DOCSLIB.ORG

Music and Musicians in the Equity and Common-Law Courts of England, 1690–1760

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Music and Musicians in the Equity and Common-Law Courts of England, 1690–1760 MUSIC AND MUSICIANS IN THE EQUITY AND COMMON-LAW COURTS OF ENGLAND, 1690–1760 CHERYLL DUNCAN A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Awarded for a Collaborative Programme of Research at the Royal Northern College of Music by the Manchester Metropolitan University April 2015 Abstract The six journal articles and one book chapter that make up this submission demonstrate the rich potential of legal documents preserved in The National Archives of the UK as sources of new information about music and musicians. Key literature in relation to eighteenth-century legal studies, theatre research, historical musicology and the broader social context is first reviewed in order to appraise the current state of knowledge. Each of the publications takes as its starting point the author’s discovery of one or more lawsuits as a means of exploring professional music culture in England between 1690 and 1760. These encompass a wide diversity of human interactions, including financial agreements, patronage, benefit arrangements, consumption and debt. The litigation also yields details about the professional and personal lives of individuals ranging from iconic figures such as Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel to minor players like Giuseppe Manfredini and Elizabeth Frederica, whose names have been omitted from previous historical accounts. The publications make an original contribution to existing knowledge and scholarship, thereby demonstrating the value of legal documents as a field of musicological endeavour; while building on previous work on eighteenth-century equity lawsuits, they also include the first detailed studies of common- law documents undertaken by a musicologist. Legal records are notoriously challenging to use, and some of the issues involved in locating, reading and interpreting these abstruse documents are elucidated. The process of contextualization provides opportunities to deploy the material in ways that feed into a variety of historiographical perspectives, including cultural, social and women’s history. Legal documents open up a field of study that is ripe for further investigation; the outcomes will offer new perspectives on music and musicians viewed through the lens of the law, and make a compelling case for the continuing relevance of archival research. CONTENTS 1. Introduction and overview of the literature 1 2. The publications (individually paginated): 2.1 ‘An Innocent Abroad? Caterina Galli’s Finances in New Handel Documents’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64/3 (2011), 495-526. 2.2 ‘Geminiani v. Mrs Frederica: Legal Battles with an Opera Singer’, in Christopher Hogwood (ed.), Geminiani Studies (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2013), 399-411. 2.3 ‘Castrati and impresarios in London: two mid-eighteenth-century lawsuits’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 24/1 (2012), 43-65. 2.4 ‘‘A Debt contracted in Italy’: Ferdinando Tenducci in a London court and prison’, Early Music, 42/2 (2014), 219–229. 2.5 ‘‘Young, Wild, and Idle’: New Light on Gaetano Guadagni’s Early London Career’, The Opera Journal, 46/1 (2013), 3-28. 2.6 ‘New Purcell documents from the Court of King’s Bench’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 49 (2016), 1–38 (in the press). 2.7 ‘New light on ‘Father’ Smith and the Organ of Christ Church, Dublin’, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 10 (2014–15), 23–45. 3. Contribution to knowledge and scholarship 23 4. Methodological issues and future directions 38 1. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ‘Civil litigation (legal disputes between two parties) makes up a very large - and under-used - part of the National Archives’ holdings. The records cover disputes about land, property rights, debts, inheritance, trusts, frauds, etc., and they can provide unparalleled levels of information about people in the past.’1 For the musicologist investigating professional music culture in England during the long eighteenth century, legal documents constitute a rich and yet largely untapped repository of primary source material. The names of many individuals associated with the burgeoning entertainment industry are to be found amongst the records of the various courts that comprise the English legal system. An unprecedented expansion in trade, commerce and consumerism during this period, particularly in London, resulted in a sharp escalation in disputes pertaining to business transactions and personal debt; at the same time, commercial music-making was developing in ways that left its practitioners highly susceptible to litigation. With the rise of public entertainments such as opera and concerts, numerous musicians - including many from abroad - were attracted to London by the performance opportunities and lucrative salaries on offer. However, the leisure industry operated within a viciously competitive commercial market; opera, in particular, was enormously expensive to produce, and the notorious fickleness of the tiny minority who could afford tickets made investing in it a very risky financial proposition. At this elite end of the music profession, aristocratic patronage continued to play a pivotal role in the fortunes of performers, who were often obliged to ingratiate themselves with the upper classes in order to further their careers. The lifestyle that many musicians adopted as a consequence usually proved to be beyond their means, and several were brought to the brink of ruin. Both men and women succumbed, though in the case of female singers their misfortune was often attributed to sheer 1 Amanda Bevan, Tracing your Ancestors in the National Archives: the website and beyond (Kew, Surrey: The National Archives, 7/2006), 495. 