In 1741, in just 24 days, the German-born, British-naturalized composer George Frideric Handel wrote an oratorio rich in tuneful arias and choruses of robust grandeur. Coolly received in London at first, after Handel's death Messiah enjoyed an extraordinary surge in popularity: it was performed at festivals across England; other composers rushed to rearrange it; it would be commercially recorded on more than 100 occasions. Jonathan Keates tells the story of the composition and musical afterlife of Handel's masterpiece: he considers the first performances and its place in Handel's output; he looks at the oratorio itself and its relationship with spirituality in the age of the Enlightenment; and he examines why Messiah became such an essential element in the national culture of Britain. Illustrated with beautiful images, including the original score of the work, Messiah is a richly informative and affectionate celebration of a high-point of Britain's Georgian golden age.

Stephen Storace (1762-96) was a prominent opera composer in London. His works exemplify the best in English opera, with music closely integrated with the drama, and including attractive tunes the audience could sing and play at home. Theatrical life and music publishing are both examined from the perspective of Storace's works.

John Jenkins (1592-1678) was acknowledged by his English contemporaries as a supreme composer of instrumental music. A conference held in 1992 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth, rather than focusing only on his life and work, set these in a wider context. Some of the papers included here were first presented at the conference, but are supplemented by others giving a broad conspectus of current work by leading scholars in the field of English consort music. The collection embraces various aspects not only of Jenkin's work, but also some of his contemporaries (Gibbons, Ferrabosco II, Mico, Cobbold), instruments (lute, lyre, viol, organ), and consort manuscripts, including their patrons and copyists.

This book opens a door long closed on an important era in the history of Venice. It presents, for the first time, an introductory, contextual study of three centuries of musical activity at the four eleemosynary foundations of the former Venetian Republic: the ospedali grandi. It provides a comprehensive account of the institutional, social, religious, and civic dimensions of these welfare complexes, with particular reference to their musical subsidiaries, or cori.

Involving over 300 external professional male composers and music teachers and over 800 internal professional women musicians, the history of the cori also incorporates a vast repertory of over 4,000 original works - sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental, solo and choral - little known today but recognized as key elements in the historical evolution of musical genres. Responsible for this phenomenon through their association with the ospedali grandi and the figlie del coro were such figures as Lotti, Legrenzi, Vivaldi, Hasse, Galuppi, and Cimarosa. It is their relationship to the ospedali and the concert series in the churches and music salons annexed to them that Dr Berdes explores. In the process she proves the significance of the cori as reflectors of a range of cross-disciplinary scholarship from the history of art and architecture to the history of culture and social policy, as well as medical care and aspects of women's, children's, and Venetian studies.

Amassing a wealth of information from primary sources, this book constitutes a repository of information and references for a multitude of new investigations. Above all, it will facilitate rediscovery, performance, and analysis of the repertoire commissioned for and first performed by the women musicians of the cori, a repertoire of unique richness which may be seen as the mirror of a lost Venetian civilization.

As Nicholas Kenyon says, quoting Ralph Vaughan Williams in the introduction to this volume, 'We all pay lip service to Henry Purcell, but what do we really know of him?'. Many aspects of the composer's life remain obscure, but, with the approach of the tercentenary of Henry Purcell's death in 1995, much of his music would be performed again, in some cases for the first time for many years. It was clear that many issues of performance practice needed to be aired before 1995; further it was equally clear that such discussion should begin early and should be available in published form. To this end, a group of scholars and performers gathered at Exeter College, Oxford in 1993 and the contents of this volume represents some of the fruits of their deliberation. The first part of the book considers purely musical issues, and covers a wide range of topics. Peter Holman looks at the importance of the Oxford set parts for Restoration Concerted Music in the overall picture of orchestral practice in the seventeenth century. This is followed by two organological essays, one on organs (Dominic Gwynne) and the other on violins (John Dilworth). The remainder of this first section has three studies of historical performance - on Percell's "Exotic" trumpet notes (Peter Downey), on Queen Mary's Funeral Music (Bruce Wood), and ornamenting Purcell's keyboard music (H Diack Johnson) - and two concerning singers and singing - Purcell's stage singers (Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson) and on voice ranges, voice types and pitch (Timothy Morris). The second part of the book, devoted to the stage works, opens with an examination of past performances of the dramatic operas in Michael Burden's essay, 'Percell debauch'd'. Contributors then examine the importance of allegory in performing stage works (Andrew Walkling), theatrical dance (Richard Semmens), costume and etiquette (Ruth Eva Ronen), stage music (Roger Savage), and aspects of performing Dioclesian (Julia and Frans Muller) and King Arthur (Lionel Sawkins).

