also didn't help.
Here, dear readers, is the Director's Cut, with added teeth.
Hallelujah! 2009 marks the 250th anniversary of Georg Friedrich Handel’s death. In the UK, which has produced perhaps five musical geniuses in 350 years, the domicile of this German giant in London from 1712 is taken as something of a national triumph; he’s been deified ever since. To question his supremacy is to blaspheme against three centuries of opinion, received or otherwise. But does his music really deserve such status?
Handel was a strong, quick-witted, pugnacious personality. He didn’t mince his words: once he threatened to throw a disobedient soprano out of the window. He never married, partly because the families of his potential brides disapproved of a match with a mere musician. Perhaps that was extra incentive for him to prove just how much he was worth.
His antithesis was JS Bach, his contemporary, who signed his works ‘Soli Deo Gloria’ – only for the glory of God; his job at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig gave him the freedom to compose, within its parameters, according to the truths of his own soul. Handel, by contrast, went commercial. He travelled widely, hobnobbed with the great and the good, wheeled and dealed behind the scenes and in front of them. To please the wealthy, the powerful and the masses, he wrote for maximum impact and maximum income. Had he lived in the 1980s, his chief rival could have been Andrew Lloyd Webber.
His commercial instinct was first-rate. When the young Gluck asked his advice on a new stage work, Handel allegedly replied: “You have taken too much trouble over your opera. Here in England that is a mere waste of time. What the English like is something they can beat time to, something that hits them straight on the drum of the ear.” Later, Mozart cottoned on: “Handel understands effect better than any of us,” he wrote.
Handel was incredibly prolific. At times he was paid to churn out multiple operas per year, at others he ran his own operatic seasons (and lost huge sums of money). So he cut corners. He recycled his music ad infinitum. And he borrowed other composers’ music and did likewise with that. “He takes other men’s pebbles and polishes them into diamonds,” gasped the composer William Boyce. Today it would be called plagiarism.
Many of his operas’ plots are impossibly convoluted, the stop-start action carried forward in a plodding succession of recitatives and ‘da capo’ arias each involving opening section, middle bit, then recap of opening plus twiddles ad-libbed by the singer to show off. The same arias appear in a variety of operas, with different words. Occasionally a gifted director will work magic – David McVicar’s Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne was a case in point. But in lesser hands these operas can feel interminable, and today they are regarded as sacred country, so cuts are frowned upon.
The reverence with which we worship at the shrine of baroque potboilers is misplaced; that attitude was invented in another era, namely by Wagner, for Wagner. In Handel’s time, business meetings, illicit trysts and so on took place in the theatre throughout; when you went to the opera, it wasn’t for the music. Though you could – unlike now – enjoy throwing the odd vegetable at it.
Handel wrote stirring choruses, damn good tunes and enough instrumental pieces to drive music students round the bend for centuries. But did he compose anything that has the intense, sublime, genuine spirituality of Bach’s St Matthew Passion? Is there a single Handel aria remotely comparable to its heartbreaking ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben?’ Not even the beautiful ‘Ombre mai fu’ is on that level. Where in those operas can we find the degree of perception and compassion that Mozart showed in Don Giovanni? And Handel’s pleasant chamber and orchestral works reduce to Muzak the minute you encounter Beethoven’s.
Beethoven said: “Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived.” He was wrong: he deserved that epithet himself. Handel can’t hold a candle to Bach, let alone Beethoven. A one-man baroque-and-roll hit factory, he compromised his art by selling out. Even if he did move to Britain.
47 comments:
May I be the first to say "rubbish"?
No time to expand now, but I fear you have allowed your personal experiences to sway your opinion too much.
Peter
I knew everyone would say 'rubbish', but I don't care! Responses to music are always based on personal experience - it can't be any other way - and besides, some depressing and awful experiences of Wagner haven't put me off him.
One more point that is worth making: it is not Handel's music that I dislike, but the over-reverential attitude that says we have to love him or hide our heads in shame because he is Old and Established and Lived Here.
