Conference

Commemorating Handel
Saturday, 24 November 2007
The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London, WC1 1AZ

 10.00   Registration

 10.30   Donald Burrows
            Commemorating a Commemoration: The Royal Music Library

 11.00   David Coke
            Roubiliac's ‘Handel’ for Vauxhall Gardens: A Sculpture in Context

 11.30   Coffee

 12.00   John H. Roberts
            Questions about Borrowing

 12.30   Sarah Bardwell and Katharine Hogg
            London’s Two Handel Museums

 1.00     Lunch

 2.15     Graydon Beeks
            Sir George Smart’s Performance of Handel’s Messiah

 2.45     Annette Landgraf
            The Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace: Cultural and Economic Achievement Combined

 3.15     Richard G. King
            Commemorating Handel Scholars

 3.45     Tea

 4.15     Wolfgang Ruf
            The Performance of Handel’s Messiah by Johann Adam Hiller in Berlin

 4.45     Konstanze Musketa
            The 1922 Halle Handel Festival

 5.15     Matthew Gardner
            The Commemoration of Handel through Film

 6.00     Reception on Opening of Exhibition ‘Handel and the Crystal Palace’; Dinner

If you wish to attend the conference, complete the form overleaf and send it in by 10 November. If booking for two or more people, photocopy the blank form and send a separate copy for each person (you may also wish to keep a copy of the details given above).

ABSTRACTS

This forthcoming event breaks the mould in two ways. It is the first Handel Institute conference to step outside the triennial pattern established in 1990 and the first to be restricted to a single day. The theme of the conference was prompted by the 150th anniversary of the first of the great Handel festivals at the Crystal Palace and the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death. The event thus affords an opportunity to reflect on previous commemorations – their concerns, meanings and effects – and to look forward to 2009 and beyond. Allowance has been made for ‘free’ papers. Here are the abstracts of the papers to be read.

Graydon Beeks (Claremont, California)

Sir George Smart’s Performance of Handel’s Messiah

Sir George Smart (1776-1867) was one of the most influential English musicians of the first half of the 19th century, not least because he was considered an authority on the ‘authentic’ way to perform the music of Handel. In the words of the 19th-century historian W. H. Husk, ‘he was much sought after by singers wishing to learn the traditional manner of singing Handel’s airs, which he had been taught by his father, who had seen Handel conduct his oratorios’. Smart was also the conductor of the Handel Festival held in Westminster Abbey in 1834.

Little work has been done on the exact nature of Smart’s performance style in Handel, primarily because little direct evidence has survived. In recent years, however, the British Library has acquired the full score from which he conducted Messiah and a vocal score of the work into which he wrote ornamentation for the soprano arias at the request of the celebrated soprano Jenny Lind (the ‘Swedish nightingale’). This paper uses evidence from these sources, together with information from Smart’s journals and descriptions of the 1834 Handel Festival, in an attempt to decipher what Smart and his contemporaries thought of as ‘the traditional manner of singing Handel’.

Donald Burrows (Milton Keynes)

Commemorating a Commemoration: The Royal Music Library

On 27 November 1957 Queen Elizabeth II presented the Royal Music Library to the Trustees of the British Museum, a gift commemorating the 200th anniversary of King George II’s presentation of the Old Royal Library to the recently established Museum. Subsequently the Royal Music Library, with the rest of the Museum’s library collections, was transferred to the British Library, and it remains today as an identifiable section of the British Library’s music collection at St Pancras. The Handel material in the Royal Music Library, both manuscript and printed, is still one of the essential resources for our knowledge of his music; the fiftieth anniversary of the presentation provides an opportunity to reflect on its significance, the effects of its wider availability, and some of the puzzles about various stages in its history. 

David Coke (Ripon)

Roubiliac’s ‘Handel’ for Vauxhall Gardens – A Sculpture in Context

Commemorative statues, even today, rarely celebrate living people; in Handel’s lifetime such a thing was unthinkable under normal circumstances.  However, the pleasure garden at Vauxhall in south-west London was far from normal. Its young entrepreneur, Jonathan Tyers, was a true patron of the arts, and it was he who, in the later 1730s, commissioned from Louis Francois Roubiliac a life-sized sculpture of Handel in the finest white Carrara marble. The sculpture was specifically created for the site that it occupied for some eighty years; there, as well as being the focus of a special effect, it fulfilled specific functions that informed its revolutionary design and were associated with the gardens’ carefully honed public image.

            Unusually for a statue, it is probable that its subject was involved in the commission and that its benefits that were enjoyed not only by Tyers but also by Handel and Roubiliac. Without his investment in this sculpture, Tyers would have found it harder to achieve the popular success that Vauxhall earned in the 1730s and ’40s and Handel might have had greater difficulty in sustaining his public profile.

            The sculpture fell out of favour after its removal from the gardens in the 19th century but has since been recognised as one of the great icons of British portraiture. It now enjoys pride of place in the British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, alongside other works of art associated with Vauxhall.

Matthew Gardner (Heidelberg)

The Commemoration of Handel through Film

There have been numerous films and documentaries on various aspects of Handel’s life. One of the earliest cinema films, The Great Mr Handel (1942), coincided with the 200th anniversary year of Messiah’s first performance and is centred on Handel’s production of this work. Later films include the East German documentary Georg Friedrich Händel (1960), offering a general overview of his life, and the television film Honour, Profit and Pleasure (1985), which was clearly made with his 300th birthday in mind. Handel (as a character) has not only taken the lead role in films, but has also made appearances in such works as Farinelli: il Castrato (1994), where he is portrayed both searching for new castratos in Italy and in competition with the Opera of the Nobility. He has also enjoyed some popularity on the small screen in such documentaries as Journey Through Time: Handel (1999) and, more recently, Auf der Suche nach dem jungen Händel in Rom (2007), where his time in Rome and, to a certain extent, Italy in general is outlined by scholars.