Music in 17th and early 18th century Italy was wonderfully rich and varied: in theatrical and secular vocal chamber music alone, we saw the rise of the solo song and cantata, and the birth and growth of opera, all establishing important new structural and expressive paradigms. But this was also a complex time of uncertainty and change, as 'old' and 'new' interacted in subtle and often surprising ways. There is still much to document, explore and explain in terms of composers and repertories and their multi-layered contexts. This collection of essays by European, British and American musicologists seeks to consolidate the recent growth interest in seventeenth century studies. It includes discussions of leading composers (d'India, Monteverdi, Rovetta, Steffani, Albinoni, Vivaldi and Handel), repertories (chamber laments, staged balli and operatic mad-scenes), geographical issues (the arrival of Neapolitan opera in Venice), institutional contexts, and iconography. Inspiration for the book was drawn from the poineering research of Nigel Fortune, to whom the volume is dedicated on his 70th birthday.

One evening, journalist Eric Siblin attended a recital of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Cello Suites" and began an epic quest that would unravel three centuries of intrigue, politics, and passion. Winner of the Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction and the McAuslan First Book Prize, "The Cello Suites" weaves together three dramatic narratives: the disappearance of Bach's manuscript in the eighteenth century; Pablo Casals's discovery and popularization of the music in Spain in the late-nineteenth century; and Siblin's infatuation with the suites in the present day. The search led Siblin to Barcelona, where Casals, just thirteen and in possession of his first cello, roamed the backstreets with his father in search of sheet music and found Bach's lost suites tucked in a dark corner of a store. Casals played them every day for twelve years before finally performing them in public. Siblin pursues the mysteries that continue to haunt this music more than 250 years after its composer's death: Why did Bach compose the suites for the cello, then considered a lowly instrument? What happened to the original manuscript? A seamless blend of biography and music history, "The Cello Suites" is a true-life journey of discovery, fueled by the power of these musical masterpieces.

Examines aspects of figured bass notation and continuo realization in the High Baroque, especially with respect to the operas and oratorios of G. F. Handel. This pioneering study examines aspects of figured bass notation and continuo realization in the High Baroque, especially with respect to the operas and oratorios of G. F. Handel. Contemporary treatises, Handel's manuscripts, original performance material, and other early sources provide clarification and guidance for the modern performer. Part one is an overview of figured bass in Handel source materials: autograph manuscripts, performing scores, original keyboard parts, 18th century scribal copies, and early editions. Part two treats in depth continuo realization problems that are often overlooked and can be troublesome in modern performances. The author defines the most common bass patterns, or formula-progressions, in Handel's music, together with the precise harmony the composer intended. The author attempts to show that continuo figuring can serve different functions depending oncontext. Much of the figuring that comes down to us in secondary sources may derive from the composer, or it may reflect valid contemporary practice. Modern editions, in the main, are too selective in this regard: they only include bass figuring from primary sources, leaving the modern performer frequently without sufficient guidance in the continuo part to improvise a stylistic accompaniment. Appendices include brief examples of continuo realization by Handel. Patrick J. Rogers is an active keyboard player and former Fulbright Scholar who studied Handel under Theodor Goellner, Roland Jackson, Terence Best, and the late J. Merrill Knapp.

Victoria's Requiem is among the best-loved and most-performed musical works of the Renaissance, and is often held to be 'a Requiem for an age', representing the summation of golden-age Spanish polyphony. Yet it has been the focus of surprisingly little research. Owen Rees's multifaceted study brings together the historical and ritual contexts for the work's genesis, the first detailed musical analysis of the Requiem itself, and the long story of its circulation and reception. Victoria composed this music in 1603 for the exequies of Maria of Austria, and oversaw its publication two years later. A rich variety of contemporary documentation allows these events - and the nature of music in Habsburg exequies - to be reconstructed vividly. Rees then locates Victoria's music within the context of a vast international repertory of Requiems, much of it previously unstudied, and identifies the techniques which render this work so powerfully distinctive and coherent.

