THOMAS NEWBURGH AND HIS POEM ON HANDEL'S BLINDNESS (original) (raw)
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Journal of the Royal Musical Association
ABSTRACTThis article examines the early writings of one of Handel's English librettists, Newburgh Hamilton. It describes what seems to be Hamilton's first publication, the little-studied Tory satire The Changes (1711), sets it alongside other early publications and biographical details, and reads this material alongside two of Hamilton's librettos for Handel, Alexander's Feast (1736) and Samson (1743). Hamilton's early writings are approached less as contexts for the oratorios than as texts with their own interest, and as intertexts to be set in dialogue with later productions. The article seeks to contribute to debate over the politics of Handel's vocal music, debate provoked not least by the difficulties of defining the sphere and meanings of politics in eighteenth-century culture, and of conceptualizing the collaborative endeavours and multiple sites of composition, patronage, business, performance and reception that make up Handel's oratorios.
Musical to Read, Difficult to Set: Handel’s Response to the Musicality of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast
Society for Musicology in Ireland/International Council for Traditional Music Postgraduate Conference, 2016
As John Dryden himself observed, the verse he wrote for composers to set to music exhibits a number of features not found in his other poetry. In the second of his Cecilian odes, Alexander’s Feast, these features reach an unprecedented level of pervasiveness and expressive importance. From stanza-ending choral refrains to word-repetition within lines and complex metrical and rhythmic ‘sound-effects’, the poem overflows with cues to the composer and ‘word-music’ that makes even a spoken performance into a sonorous display. When George Frideric Handel undertook to set Alexander’s Feast in 1736, Edward Holdsworth observed that ‘tho’ ’tis very musical to read, yet the words […] are very difficult to set […] I hope [Handel’s] superior genius has surmounted all difficulties.’ The concern is a valid one, for how is a composer to approach a text in which the poet has already attempted to do so much of the work for them? Moreover, the poem had been set to music twice already, and its popularity would no doubt ensure that the public was well-acquainted with its lyrical qualities. This paper explores Handel’s solutions to the metrical and stanzaic complexities of the Feast, as well as its inbuilt word-repetition, examining which poetic ‘musicalities’ the composer embraced, transformed, or rejected. It also presents evidence for the setting as a public display of musico-poetic virtuosity, strongly engaged with the English choral tradition and ‘classic’ literature, and suggests the Feast as a starting point for a musico-poetic interrogation of Handel’s wider output in English.
Handel as a Transitional Figure
"The view of Handel as the last giant of Baroque music rests primarily on stylistic grounds. Against this view stands one based on socio-historical realities: the half-century Handel spent in Britain and the extent of his achievements there place him squarely within modernity. If anything, the two conflicting perspectives help us understand Handel as a transitional figure who exchanged the fixed hierarchies of the Baroque with the self-affirmation (and anxieties) of a modern artist. This paper explores the composer’s life and career as sites of transition. An artist of exceptional will power and adaptability, Handel managed to transform himself from a prestigious agent of foreign taste to a paragon of British values; and from a representative of an aging style to the classic exponent of the sublime in music. This change involved biographical details like his attachment to the Hanoverian dynasty and the devotion he received from influential admirers. Far more important, it was inscribed in the social dynamism of early Georgian Britain, and defined by the Hanoverian Succession, the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, London’s entrepreneurial theatrical scene, the explosion of print culture, and the rise of charitable institutions. Their combined force enabled Handel to advance socially and achieve a degree of independence hitherto unavailable to members of his profession, thus becoming the culturally fortified artist whose music and status would inspire the Viennese Classics. "