1 extravagance and/or improvidence.2 Making a living from music in eighteenth-century England, even at the higher levels of the profession, was a demanding and precarious business. Legal documents can supplement our knowledge of a wide range of social and economic issues pertinent to professional music culture; even more importantly, they can play into a variety of historiographical perspectives that are widely represented in the general historical literature of the long eighteenth century, but have yet to be thoroughly assimilated into the standard musicological discourse about this period. The historical background The eighteenth century was a time of exceptionally rapid and far-reaching change, and the historiography of the period has been subject to numerous shifts of emphasis.3 Before the second half of the twentieth century, Georgian Britain was typically portrayed as ‘an age of stability in politics, in religion, in literature, and in social observances ... the period has a rare unity of its own and seems to concentrate in itself all the faults and merits that we are apt to think of as specially characteristic of the whole eighteenth century’.4 As interest in kingship and politics declined after the 1960s, the focus of research realigned to embrace a bewildering array of historiographical approaches - economic history, social history, urban history, gender history, fashion history and, from the 1990s, cultural history - each with its own substantive literature and key resources. Scholars of this period are in the vanguard of digitizing primary sources and making them available online; to give just one example, the London Lives database includes a huge number of digital and searchable primary sources 2 See, for example, Burney’s disparaging comments on Cuzzoni and Frasi in Abraham Rees, The Cyclopaedia, or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, 39 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1819) 15: [no pagination], s.v. ‘Frasi, Giulia’. 3 For a succinct overview of this subject, see Penelope Corfield, ‘The Lure of the Georgian Age’, History Today, 64/1 (January 2014), 57–8. 4 Basil Williams, rev. C. H. Stuart, The Oxford History of England: The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760, vol. 11 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939, rev. 1960), 1. 2 related to the lives of plebeian Londoners.5 The continuing output of significant new studies on eighteenth-century British history is so great that even a brief overview lies well beyond the scope of the present study; the following is merely a small selection of literature that contributes to a broad understanding of the social and cultural context of the period. Pleasures of the Imagination is an important study that charts the broader historical processes through which the arts were commercialized in Georgian England.6 Situating the performing arts, visual arts and print culture at the very heart of eighteenth-century experience, John Brewer argues that the consumption of high culture by the urban middle classes brought about profound transformations in ideas, attitudes, markets and institutions. Studies of the middling classes - their economic activities and their cultural lives - have constituted a major research area since the late 1980s, and the economic history of the era has been reconfigured to reflect social and cultural historical approaches. Among the earliest of these was Peter Earle’s The Making of the English Middle Class, which concentrated on the wealthier end of the social stratum. Earle’s focus on London was unfashionable at a time when many contemporary historians were playing down its significance and decentering attention to the provinces, but he defends its legitimacy on the grounds that the capital ‘totally dominated English urban culture and indeed invented it’.7 The author draws
Load more

Recommended publications
  • «Je Me Figurais Être Orphée», Wrote Countess Sophie Fersen After At- Tending a Performance of Christoph Gluck's Orpheus Oc
    Women in love: Gluck’s Orpheus as a source of romantic consolation in Vienna, Paris, and Stockholm JOHN A. RICE ABSTRACT Among those who witnessed early performances of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice were Princess Isabelle of Parma, Julie de Lespinasse, and Countess Sophie Fersen. Orpheus, and the music Gluck wrote for him, stirred up similar responses in these passionate young women, all of whom found in the protagonist’s tragic plight consolation for own romantic yearning. This paper explores their emotio- nal states, as documented in their letters, and offers some explanations for their identification with a male character from Greek mythology, as brought to life by Gluck’s music and the men who sang it. «Je me figurais être Orphée», wrote Countess Sophie Fersen after at- tending a performance of Christoph Gluck’s Orpheus och Euridice in Stockholm in 1777. She was writing to a man with whom she had been involved in a brief and passionate love affair, and who had just left Sweden. Countess Fersen was not the only young woman who found romantic consolation in Gluck’s Orpheus. Already during the first run of performances in 1762, Princess Isabelle of Parma, recently married to Archduke (later Emperor) Joseph, wrote mournfully to her sister-in-law Marie Christine, whose company she much preferred to Joseph’s. Isabelle identified herself with Orpheus as a way of express- ing the depth and hopelessness of her love. And shortly after the première of the Paris version in 1774, Julie de Lespinasse wrote to her beloved Comte de Guibert, who was far from Paris, that she found a mixture of pain and pleasure in Gluck’s opera: «Je voudrois entendre dix fois par jour cet air qui me déchire, et qui me fait jouir de tout ce que je regrette: j’ai perdu mon Euridice».