Studies of pre-existing music in narrative cinema often focus on a single film, composer or director. The approach here adopts a wider perspective, placing a specific musical repertoire - baroque music - in the context of its reception to explore its mobilisation in post-war cinema. It shows how various revivals have shaped musical fashion, and how cinema has drawn on resultant popularity and in turn contributed to it. Close analyses of various films raise issues of baroque musical style and form to question why eighteenth-century music remains an exception to dominant film-music discourses. Account is taken of changing modern performance practice and its manifestation in cinema, particularly in the biopic. This question of the reimagining of baroque repertoire leads to consideration of pastiches and parodies to which cinema has been particularly drawn, and subsequently to the role that neobaroque music has played in more recent films.

This book is concerned with a hundred years of musical drama in England. It charts the development of the genre from the theatre works of Henry Purcell (and his contemporaries) to the dramatic oratorios of George Frideric Handel (and his). En route it investigates the objections to all-sung drama in English that were articulated in the decades around 1700, various proposed solutions, the importation of Italian opera, and the creation of the dramatic oratorio - English drama, all-sung but not staged. Most of the constituent essays take an in-depth look at a particular aspect of the process, while others draw attention to dramatic qualities in non-dramatic works that also were performed in the theatre. The journey from Purcell to Handel illustrates the vigour and vitality of English theatrical and musical traditions, and Handel's dramatic oratorios and other settings of English words answer questions posed before he was born.

The musica secreta or concerto delle dame of Duke Alfonso II d'Este, an ensemble of virtuoso female musicians that performed behind closed doors at the castello in Ferrara, is well-known to music history. Their story is often told by focussing on the Duke's obsessive patronage and the exclusivity of their music. This book examines the music-making of four generations of princesses, noblewomen and nuns in Ferrara, as performers, creators, and patrons from a new perspective. It rethinks the relationships between polyphony and song, sacred and secular, performer and composer, patron and musician, court and convent. With new archival evidence and analysis of music, people, and events over the course of the century, from the role of the princess nun musician, Leonora d'Este, to the fate of the musica secreta's jealously guarded repertoire, this radical approach will appeal to musicians and scholars alike.

J. S. Bach composed some of the best-loved and most moving music in Western culture. Surviving mostly in manuscript collections, his music also exists in special and unique publications that reveal much about his life and thoughts as a composer. In this book, Peter Williams, author of the acclaimed J. S. Bach: A Life in Music, revisits Bach's biography through the lens of his music. Reviewing all of Bach's music chronologically, Williams discusses the music collection by collection to reveal the development of Bach's interests and priorities. While a great deal has been written about the composer's vocal works, Williams gives the keyboard music its proper emphasis, revealing it as crucial to Bach's biography, as a young organist and a mature composer, as a performer in public and teacher in private, and as a profound thinker in the language of music.

The first volume of this monumental study of Handel's operatic works, covering the first seventeen operas. This first of the classic two-volume survey of Handel's operas was first published in 1987 and reissued in a revised paperback edition in 1995. Now it is brought back into print in a year which has seen numerous productions and recordings of the operas and which marks the 250th anniversary of Handel's death. Their revival in the modern theatre - not a single opera was staged or performed anywhere between 1754 and 1920 - has been among the most remarkable phenomena in the history of the art, and is due in no small measure to the painstaking research of Dean and Knapp in volume one, and Dean himself in volume two, published by Boydell in 2006. This first volume devotes a chapter to each of Handel's first seventeen operas, offering a full synopsis and study of the libretto, extensive discussions of the music, a performance history, and a comparison of the different versions of the opera. In addition there are several general chapters on the historical and stylistic context of Handel's operatic career to 1726, and a number of Appendices including a list of performances during Handel's life and the location of librettos, Handel's borrowings, Handel's singers, and modern stage productions up to the end of 1993. WINTON DEAN is a distinguished Handelian scholar and writer on opera. He is a former vice-president of the Georg-Friedrich-Handel Gesellschaft in Halle and a founding Council Member of the Handel Institute in London. JOHN MERRILL KNAPP died in 1993. He was Emeritus Professor of Music, Princeton University and the editor of two volumes of the German edition of Handel's complete works, and author of The Joy of Opera.

