© The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Handel at a Crossroads: His 1737–1738 and 1738–1739 Seasons Re-Examined
*Stanford University. Email: ichriss{at}stanford.edu. My research on Handel's affairs during the 1730s was supported by fellowships from the Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Huntington Library, the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, Harvard University's Houghton Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I am grateful for academic support and consultations to Karol Berger, Thomas S. Grey, Ellen T. Harris, Stephen Hinton, Lowell Lindgren, Felicity Nussbaum, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field. Ruth Smith offered generous feedback on an earlier version of my account of Israel in Egypt, for which I never thanked her properly. Daniel K. Chua's feedback helped me improve the section on Handel and Music Technology. Finally, Craig Stuart Sapp and the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities at Stanford, <http://ccarh.org>, have sustained my belief in the public usefulness of positivist musicology.
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Abstract |
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The years 1738 and 1739 saw a dramatic reversal in Handel's life and career. Wide popularity, admiration, and financial success in the spring of 1738 gave place to unexpected competition and performance clashes with the Italian opera party a year later, spoiling Handel's first oratorio season and exhausting his current account. New documentary evidence culled from a variety of sources allows us to reconsider this period, probe its central episodes, and reveal new ones. Among the topics explored in this essay are a hitherto unknown attempt by female aristocrats to produce Italian operas in 1739, Handel's long-standing interest in musical innovation, a Frenchman's eyewitness account of key Handelian events in 1738, a reconsideration of Saul's and Israel in Egypt's reception in 1739, and the earliest attempt to promote English Oratorio as a British national genre.