    [Show full text]
  • Handel's Oratorios and the Culture of Sentiment By
    Virtue Rewarded: Handel’s Oratorios and the Culture of Sentiment by Jonathan Rhodes Lee A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Davitt Moroney, Chair Professor Mary Ann Smart Professor Emeritus John H. Roberts Professor George Haggerty, UC Riverside Professor Kevis Goodman Fall 2013 Virtue Rewarded: Handel’s Oratorios and the Culture of Sentiment Copyright 2013 by Jonathan Rhodes Lee ABSTRACT Virtue Rewarded: Handel’s Oratorios and the Culture of Sentiment by Jonathan Rhodes Lee Doctor of Philosophy in Music University of California, Berkeley Professor Davitt Moroney, Chair Throughout the 1740s and early 1750s, Handel produced a dozen dramatic oratorios. These works and the people involved in their creation were part of a widespread culture of sentiment. This term encompasses the philosophers who praised an innate “moral sense,” the novelists who aimed to train morality by reducing audiences to tears, and the playwrights who sought (as Colley Cibber put it) to promote “the Interest and Honour of Virtue.” The oratorio, with its English libretti, moralizing lessons, and music that exerted profound effects on the sensibility of the British public, was the ideal vehicle for writers of sentimental persuasions. My dissertation explores how the pervasive sentimentalism in England, reaching first maturity right when Handel committed himself to the oratorio, influenced his last masterpieces as much as it did other artistic products of the mid- eighteenth century. When searching for relationships between music and sentimentalism, historians have logically started with literary influences, from direct transferences, such as operatic settings of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, to indirect ones, such as the model that the Pamela character served for the Ninas, Cecchinas, and other garden girls of late eighteenth-century opera.
    [Show full text]
  • A Countertenor's Reference Guide to Operatic Repertoire
    A COUNTERTENOR’S REFERENCE GUIDE TO OPERATIC REPERTOIRE Brad Morris A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF MUSIC May 2019 Committee: Christopher Scholl, Advisor Kevin Bylsma Eftychia Papanikolaou © 2019 Brad Morris All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Christopher Scholl, Advisor There are few resources available for countertenors to find operatic repertoire. The purpose of the thesis is to provide an operatic repertoire guide for countertenors, and teachers with countertenors as students. Arias were selected based on the premise that the original singer was a castrato, the original singer was a countertenor, or the role is commonly performed by countertenors of today. Information about the composer, information about the opera, and the pedagogical significance of each aria is listed within each section. Study sheets are provided after each aria to list additional resources for countertenors and teachers with countertenors as students. It is the goal that any countertenor or male soprano can find usable repertoire in this guide. iv I dedicate this thesis to all of the music educators who encouraged me on my countertenor journey and who pushed me to find my own path in this field. v PREFACE One of the hardships while working on my Master of Music degree was determining the lack of resources available to countertenors. While there are opera repertoire books for sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, tenors, baritones, and basses, none is readily available for countertenors. Although there are online resources, it requires a great deal of research to verify the validity of those sources.