The above-mentioned productions (and more) form a part of Handel reception, biography and/or commemoration. This paper offers an overview of the ways in which Handel and his music are portrayed in selected productions, and a more general historical review of Handel commemoration through films and documentaries.

Richard G. King (Maryland)

Commemorating Handel Scholars

The year 2007 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Victor Schoelcher’s landmark Life of Handel, one of the founding documents in Handel research. The 1850s also saw the publication of the first volumes of Friedrich Chrysander’s Handel biography and edition. The work of both Schoelcher and Chrysander has received much attention in recent years, but they were by no means the only scholars active in Handel research in the second half of the 19th century.

This paper marks the anniversary of Schoelcher’s monograph with a review and evaluation of his goals, methods and accomplishments; but the focus is rather on the work of other musicians and scholars active in the second half of the 19th century, who commemorated Handel in editions, arrangements, collections, or research and whose work is still largely unknown or underappreciated. Figures to be considered include William Ayrton, Michael Rophino Lacy, George Macfarren, Julian Marshall, and Edward Rimbault.

Annette Landgraf (Halle)

The Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace: Cultural and Economic Achievement Combined

In 1851, when the Crystal Palace was erected for the London World Exposition, the capital of Britain was the largest city in Europe and the centre of the industrialised nations. The construction of the greatest glasshouse in the world was possible only because of the standard of British technical achievement. The building symbolised the idea of culture in the Victorian age, at a time of unprecedented economic prosperity and with the British Empire at the height of its power. Culture and art thrived in parallel with the technical, political and economic supremacy of the Empire. The development of the Handel ‘cult’ through vast performances in the festivals at the Crystal Palace demonstrated the close connection between cultural advancement and the development of economic power. When British influence diminished, attitudes changed and the success of the festival declined.

The Crystal Palace was moved from Hyde Park to Sydenham in 1854. The first Handel festival took place there on 19 June 1857, the last in 1926. This paper is based mainly on the reports, reviews and announcements in The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular (1844-1902), The Musical Times up to 1926, and other music magazines. The paper describes the festival’s history, the programme planning, the quality of the performances and the influence of the conductors. It also explores the expectations and reactions of the audiences, the advantages and disadvantages and the possibilities and limitations of such performances. 

Konstanze Musketa (Halle)

The 1922 Halle Handel Festival

After the great Handel commemorations of 1859 and 1885, it was only in 1922 that a Handel festival again took place in Handel’s home town. Organized by several of the town’s musical institutions, it marked, as Hermann Abert had hoped, the beginning of a new era of Handel performances in Halle. Indeed, it was the first in the continuing series of Handel festivals, which now number seventy. The rich and ambitious programme included the oratorios Semele and Susanna, the opera Orlando furioso, and several concerts with smaller works by Handel and other Halle composers of the 16th, 17th or 18th century. The programme booklet of more than 100 pages provides information on the concerts and other events, the locations, the performers, the organizers and their intentions – on all of which it is the purpose of this paper to comment.

John H. Roberts (Berkeley, California)

Questions about Borrowing

In his classic study of Handel’s dramatic oratorios in 1959 Winton Dean posed five questions about the composer’s much-discussed habit of borrowing musical material from other composers and his own earlier works. In light of subsequent discoveries and changing attitudes, these questions can be reformulated and amplified to serve as the basis for future research and debate. I suggest that we need above all to ask: (1) How should ‘borrowing’ be defined in Handel studies? (2) What role did borrowing play in Handel’s compositional process? (3) In what ways did the nature and extent of Handel’s borrowing change over the course of his career, and why? (4) How do Handel’s borrowing practices relate to those of his contemporaries? (5) How can the study of Handel’s borrowing inform our understanding of his music? Some preliminary answers will be offered.

Wolfgang Ruf (Halle)

The Performance of Handel’s Messiah by Johann Adam Hiller in Berlin

Hiller’s performance of Messiah in 1786 was not the first in Germany but was by far the most important for the reception of Handel’s works on the continent. Its success was due mainly to the bookseller Friedrich Nicolai, a music-lover, anglophile and leader of bourgeois intellectual life in Berlin. Nicolai had planned a Messiah performance as early as 1771 but abandoned it for unknown reasons. In 1785 he was visited by Burney, who reported on the London commemoration and encouraged him to revive his idea. Nicolai had good contacts at the Prussian court and took advantage of the illness of King Frederick to organize the performance with the assistance of the court chapel and the approval of the crown prince Frederick William, a greater friend of Handel’s music than his uncle.

The performance was special for many reasons: the outstanding venue, large orchestra, high-quality soloists, fine choir, guest conductor, mixed audience (royalty and public), language (Italian), arrangement of the music and the charitable nature of the event. The performance accorded well with new orientations in Prussian religious politics and with foreign policies of the 1780s, when Berlin looked for a strong Hanoverian (i.e., British) ally in the so-called Fürstenbund, a German counterpart to Austria. The resonance of the concert in the press was remarkable, prompting further performances elsewhere in Germany and a more intensive preoccupation with Messiah and its composer. The Berlin performance marked a significant step in the process of Handel’s canonization as a national figure in German culture..