NEWSLETTER of the American Handel Society
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NEWSLETTER of The American Handel Society Volume XXVIII, Number 1 Spring 2013 FROM THE PRESIDENT’S DESK The American Handel Society Festival & Conference held at Princeton University in February and described elsewhere in this issue of the Newsletter was an unqualified success. Thanks are due to Wendy Heller and her colleagues in the Princeton University Music Department for organizing and hosting this stellar event, and for providing an array of outstanding concerts. Special thanks are due to the Program Committee and its Chair Robert Ketterer for assembling a splendid selection of speakers and topics. The next AHS Festival and Conference will take place in April 2015 at the University of Iowa; further details will be forthcoming. The Secretary/Treasurer reminds all members that it is time to pay membership dues for 2013. This can be done the old-fashioned way with a check, or via Paypal on the AHS website. It is now possible to pay membership Angelica Kauffmann, British, born in Switzerland, 1741-1807 Portrait of Sarah Harrop (Mrs. Bates) as a Muse ca. 1780-81 Oil on canvas 142 x 121 cm. (55 7/8 dues to our sister societies, The London Handel Institute x 47 5/8 in.) Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase, Surdna Fund and the G.F Händel-Gesellschaft, via Paypal. and Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund 2010-11 photo: Bruce M. White Finally, the death of conductor and Handel enthusiast Stephen Simon in January of this year should CONFERENCE REPORT: AHS cause us all to remember and acknowledge his pioneering FESTIVAL AND CONFERENCE, work, and that of his contemporaries including Brian FEBRUARY 21 - 24, 2013 Priestman and Johannes Somary ,who died a year earlier, in performing and recording Handel’s oratorios and The American Handel Society Festival and Conference returned this year to Princeton, where once operas in the 1960s and 70s. Simon’s recording of Solomon again some of the world’s most distinguished scholars and was nominated for Grammy Award in 1969 and he was musicians converged for a stimulating and exceptionally director of the Handel Festival in New York from 1971 well-attended weekend of music, talks, and happy reunions. to 1974. He moved to Washington, D.C. in 1976 and If beautiful music and outstanding scholarship were not enough, another draw to this year’s conference was the started the Handel Festival Orchestra, which performed exciting new acquisition by Princeton’s Firestone Library: at the Kennedy Center and revived many of Handel’s a manuscript copy of Handel’s Berenice from the Aylesford lesser-known works. In recent years he had concentrated collection, which had once belonged to Charles Jennens but primarily on providing programs and recordings of had been missing for nearly a century. The manuscript was on exhibit throughout the festival, and will now be available classical music for children. for study to scholars from around the globe. The festival, which took place between February — Graydon Beeks 21 and 24, was framed by two concerts performed by Pomona College continued on p. 2 1 CONFERENCE REPORT continued from p. 1 Messiah by the 1830s had become a cultural practice that the internationally-acclaimed period ensemble, the English represented a newfound emphasis on domestic life and the Concert, directed by Harry Bicket. Following a reception emerging bourgeois family in both Britain and the U.S. One and a public lecture by Telemann scholar Steve Zohn, of Nissenbaum’s many interesting conclusions was that it the first concert, held in Princeton’s majestic Richardson was largely due to the efforts of religious dissenters on both Auditorium, included performances of Purcell’s King Arthur sides of the ocean—Methodist in Britain and Unitarian in Suite, Handel’s Concerto Grosso, Op. 3, No. 2, and selections the United States—that the traditional Easter connotations from all three suites of the Water Music. Also on the program of Messiah were changed. was a Telemann concerto for viola, TWV 51:G9, performed Friday’s afternoon session, “Compositional Issues,” by violist Alfonso Leal del Ojo, and a gripping performance was devoted exclusively to Handel’s music, and the three of Bach’s A minor violin concerto, BWV 1041, by Nadja presentations delved into more detailed issues of materials Zweiner. and chronology offered by Handel sources. Fred Fehleisen The international and wide-ranging scope of the drew upon his earlier examination of melodic and sequential conference was already in evidence during Friday morning’s gestures found in Messiah to discuss similar gestures that paper session, “Response and Reception.” First, Luca della seem to link contiguous movements in a contemporaneous Libera explored two sacred vocal works by Alessandro Scarlatti work, Handel’s Concerto Grosso Op. 6, No. 6. Pastoral written in a style deemed “imperfetto” (imperfect) by one of descending-third motives from Messiah, and the suggestive his contemporaries: the Missa defunctorum and a Salve Regina formal expectations that Handel sets up through their from 1703, which both combine antico techniques of cantus rhythmic presentation, creep into similar moments of Op. firmus and cyclical construction with typically baroque topoi 6/6, particularly the Musette, which according to Fehleisen (lament bass and text painting) and freer harmonic language. (citing Burney) may have been the concluding movement These connect to Handel by way of their possession by in Handel’s own performances. In the next paper, Amanda Cardinal Ottoboni, Handel’s patron in Rome, and eventual Babington discussed the nine sketches Handel left for three migration to British libraries. Evan Cortens then spoke about movements of Messiah, preserved in two sources of the the music of Christoph Graupner, Handel’s contemporary Fitzwilliam Collection. Babington explored the implications in Hamburg, whose German cantatas—usually considered these sketches have for our understanding of Handel’s most a sacred genre—make interesting connections to Handel’s famous work, particularly because not all of the sketches Hamburg operas, including Almira (1704), notably in their were originally intended for Messiah. idiosyncratic use of da capo form. Donald Burrows concluded the session with a lively Oxford historian Michael Burden then gave a and informative talk about the several modifications Handel fascinating account of a 1787 London revival of Handel’s Giulio and his librettists made to L’Allegro & Il Penseroso during the Cesare, whose producers apologized for the “incongruities” of work’s creation and early performances both in London and Handel’s original opera, making changes to align the plot Dublin around 1740. In a presentation as entertaining as it more along Metastasian ideals and inserting well-known arias was erudite, Burrows reconstructed a portion of one of these from other operas favored by the Italian singers. Such an performing versions, using letters between Charles Jennens approach revealed interesting connections between a public and James Harris, Handel’s autograph and performing who desiried to hear Handel’s music but who craved a more scores, and the original word-book as a guide. In perhaps the contemporary work. Next came Todd Jones’s discussion festival’s most memorable moment, Burrows’ presentation of Handel’s reception in colonial and post-revolutionary concluded with an impromptu performance by what can America up to the founding of Boston’s Handel and Haydn only be described as a quartet of giants in the field of Handel Society in 1815. Tying the religious and economic interests of studies: Ellen Harris, Ruth Smith, Graydon Beeks, and early Americans to known performances of Handel’s music Professor Burrows himself at the harpsichord. in the British colonies, Jones found that Handel’s operas and Following this, attendees were treated with a lecture- chamber music were often neglected in favor of his oratorios, demonstration by Nicholas Lockey and John Burkhalter and connect to a longstanding tradition of “genteel” music in on a music manuscript once belonging to a certain “Miss the United States. Baring,” now located in the Firestone Library at Princeton. For the final paper of this session, the distinguished Lockey and Burkhalter were not only able to identify several scholar of American history, Stephen Nissenbaum, pieces copied in the manuscript that had previously been returned for his third consecutive paper at the festival to unknown, but through a series of musical demonstrations give a wonderful and enthusiastically-received paper on with harpsichord, recorder, and voice, were able to share a “How Handel’s Messiah Became a Christmas Tradition.” number of these unknown works. Nissenbaum, who has already written a definitive book on A highlight of the American Handel Festival is the history of Christmas in the United States, turned to early always the Howard Serwer Lecture, the keynote speech British and American documents detailing performances of of the conference, and this year we were honored to Messiah in London and Boston between 1815 and the 1830s have as our speaker the distinguished Oxford professor, to explain how this international phenomenon came to be. Reinhard Strohm, whose voluminous work on Handel and He discovered that beginning around 1815, performances eighteenth-century music are known to everyone who has of Messiah were tied to Unitarian efforts to revive Christmas studied the topic today. Taking as a point of departure itself, dissociating it from the drunkenness and begging recent considerations of opera seria as a form of social ritual practices that had come to characterize the holiday in early by scholars such as Martha Feldman, Strohm in his lecture American society. Rather than being just a religious tradition, considered the “problem of ritual in opera as applied to 2 Handel,” exploring the nature of ritual and considering career of Marie Sallé in light of a poetic parody of Jean-Féry what it might have meant to Handel’s audiences.