Same applies to Telemann. I once experienced a three-hour rendition of Tafelmusik in the Australian bush, in which the audience remained blissfully unaware that this stuff was composed as background music for dinner. Hence the title. You were supposed to talk and eat over it, not hang desperately on every wise note, hungry for poetry and meaning, which somehow failed to emerge for more than about 3 minutes total.
Jessica dear, I simply cannot allow your demolition job on poor Handel to pass without comment. While I agree that much is self borrowed & recycled, there are also many finely crafted wworks if you take the trouble to investigate away from the usual over exposed pieces.
There is a humour and joi de vivre in Handel that is quite the antithesis of J S Bach. That is why both are such an essential part of their time, offering perhaps two sides of a coin.
"I Know that my Redeemer Liveth" is, in its touching simplicity, as supremely pious as anything in the Passions.
I could not imagine life without Handel's Concerti Grossi, nor his effervescent, glittering keyboard suites, which aeons ago when I was almost an able pianist, I much enjoyed playing. Try Gavrilov's terrific recordings of them on EMI. You might get hooked....
Brendan, dear, I have been trying with this guy for three decades. Life is too short. But I agree, Gavrilov is brilliant, and the whole thing becomes much more bearable without the harpsichord!
Actually, I love Telemann's 'Tafelmusik', having lived happily with the Harnoncourt set for over 20 years.As to the comparison between Bach and Handel, singing in "Messiah" is an exhilarating experience whereas Bach, with all those overlapping entries or entries in mid-bar, have always been beyond me. I don't think Handel wrote anything to quite match the St Matthew Passion, on the other hand, much of Bach bores me to tears: the solo violin and cello works, 'The Art of Fugue', most of the Cantatas and all of the organ music.
This Handel fellow seems to have really gotten under your skin!
I'm with you on our main point in the sense that just because something is old and British doesn't make it awesome....textile mills come to mind as another example.
In terms of music, I have the same struggle with Hadyn. I try and try and try and aside from the occasional small reward, get very little back.
My biggest gripe is your point about recycling music and copying other people. The current term isn't plagiarism but sampling or covering. The results of these adaptations often provide a whole new way of hearing the original. Plus, it seems a little unfair to pillory someone for a practice that was widespread.
Phew, Jessica - way to tell it like it is! I can't tell you what a relief it is to read this from someone whose opinion I respect! After sitting right through Amadigi, Flavio and Jephtha, straining every muscle of my critical faculties to try and hear how this was "great" music, I finally admitted defeat just last month.
But I did draw a slightly different conclusion. I thought I had a problem with Handel - but clearly, the choruses and ensembles in the second half of Jephtha are magnificent by any standards (though you should have seen the look I got when I suggested to a fellow listener that it would have been better if they'd cut the first 40 minutes...) And I still get that good old authentic buzz off the Fireworks Music, and Messiah, and the Concerti Grossi.
I've concluded that I don't have a problem with Handel, as such - but I do have a huge, huge problem with Da Capo arias. And it sounds to me like you might be a fellow sufferer...
Jessica, darling, if we have to compare every composer to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, then there can be no celebrating any other composer. Is Britain's love of Handel really tantamount to declaring Handel supreme? You have based your entire column on this hyperbole.
The fact that Handel's life is intertwined with British history is something, in addition to his music, that binds Brits to Handel. This is not a bad thing.
Now, no one is forcing you to love Handel or to hide your head in shame becuase you do not love him. As I am quite sure you are aware of this fact, it is apparent that your objection has nothing to do with Handel or his music. It lies elsewhere. What really happened at that all-girls school? Do tell...
Ejohn, darling, my 'entire column' is under 700 words. The school thing is just a little extra quirkiness and has nothing to do with Handel having been the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day. I was setting out to challenge long-held assumptions about how we respond to this music. Handel and Lloyd Webber have much in common: they both write tunes and so forth that people really respond to en masse, and they do so quite deliberately. They are both impresarios in their spare time. SO: why revere Handel and dismiss Lloyd Webber?