    [Show full text]
  • Orfeo Euridice
    ORFEO EURIDICE NOVEMBER 14,17,20,22(M), 2OO9 Opera Guide - 1 - TABLE OF CONTENTS What to Expect at the Opera ..............................................................................................................3 Cast of Characters / Synopsis ..............................................................................................................4 Meet the Composer .............................................................................................................................6 Gluck’s Opera Reform ..........................................................................................................................7 Meet the Conductor .............................................................................................................................9 Meet the Director .................................................................................................................................9 Meet the Cast .......................................................................................................................................10 The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice ....................................................................................................12 OPERA: Then and Now ........................................................................................................................13 Operatic Voices .....................................................................................................................................17 Suggested Classroom Activities
    [Show full text]
  • Your Tuneful Voice Iestyn Davies
    VIVAT-105-Booklet.pdf 1 18/11/13 20:22 YOUR TUNEFUL VOICE Handel Oratorio Arias IESTYN DAVIES CAROLYN SAMPSON THE KING’S CONSORT ROBERT KING VIVAT-105-Booklet.pdf 2 18/11/13 20:22 YOUR TUNEFUL VOICE Handel Oratorio Arias 1 O sacred oracles of truth (from Belshazzar) [5’01] Who calls my parting soul from death (from Es ther) [3’13] with Carolyn Sampson soprano 2 Mortals think that Time is sleeping (from The Triumph of Time and Truth) [7’05] On the valleys, dark and cheerless (from The Triumph of Time and Truth) [4’00] 3 Tune your harps to cheerful strains (from Es ther) [4’45] with Rachel Chaplin oboe How can I stay when love invites (from Es ther) [3’06] 4 Mighty love now calls to arm (from Alexander Balus) [2’35] 5 Overture to Jephtha [6’47] 5 [Grave] – Allegro – [Grave] [5’09] 6 Menuet [1’38] 7 Eternal source of light divine (from Birthday Ode for Queen Anne) [3’35] with Crispian Steele-Perkins trumpet 8 Welcome as the dawn of day (from Solomon) [3’32] with Carolyn Sampson soprano 9 Your tuneful voice my tale would tell (from Semele) [5’12] with Kati Debretzeni solo violin 10 Yet can I hear that dulcet lay (from The Choice of Hercules) [3’49] 11 Up the dreadful steep ascending (from Jephtha) [3’36] 12 Overture to Samson [7’43] 12 Andante – Adagio [3’17] 13 Allegro – Adagio [1’37] 14 Menuetto [2’49] 15 Thou shalt bring them in (from Israel in Egypt) [3’15] VIVAT-105-Booklet.pdf 3 18/11/13 20:22 O sacred oracles of truth (from Belshazzar) [5’01] 16 Who calls my parting soul from death (from Es ther) [3’13] with Carolyn Sampson soprano
    [Show full text]
  • PRESSQUOTES Hanna-Liisa Kirchin
    PRESSQUOTES Hanna-Liisa Kirchin MEZZO SOPRANO Orfeo / Orfeo ed Euridice / Longborough Festival Opera / 2017 Cond. Jeremy Silver / Dir. Maria Jagusz “Her voice is fascinating: sweet and powerful, it had a plangent, matte finish that really did make her sound like something between a countertenor and a more conventional mezzo. In a role originally written for a castrato, and embodying a figure from myth, it was simultaneously strange and wonderfully fitting – heightened by the grace with which Kirchin walked the line between classical dignity and raw, wrenching pain.” (The Crtics’ Circle / Richard Bratby) “Hanna-Liisa Kirchin brings human nobility and ardour as Orfeo in lamenting the death of Euridice, which does not relent either as he undergoes the trial of leading her out of Hades whilst attempting to avoid the temptation of turning around to her, or in his final triumph." (Classicalsource / Curtis Rogers) “Hanna-Liisa Kirchin sang with heart on her sleeve emotion to carry the opera as Orfeo ... her ‘Che farò senza Euridice? was the grief-stricken highlight it must be.” (Seen & Heard International / Jim Pritchard) “As the mythic quester, Hanna-Liisa Kirchin displayed a mezzo which is not huge but which is sweet-toned and expressive. Interestingly, my guest remarked that at first he was uncertain whether Orfeo was being sung by a countertenor or a mezzo, for Kirchin’s voice does have an unusual colour - one which was most effective in a role initially taken by the castrato Gaetano Guadagni... Kirchin worked hard in ‘Che farò senza Euridice’: her voicing of loss was dignified and imbued with wrenching pain...” (Opera Today / Claire Seymour) "...and with a superb central performance as Orfeo movingly sung and acted by mezzo Hanna- Liisa Kirchin who clearly has a stellar career ahead of her.
    [Show full text]
  • Los Castrados
    LOS CASTRADOS “Mi querido niño [...] os diré con términos más insinuantes que debéis haceros pulir mediante una ligera operación, que os asegurará por mucho tiempo la delicadeza de vuestro cutis y la belleza de vuestra voz para toda la vida...” Charles de Saint-Evremond, 1685 Por Doña Juana La Loca Los castrados (castrati), evirados o i musicci, es como se denominó a aquellos niños a los que se les retiró los testículos antes de la pubertad, antes del desarrollo sexual secundario y que trajo consigo voces de una belleza sublime, los menos, así como infinidad de desgraciados infantes que fueron despreciados hasta el fin de sus días. En el siglo XVI, la iglesia no permitía que las mujeres cantaran en público y esto asociado a que los compositores de cámara empezaron a incluir complejas polifonías, en las cuales los niños empezaban a tener problemas para interpretarlas, ya que cuando todavía llegaban a los agudos no tenían la fuerza requerida y cuando adquirían esa fuerza durante la pubertad la ascensión al agudo se tornaba en sonidos galleados. El problema empezó a solucionarse con la traída, a la Capilla Sixtina, de españoles falsetistas, de los cuales se sospechaba que muchos de ellos eran ya castrados. Los rumores apuntaban a que ya hubo castrados en el coro de la iglesia de San Pedro de Roma desde 1533, pero fue a partir de 1589 cuando el papa Sixto V expidió una bula para la castración, pues cualquier tipo de mutilación estaba castigada por la propia iglesia salvo para salvar la vida, hecho que permitió la entrada de cuatro castrati a dicho coro.