This is the first ever book-length study of the a cappella masses which appeared in France in choirbook layout during the baroque era. Though the musical settings of the Ordinarium missae and of the Missa pro defunctis have been the subject of countless studies, the stylistic evolution of the polyphonic masses composed in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been neglected owing to the labor involved in creating scores from the surviving individual parts. Jean-Paul C. Montagnier has examined closely the printed, engraved and stenciled choirbooks containing this repertoire, and his book focuses mainly on the music as it stands in them. After tracing the choirbooks' publishing history, the author places these mass settings in their social, liturgical and musical context. He shows that their style did not all adhere strictly to the stile antico, but could also employ the most up-to-date musical language of the period.

Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies - and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Academie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.

Of all the great composers of the eighteenth century, Handel was the supreme cosmopolitan, an early and extraordinarily successful example of a freelance composer. For thirty years the opera-house was the principal focus of his creative work and he composed more than forty operas over this period. In this book, David Kimbell sets Handel's operas in their biographical and cultural contexts. He explores the circumstances in which they were composed and performed, the librettos that were prepared for Handel, and what they tell us about his and his audience's values and the music he composed for them. Remarkably no Handel operas were staged for a period of 170 years between 1754 and the 1920s. The final chapter in this book reveals the differences and similarities between how Handel's operas were performed in his time and ours.

Louis XIV and his court at Versailles had a profound influence on music in France and throughout Europe. In 1660 Louis visited Aix-en-Provence, a trip that resulted in political and cultural transformations throughout the region. Soon thereafter Aix became an important center of sacred music composition, eventually rivaling Paris for the quality of the composers it produced. John Hajdu Heyer documents the young king's visit and examines how he and his court deployed sacred music to enhance the royal image and secure the loyalty of the populace. Exploring the circle of composers at Aix, Heyer provides the most up-to-date and complete biographies in English of nine key figures, including Guillaume Poitevin, Andre Campra, Jean Gilles, Francois Estienne, and Antoine Blanchard. The book goes on to reveal how the history of political power in the region was reflected through church music, and how musicians were affected by contemporary events.

Pathbreaking study of a vast and intriguing repertoire: arrangements for keyboard instruments of songs, arias, and other vocal pieces, from the age William Byrd to that of Handel. Keyboard arrangements of vocal music flourished in England between1560 and 1760. Songs without Words, by noted harpsichordist and early-music authority Sandra Mangsen, is the first in-depth study of this topic, uncovering abody of material that is remarkably varied, musically interesting, and indicative of major trends in musical and social life at the time. Mangsen's Songs without Words argues that the pieces upon which these keyboardarrangements were based constituted a shared repertoire, akin to the jazz standards of the twentieth century. In Restoration England, the ballad tradition saw tunes and texts move between oral, manuscript, and printed transmissionand from street to playhouse and back again. During the eighteenth century, printed keyboard arrangements were aimed particularly at female amateur keyboardists and helped opera to become a widely popular genre. Songs without Words considers a wide range of model pieces, including songs of many kinds and arias and other numbers from operas and oratorios. The resulting keyboard versions range from simple and pedagogically oriented to highly virtuosic. Two central issues -- the relationship between an arrangement and its model and the reception and aesthetics of arrangements -- are explored in the framing chapters. The result is a study that will be of great interest toscholars, performers, and anyone who loves the music of the late Renaissance, Baroque, and early Classic eras. Sandra Mangsen is professor emerita of music at the University of Western Ontario.

Presupposing no specialist musical knowledge, this book offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic role of music in the plays of Shakespeare and his early seventeenth-century contemporaries. Simon Smith argues that many plays used music as a dramatic tool, inviting culturally familiar responses to music from playgoers. Music cues regularly encouraged audiences to listen, look, imagine or remember at dramatically critical moments, shaping meaning in plays from The Winter's Tale to A Game at Chess, and making theatregoers active and playful participants in playhouse performance. Drawing upon sensory studies, theatre history, material texts, musicology and close reading, Smith argues for the importance of music in familiar and less well-known plays including Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, Sophonisba, The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Killed With Kindness.