I enjoy Handel's tunes and stirring effects, but am never moved by his works the way I am by Bach's. Perhaps because I doubt the sincerity of their expression.
BTW, Frank, I can't live without Bach's solo violin and cello works! Did Handel write anything as profound as the great violin Chaconne, ever?!?
I don’t know where this idea that Handel is beyond criticism comes from, except perhaps your particular education, Jessica, though I suppose you’re being a good journalist in setting up an Aunt Sally and then knocking it down. I would have said it was more true of Bach. (I agree with Frank about a lot of Bach being tedious, though as an organist I have to say he’s quite wrong about the organ music. I also find Telemann pretty deadly.) And I don’t think the comparisons with Mozart or Beethoven make much sense – it’s a bit like saying you prefer, say, Britten’s operas to Verdi’s.
I’m not sure how they teach harmony and counterpoint these days, but when I was a student a regular exercise was to write a continuation to a piece of which the first dozen or so bars were given. Most of us could manage Palestrina, Bach and even Mozart reasonably well, but a Handel Trio Sonata defeated us all. Handel’s music at its best can sound so straightforward that it is easy to forget the skill of its construction.
You are quite right that Handel was a pragmatic composer who borrowed liberally from his own and other composers’ works – fairly standard practice for the time – and that he knew better than most what was effective. But none of that counts against him in my book.
Listen to some of the more compact Handel, the Coronation Anthems, say, or Dixit Dominus, and then tell me this is not a great composer!
By the way, have we yet established who your five British musical geniuses are? Assuming Handel is ineligible, I’d suggest Byrd, Tallis, Purcell, Elgar, and Britten.
Peter
Actually, on reflection, take out Byrd and substitute Vaughan Williams.
Peter
By the way, I am deeply flattered by the eaten-up-by-jealousy comment that's appeared on the Indy website - I'd thought I was rather beyond the 'posh totty' stage. The poster of that comment has clearly been given short shrift by my boss!
In which case, I think I know exactly who he is.
Peter S, to be honest I can only with certainty choose four.
Thank you for this. The most excruciating night I've ever spent in a concert hall or opera house was a Xerxes at Los Angeles Opera in the 90's. I only went because my friend paid for the ticket and as soon as the last note faded I turned to him and said "That's 4 hours of my life I'm never getting back". A ghastly parade of florid arias --by the umpteenth one by the *second* countertenor, I was ready to scream-- I started to wonder if I'd done something in a past life to deserve that experience.
I do sympathize, though, I know what it's like when people who just want to hear some Mozart have to sit through Pintscher or Birtwistle or Kyburz to get to it.
Jessica, I'm going to leave aside for now what you've written about dear Handel - I need longer to take it all in - and instead direct you to this from ACD at Sounds & Fury (you may have read it already): Oh Dear. A rather biting comment he makes at the end, huh? Not sure if it's meant for you, for Elgar or for both.
Now, I dare you to go and post your views on Handel over at Classical Music Mayhem. Its owner is an ardent Handelian who will surely challenge you to a duel.
(Double dare you?)
FK
Wow. An American doesn't like Elgar. There's a piece of news.
By the way, for those keeping up to speed with the comments at the Indy:
a) this wasn't 'a piece of musical criticism', this was a deliberately controversial think piece;
b) I have indeed seen Handel operas and remained unmoved - just as others saw Die tote Stadt and remained unmoved while I was in pieces for two days afterwards; chacun a son goo.
c) Elgar rocks;
d) My books are not 'children's potboilers' - I only wish they were, as they'd probably make more money, but on the whole kids are not really into Hungarian history and the differing traditions of classical v Gypsy violin playing.
Really, chaps, in a world like today's that involves 'extraordinary rendition' (an American concept in which the British government has just admitted, er, compliance) and so on, blahblah, none of this amounts to a hill of beans and I am frankly astonished that anyone gives a damn.
Apart from being glad to be Posh Totty in my fifth decade (even if by the world's most jealous, bitter and twisted male chauvinist pig, and I think I know who he is), I can produce my Cambridge degree certificates for anyone who wants to see them, and am happy to note plenty of intelligent discussion at places like Soho the Dog et al. And there'll be more...