    [Show full text]
  • Susan Rutherford: »Bel Canto« and Cultural Exchange
    Susan Rutherford: »Bel canto« and cultural exchange. Italian vocal techniques in London 1790–1825 Schriftenreihe Analecta musicologica. Veröffentlichungen der Musikgeschichtlichen Abteilung des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom Band 50 (2013) Herausgegeben vom Deutschen Historischen Institut Rom Copyright Das Digitalisat wird Ihnen von perspectivia.net, der Online-Publikationsplattform der Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, zur Verfügung gestellt. Bitte beachten Sie, dass das Digitalisat der Creative- Commons-Lizenz Namensnennung-Keine kommerzielle Nutzung-Keine Bearbeitung (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) unterliegt. Erlaubt ist aber das Lesen, das Ausdrucken des Textes, das Herunterladen, das Speichern der Daten auf einem eigenen Datenträger soweit die vorgenannten Handlungen ausschließlich zu privaten und nicht-kommerziellen Zwecken erfolgen. Den Text der Lizenz erreichen Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode »Bel canto« and cultural exchange Italian vocal techniques in London 1790–1825 Susan Rutherford But let us grant for a moment, that the polite arts are as much upon the decline in Italy as they are getting forward in England; still you cannot deny, gentlemen, that you have not yet a school which you can yet properly call your own. You must still admit, that you are obliged to go to Italy to be taught, as it has been the case with your present best artists. You must still submit yourselves to the direction of Italian masters, whether excellent or middling. Giuseppe
    [Show full text]
  • Handel's Last Prima Donna
    SUPER AUDIO CD HANDEL’s LAST PRIMA DONNA GIULIA FRASI IN LONDON RUBY HUGHES Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment LAURENCE CUMMINGS CHANDOS early music John Christopher Smith, c.1763 Smith, Christopher John Etching, published 1799, by Edward Harding (1755 – 1840), after portrait by Johan Joseph Zoffany (1733 – 1810) © Lebrecht Music & Arts Photo Library Handel’s last prima donna: Giulia Frasi in London George Frideric Handel (1685 – 1759) 1 Susanna: Crystal streams in murmurs flowing 8:14 Air from Act II, Scene 2 of the three-act oratorio Susanna, HWV 66 (1749) Andante larghetto e mezzo piano Vincenzo Ciampi (?1719 – 1762) premiere recording 2 Emirena: O Dio! Mancar mi sento 8:35 Aria from Act III, Scene 7 of the three-act ‘dramma per musica’ Adriano in Siria (1750) Edited by David Vickers Cantabile – Allegretto premiere recording 3 Camilla: Là per l’ombrosa sponda 4:39 Aria from Act II, Scene 1 of the ‘dramma per musica’ Il trionfo di Camilla (1750) Edited by David Vickers [ ] 3 Thomas Augustine Arne (1710 – 1778) 4 Arbaces: Why is death for ever late 2:21 Air from Act III, Scene 1 of the three-act serious opera Artaxerxes (1762) Sung by Giulia Frasi in the 1769 revival Edited by David Vickers [Larghetto] John Christopher Smith (1712 – 1795) 5 Eve: Oh! do not, Adam, exercise on me thy hatred – 1:02 6 It comes! it comes! it must be death! 5:45 Accompanied recitative and song from Act III of the three-act oratorio Paradise Lost (1760) Edited by David Vickers Largo – Largo premiere recording 7 Rebecca: But see, the night with silent pace
    [Show full text]
  • Catherine Harbor
    The Birth of the Music Business: Public Commercial Concerts In London 1660–1750 Catherine Harbor Volume 2 369 Appendix A. The Register of Music in London Newspapers 1660–1750 Database A.1 Database Design and Construction Initial database design decisions were dictated by the over-riding concern that the Register of Music in London Newspapers 1660–1750 should be a source-oriented rather than a model-oriented database, with the integrity of the source being preserved as far as possible (Denley, 1994: 33-43; Harvey and Press, 1996). The aim of the project was to store a large volume of data that had no obvious structure and to provide a comprehensive index to it that would serve both as a finding aid and as a database in its own right (Hartland and Harvey, 1989: 47-50). The result was what Harvey and Press (1996: 10) term an ‘electronic edition’ of the texts in the newspapers, together with an index or coding scheme that provided an easy way of retrieving the desired information. The stored data was divided into a text base with its physical and locational descriptors, and the index database. The design and specification of the database tables was undertaken by Charles Harvey and Philip Hartland using techniques of entity-relationship modelling and relational data analysis. These techniques are discussed in numerous texts on databases and database design and have been applied to purely historical data (Hartland and Harvey, 1989; Harvey and Press, 1996: 103-130). The Oracle relational database management system was used to create the tables, enter, store and manipulate the data.