Musical Creativity in Restoration England is the first comprehensive investigation of approaches to creating music in late seventeenth-century England. Understanding creativity during this period is particularly challenging because many of our basic assumptions about composition - such as concepts of originality, inspiration and genius - were not yet fully developed. In adopting a new methodology that takes into account the historical contexts in which sources were produced, Rebecca Herissone challenges current assumptions about compositional processes and offers new interpretations of the relationships between notation, performance, improvisation and musical memory. She uncovers a creative culture that was predominantly communal, and reveals several distinct approaches to composition, determined not by individuals, but by the practical function of the music. Herissone's new and original interpretations pose a fundamental challenge to our preconceptions about what it meant to be a composer in the seventeenth century and raise broader questions about the interpretation of early modern notation.

Bach's Johannine Theology: The St. John Passion and the Cantatas for Spring 1725 is a fertile examination of this group of fourteen surviving liturgical works. Renowned Bach scholar Eric Chafe begins his investigation into Bach's theology with the composer's St. John Passion, concentrating on its first and last versions. Beyond providing a uniquely detailed assessment of the passion, Bach's Johannine Theology is the first work to take the work beyond the scope of an isolated study, considering its meaning from a variety of musical and historical standpoints. Chafe thereby uncovers a range of theological implications underlying Bach's creative approach itself.
Building considerably on his previous work, Chafe here expands his methodological approach to Bach's vocal music by arguing for a multi-layered approach to religion in Bach's compositional process. Chafe bases this approach primarily on two aspects of Bach's theology: first, the specific features of Johannine theology, which contrast with the more narrative approach found in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke); and second, contemporary homiletic and devotional writings - material that is not otherwise easily accessible, and less so in English translation. Bach's Johannine Theology provides an unprecedented, enlightening exploration of the theological and liturgical contexts within which this music was first heard.

During the years 1500-1800, European performing arts reveled in a kaleidoscope of Otherness: Middle-Eastern harem women, fortune-telling Spanish 'Gypsies', Incan priests, Barbary pirates, moresca dancers, and more. In this prequel to his 2009 book Musical Exoticism, Ralph P. Locke explores how exotic locales and their inhabitants were characterized in musical genres ranging from instrumental pieces and popular songs to oratorios, ballets, and operas. Locke's study offers new insights into much-loved masterworks by composers such as Cavalli, Lully, Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, and Mozart. In these works, evocations of ethnic and cultural Otherness often mingle attraction with envy or fear, and some pieces were understood at the time as commenting on conditions in Europe itself. Locke's accessible study, which includes numerous musical examples and rare illustrations, will be of interest to anyone who is intrigued by the relationship between music and cultural history, and by the challenges of cross-cultural (mis)understanding.

Janet K. Page explores the interaction of music and piety, court and church, as seen through the relationship between the Habsburg court and Vienna's convents. For a period of some twenty-five years, encompassing the end of the reign of Emperor Leopold I and that of his elder son, Joseph I, the court's emphasis on piety and music meshed perfectly with the musical practices of Viennese convents. This mutually beneficial association disintegrated during the eighteenth century, and the changing relationship of court and convents reveals something of the complex connections among the Habsburg court, the Roman Catholic Church, and Viennese society. Identifying and discussing many musical works performed in convents, including oratorios, plays with music, feste teatrali, sepolcri, and other church music, Page reveals a golden age of convent music in Vienna and sheds light on the convents' surprising engagement with contemporary politics.

In eighteenth-century Germany the universal harmony of God's creation and the perfection of its proportions still held philosophical, moral and devotional significance. Reproducing proportions close to the unity (1:1) across compositions could render them beautiful, perfect and even eternal. Using the principles of her groundbreaking theory of proportional parallelism and the latest source study research, Ruth Tatlow reveals how Bach used the number of bars to create numerical perfection across his published collections, and explains why he did so. The first part of the book illustrates the wide-ranging application of belief in the unity, showing how planning a well-proportioned structure was a normal compositional procedure in Bach's time. In the second part Tatlow presents practical demonstrations of this in Bach's works, illustrating the layers of proportion that appear within a movement, a work, between two works in a collection, across a collection and between collections.