Shouldn't a few centuries of received opinion be up for challenge from time to time? You don't have to like it. Just think about it
I'm sure Jessica won't mind me mentioning this, but if you've only read her article here and therefore missed the deliciously amusing comment posted by the someone posing as 'newmusicologist' - whose identity Jessica thinks she knows - over at The Independent website, then you're missing a treat ... albeit one that ends with a smattering of poor taste.
To address Frank's deriding of Bach's solo cello suites (which I missed first time around), I suppose he'd consider it a living hell to spend a weekend at my house listening to the 18 different sets that I've acquired of these fine works.
Oh, and Handel's Dixit Dominus: fantastic work, but you must hear it in context on the Virgin Veritas recording of Andrew Parrot's take on the Carmelite Vespers of 1707.
FK
Dear FK, if you have 18 different sets of the Bach cello suites then you have permission to call me posh totty any time you like!
I see, Jessica ...
So you won't be wanting the guest bedroom next weekend, then?
;o)
FK
I wrote a longish contribution to this early on, but it must have gone into the aether, as is the wont of these things on occasion. I'll not reconstruct it, but just say in sum that I enjoyed the article greatly, disagree hugely, and had little doubt as to what you were up to. And so, the comments posted in the Independent seem at first blush way over the top. I say at first blush, because I then, having spent many years in academe, remembered who Professor Bowdler is and her role in an academic feud of such magnitude it had its own websites and was the subject of its very own book. Given my impressions from reading that book, her bit of vituperation surprises not. Her own subject is not music, by the by. Now, newmusicologist is far more interesting, and not just because he plainly has issues. I am inclined to think his post name indicates not that he is a recent graduate, but rather that he is an adherent of the school of New Musicology, and given certain foci of that school, and that this is about Handel, I think part of the explanation for his diatribe may lie there. But, really, the man has issues. Sounds and Fury has always been a bit of a mystery to me in as much as I've never been able to discern any overall tendency of thought other than spleen without wit, and you can't engage in dialectic with him with a view to finding out more because he doesn't take comments. But his reference to Elgar there is just the sort of thing that makes me shrug and move on, for there is no meat to it, no argument, same old stuff, and, if I read your article aright, this should have an opportunity for a bit of wit and repartee, a drop of fun really, not vituperative comment, and never, regardless of all else, ad feminam, which newmusicologist most certainly is, and couple of other come close. I am now going to listen to Dixit Dominus. I shall follow up on FK's suggestion on that, but Simon Preston on Archiv has always been the stunner for me. Thanks once more for the pleasure of your blog, Jessica.
Touched a bit of a nerve there, Jessica, did you not? I am bound to say that I am more with you than against you. A couple of hours ago I was listening to Beethoven's Ninth on the radio here in Oregon as I wrote my blog for Portland Opera. I felt compelled to mention that I find this symphony "loud, brash and vulgar" and I am expecting much the same response as you got. People do love their sacred cows, don't they?
Yes of course it's perfectly legitimate to challenge received opinions, but it needs to be done better than in Jessica's original piece. Complaining that Handel's operas can be dull and then saying "Bach is much better" when Bach didn't write operas isn't comparing apples with apples. But if the end result is that a few more people listen to "Dixt Dominus", some good will have come out if it!
Peter
Ew! It ate my comment!
I wanted to say I won't be part of any pro/anti Händel debates or ranking of composers and their music, which to me doesn't make any sense. It's a matter of personal taste and opinion, to which everybody has a right, of course.
But I was all but prevented from reading the article because of its embarrassing start. 300th anniversary? How could the man have died 300 years ago and moved to London three years later? If you want to launch an attack on Händel, fine, but please, do get your numbers right. It would add that nitpicky bit of credibility...
Wow - it took the better part of 2 days for anyone to spot that one! I'd wondered.
The figure has now been corrected, since the cat is out of the bag, but it was very funny while it lasted. Well done, Yap :-)
Ouch!