    [Show full text]
  • Con Certgebouw Cahier
    CONCERTGEBOUWCAHIER Georg Friedrich HÄNDEL — Ignace Bossuyt Voorwoord Beste lezer, In 2009 wordt Georg Friedrich Händel herdacht, 250 jaar na zijn over- lijden. Voor het Concertgebouw is deze herdenking een ideaal aan- knopingspunt voor een festival en een publicatie rond dit boegbeeld uit de barokperiode. In dit tweede Concertgebouwcahier wordt het veelzijdige en muzikaal hoogstaande oeuvre van Händel in zijn context geplaatst. De kosmopoliet Händel assimileerde de Duitse en Italiaanse muzikale praxis en ontpopte zich in Londen tot een ongeëvenaarde componist van - vooral - opera's en oratoria. Als zelfbewuste kunste- naar die zich erg onafhankelijk opstelde, was hij zowel componist als manager. De ‘ups en downs’ die hiermee gepaard gingen, maken van zijn levensloop een intrigerend verhaal. De uitgebreide en overzichtelijke biografie biedt een inkijk in het leven en de carrière van Georg Friedrich Händel. In een tweede deel worden de belangrijkste genres beknopt besproken. De evolutie en de stijl van Händels composities worden aan de hand van enkele representatieve voorbeelden concreet belicht. De keuze voor Ignace Bossuyt als auteur was een evidentie. Ignace Bossuyt wakkert al decennialang het muzikale vuur aan bij melomanen, niet alleen als wetenschapper en docent, maar ook als auteur en inlei- der. Zijn gedrevenheid en talent om het muzikale repertoire krachtig en helder toe te lichten, spreekt uit elke pagina. Dit cahier is dan ook een ideaal vertrekpunt om de muziek van Georg Friedrich Händel voor een breed publiek te ontsluiten. Deze introductie wil vooral ook een stimulans zijn om de platgetreden paden van het 'populaire' Händel- repertoire te verlaten en in het schitterende oeuvre van Händel nieuwe horizonten te ontdekken.
    [Show full text]
  • It Must Be So: Reconsidering the Dramatic Agencies in George Frideric Handel’S Jephtha
    IT MUST BE SO: RECONSIDERING THE DRAMATIC AGENCIES IN GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL’S JEPHTHA BY GREGORY JON GEEHERN Submitted to the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree, Doctor of Music, Indiana University December, 2012 Accepted by the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Music. ___________________________________ Carmen Helena Téllez, Research Director, Chairperson __________________________________ Gary Arvin __________________________________ William Jon Gray __________________________________ Marianne Kielian-Gilbert ii Copyright © 2012 Gregory Jon Geehern iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the love and support of mentors, family, and friends. I would first like to thank my parents, Christopher and Terese Geehern, for encouraging me to pursue a career about which I am unabashedly passionate. Their love, patience, and support have given me the impetus to live a happy and fulfilled life. I would also like to thank my project research director, Dr. Carmen Helena Téllez, for her unequivocal support throughout my tenure at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. Her enthusiasm for new and innovative performances and analyses has enabled me to discover the “art of the possible.” I will be forever grateful for her kindness, humor, and creative insights. I am also grateful to my research committee, Dr. William Jon Gray, Dr. Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, and Professor Gary Arvin. Dr. Gray was instrumental in developing my knowledge of the rhetorical figures essential to this paper’s claims. Dr. Kielian-Gilbert’s theoretical and dramatic expertise enabled me to see the important connections between harmony, key areas, and narrative structure.
    [Show full text]