FK
Is that so? In this case: Touché. ;-)
(Does the same apply to "Ombre mai fu"?)
I've come across wrong Händel/Mendelssohn/Haydn/Lincoln/Darwin/whathaveyou numbers depressingly often during the last months, and I'm quite sure they weren't all put there for a laugh.
If I had to make a choice between Bach and Handel, I'd choose Handel everytime. For two guys who were born in the same year and within cooee of each other, they certainly turned out to be very different - musically. Handel was the extrovert and his music reflects that; Bach alas never forgot that he was being paid for his efforts and his music is metronomic, finger/mind-numbing and introverted. Bach bores but Handel harrumphs!
RMO: Bach is only metronomic if you play him with a metronome, and you don't have to as he didn't put metronome marks on his scores. And that might be because the metronome wasn't invented until 1812.
If he's played metronomically today, that says more about our time than his...
While I am not totally conversant with GFH's output, I was reminded of a description once given to Alfred Hitchcock, which may or may not be fitting here:
"Those who put him on a pedestal ignore what is cheap, phony, or shallow about him; those who knock him down ignore what brings him to the base of the pedestal, and keeps him there."
Sure, a lot of Handel may have been assembly, but it's pretty good quality assembly line, certainly more inspired generally than Telemann, for one (who did well enough in his own lifetime).
BTW, the nasty comment aimed at JD in the Indy's comments section is not warranted. That criticism is more properly directed at Norman Lebrecht, who did his own hatchet job on Elgar 2 years ago, which I must admit JD's article uncomfortably reminded me of.
BTW, to JD: are you with the LPO on tour this side of the pond? I obviously can't go to see them, being geographically challenged on that.
Geo., I love the Hitchcock quotes and thanks for the moral support.
Alas, I'm not in New York. Tom reports that the Martynov opera - which got 1 star all round here, not for performance but for the music itself - has sold out Alice Tully Hall and is hotly anticipated! It will be interesting to see if American critics take a different line on it from ours.
Guess what? I've been invited to talk about Handel on the radio on Monday morning...
Sorry that you couldn't be in NYC (if for no other reason than we actually did elect sane President, who has to deal with the horrible messes left by his predecessor, but never mind). I suspect that part of the sellout at Alice Tully Hall is the fact that the hall's renovations seem to have gone swimmingly well (related articles here and here).
BTW, going back to the original topic, while I don't necessarily place GFH as above criticism, in general, what I've heard of him beyond the "greatest hits" is very good, and in this world, very good is fine.
Which radio station, Jessica?
FK
Well Jessica, as a bit of "prep" for your radio piece tomorrow, there is a 90 minute programme all about Handel's operas on BBC Radio 3 at 5pm today, with the splendid Catherine Bott, who will give a very balanced and knowledgeable view i am sure! I shall tune in with great anticipation.
One more thing: please do not allow a thread to start here knocking poor Alfred Hitchcock! He is another great hero of mine, ever since I had the enormous thrill of interviewing him when I was just a movie-struck 19 year old, at the time he was in London to make 'Frenzy'. One of the great experiences of my life.
Well said! Here in Christchurch, New Zealand we have to put up with annual performances of The Messiah to show how English we are!
I far prefer Bach's Christmas Oratorio but nobody considers that here.
I think there are dangers in being too anxious to provoke: Handel most certainly wasn’t ‘deified’ – outside the Huddersfield Choral Society-type context anyway - in the 70s and 80s: anything but. It was in fact seen as deeply uncool to be interested in him, at least until the period-instrument movement got under way. (I do reluctantly admit that the pendulum has perhaps swung a little bit too far the other way.)
I feel you betray your own rather Puritanical view of music and/or spirituality in your remarks, Ms Duchen: how are you so certain that Bach’s ‘Soli Deo Gloria’ was any more meaningful than ‘Goodbye’ = ‘God be with you’ today? There is an argument, quite convincing in my view, that Handel was in fact the more God-fearing of the two composers. There isn’t a shred of evidence that SDG was an important factor for Bach when he was at Cöthen, quite the reverse in fact. And as for rehashing – well, are you really unaware of the way Bach reused his own music, and across the sacred/secular divide at that? I find that hard to believe.
Don’t criticise composers of the 18c for being commercial: they ALL were. It was a fact of life for people who had to earn a living. Phrases like ‘Bach [composed] … according to the truths of his own soul’ are fanciful and utterly meaningless. How are you so certain that Handel didn’t do the same? Because writing about human emotions is less valuable than writing for the church? Purlease.
If your imagination can stretch to ‘spirituality’ involving something other than Jehovah, I suggest you listen again not only to ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ as has been suggested above, but also to: ‘Lascia la spina’ (Trionfo del Tempo); ‘Ombra cara’ (Radamisto); ‘Cara sposa’ (Rinaldo); ‘Vieni o figlio’ (Ottone); ‘Caro figlio’ (La Resurrezione); ‘Verdi prati’ (Alcina); ‘Verdi pianti’ (Orlando) and ‘Hide me from day’s garish light’ (L’Allegro ed il Penseroso) … to start with.
Having said all this, I do rather agree with you about many of the operas, for which cut, cut and cut again should be the principal principle for modern productions.
Rehan, your comment is way out of order. You have no business making snide personal remarks about my "spiritual life" or anybody else's.
One question people might like to ask themselves: if all 18th-century composers were commercial, and that is considered critically OK, why is it apparently not OK for composers to write commercially in the 20th century and indeed today?
Rehan - what is your spirituality? What do you mean by Jehovah? Do you know that Lent has started in the Holy Catholick church??
Criticising others' spirituality is not in the spirit of Lent.
In New Zealand Handel has been deified ever since I remember - don't forget the colonies!
Just so I've got this clear:
Beethoven is the greatest composer that ever lived. But if he had lived in the 1980s, he would have praised Andrew Lloyd Webber as the greatest composer ever.
Sorry if I can't follow this.
Look, Jessica, if you really can't figure out why Beethoven considered Handel so great, perhaps you're missing something fundamental.
No. Try again.
[I did reply early this morning, but perhaps somehow I misposted - or I was censored? So here goes again...]
I’m sorry, you’re right, that was a snide-sounding remark; even mild sarcasm is clearly unwise in writing. But tell me, is there an objective and absolute Profundity Scale that rates ‘the’ Bach violin Chaconne above everything Handel wrote? If so, where can I find it? Is it universally agreed by people German, English, Italian, Russian, Chinese and Kenyan? Has it always been so or, as in your own Beethoven quote, is it a shifting and/or sliding scale? Maybe, being a lightweight and someone who believes music should be about pleasure as much as anything else, I’ve missed the point altogether.
… Sorry, drifting into sarcasm again. Surely you accept that judgments such as ‘profound’ and ‘spiritual’ are, and can only be, personal ones? Therefore, do you really find it so hard to believe that some people could find a song of human (as opposed to religious) love and loss – ‘Ombra cara’ for example - both meaningful and profound?
And you don’t address my other points. But I would say, in answer to your Lloyd Webber comparison, there’s nothing at all wrong with him being commercial today, if his music does anything for you. It doesn’t for me, by and large – but I would certainly say that some of the finest 20c songs were by Cole Porter without question, outclassing even the fine work of composers like Sondheim and Bacharach simply because, like Handel and unlike Bach, he didn’t have to resort to tricksiness to make his music interesting or beautiful.
By the way, is there any evidence that Bach deliberately shunned commercial success for the Glory of God and Music? I thought not, but I’m perfectly willing to be proved wrong.
Gerald: as is probably fairly obvious, my gripe is with the word ‘spirituality’ in the context of music. And apart from that, I can’t say I have A Spirituality. Nor, being a non-superstitious product of the later 20c, do I subscribe to a religion, organised or otherwise.
Having lived in NZ for 14 years from 1971 I’d be only too happy to forget the colonies! But seriously, outside the context of Reverential choral-society performances, I can safely say that in the 70s and early 80s to express a preference for Handel over Bach, particularly at university, would have been considered eccentric in the extreme. Handel has always suffered from being underestimated because of his surface glitter – his “effects” – much as Mozart was seen as being only tinkly and charming before the 1930s.
I feel the same way about John Denver (except I was sitting on a gymnasium floor, forced to sing "Colorado, Rocky Mountain High" instead of "Where e'er you walk." Otherwise, it's exactly the same).
Rehan, in your New Zealand sojourn did you ever visit Christchurch? We have had The Messiah every year since circa 1936. You ask concert goers in Christchurch and they will prefer Handel.
I'm with you Jessica thank you for writing your piece. As a flautist Bach wrote amazing music for us and I've enjoyed playing violin partitas and cello suites on the flute alike. Bach wins every time!
I've been to Eisenach and played in St Thomas, Leipzig.
I would recommend a trip to Germany Rehan. If you mention Haendel to them they may ask you who he is! Except in Halle I suppose.
Gerald - thanks for the reminder, I really should go to Germany again soon. I think you may be a bit out of date though, there's not only the annual Göttingen Handel Festival but even in Berlin they're already so fond of him that the Komische Oper staged a pasticcio - Orest - a few years ago (deplorable if you ask me, but then I don't think you did).
I have already said (twice) that the choral-society tradition puts ONE Handel work on a pedestal; but I think you'd admit that Messiah is one of those works that has developed a life of its own. The loyal Christchurch audience that ritually attends their annual Messiah (chorus of 200?) would, I wager, run a mile from Theodora or Alexander's Feast. So I doubt you can really say they 'deify' him.
Coming back to Jessica's points, I would in fairness admit there's little Handel that can equal the austere meditative quality of Aus liebe; but why should you compare chalk and cheese, or perhaps more appropriately cheese and pudding? There's little Bach that can match Ombra mai fu or Lascia la spina, come to that.
Incidentally, it's all very well to bemoan the leaden predictability of the da capo aria in Handel operas; but why overlook its even more leaden appearance in Bach cantatas and oratorios? At least Handel broke with stage convention as soon as he could - what was Bach's excuse?
Rehan you make a lot of wild assumptions and dangerous generalisations. Face facts: JSB is no 1 or thereabouts. Your beloved Handel is down there with the also rans.
Handel the tuth Rehan!
I know little of music, and perhaps even less of musical perception. And in the main not much.
However, regardless of history, christianity etc. of which i am competently ignorant, Handel speaks to the very bone of my philosophical being.
He speaks in the broadest, most abstract sense, about life, about "truth" and "beauty", and their conflict; in each sentence he seems to be able to capture the story of life, again and again - and yet, each word strikes with the force of poetry, always in memory of lost passages, always with sweet tragic tears anticipating things yet to come.
This union of the past and future in communication, the ability to never reduce to detail in story or time, always keeps me coming back.
Not about godly emotions, not about complex passion of genius, not about intricate riddles and solutions. It's about the most elementry tragic beauty of life, it's the kind of wisdom we are immersed in, the kind of wisdom we can catch a glimpse of when alien cultures speak to us in their old songs and tales.
It's the very most crystalized form of this type of wisdom, and he seems to have an endless supply of it. He captured the prototypical western mentality, reflecting our moral conflicts, our sense of adventures, and concepts of past and future.
These things are in many ways so obvious and close to us that it is hard to notice. In another sense they are so simple and abstract that they cannot be pointed to.
It's not a coincidence that Handel's "sarabande" was used in my favorite Kubrick movie "Barry Lyndon"; the movie some would probably see in the light you throw Handel - just because, i think, it's a movie with the same kind wisdom and stare into life.
As a personal note my favorite Handel piece is the first part of the Larhetto in "Harp Concerto HWV 294"; first one and a half minute there probably sums it all up.
If anyone is still reading my.., i appreciate it. :) bye!
Wow... CLains, your comment is AMAZING. Now, finally, I am ready to be convinced. Thank you!
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