Handel’s Transformative Compositional Practices

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-502
Author(s):  
David Ross Hurley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Developing Variation ◽  
Compositional History ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Transformations ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
First Time ◽  
Variation Process

In recent decades singers of Handel’s music have made great strides in recapturing the art of embellishing his music, thus breathing new life into forms such as the da capo aria. Yet Handel’s own “variations”—his development and transformation of musical material in his vocal music, important for understanding his compositional practice with borrowed as well as (presumably) original music—are not yet fully explored or appreciated. Admittedly, scholars have discussed musical procedures such as inserting, deleting, and reordering musical materials, as well as other Baroque combinatorial practices in Handel’s arias, but the musical transformations I discuss here are closer to a specifically Handelian brand of developing variation. To my knowledge, the concept of developing variation has never before been applied to early eighteenth-century music. I explore the relation of developing variation to drama (also rarely done) in two of Handel’s arias, providing a close examination of “Ombre, piante” from the opera Rodelinda and new thoughts about “Lament not thus,” originally intended for the oratorio Belshazzar. Although these arias belong to different genres and different stages of Handel’s career, they both exhibit material that undergoes a kind of progressive variation process that has tangible musical and dramatic ramifications, of interest to opera specialists and performers. Furthermore, both arias have a complicated compositional history; I offer fresh insights into the aesthetic qualities of each version, thereby throwing light on Handel’s possible compositional intentions. This article also discloses for the first time some recurring musical passages shared between “Lament not thus” and other pieces that could influence the listener’s interpretation of certain musico-dramatic gestures.

The Royal Sign and Visual Literacy in Eighteenth-Century London

2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Koscak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Everyday Objects ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Aesthetic

AbstractThis article argues that the commercialization of monarchical culture is more complex than existing scholarship suggests. It explores the aesthetic dimensions of regal culture produced outside of the traditionally defined sphere of art and politics by focusing on the variety of royal images and symbols depicted on hanging signs in eighteenth-century London. Despite the overwhelming presence of kings and queens on signboards, few study these as a form of regal visual culture or seriously question the ways in which these everyday objects affected representations of royalty beyond asserting an unproblematic process of declension. Indeed, even in the Restoration and early eighteenth century, monarchical signs were the subject of criticism and debate. This article explains why this became the case, arguing that signs were criticized not because they were trivial commercial objects that cheapened royal charisma, but because they were overloaded with political meaning. They emblematized the failures of representation in the age of print and party politics by depicting the monarchy—the traditional center of representative stability—in ways that troubled interpretation and defied attempts to control the royal image. Nevertheless, regal images and objects circulating in urban spaces comprised a meaningful political-visual language that challenges largely accepted arguments about the aesthetic inadequacy and cultural unimportance of early eighteenth-century monarchy. Signs were part of an urban, graphic public sphere, used as objects of political debate, historical commemoration, and civic instruction.

ANTONIO VIVALDI AND THE SUBLIME SEASONS: SONORITY AND TEXTURE AS EXPRESSIVE DEVICES IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ITALIAN MUSIC

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS LOCKEY
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Antonio Vivaldi ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Four Seasons ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Italian Music ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Powerful Demonstration

ABSTRACTAntonio Vivaldi's cycle of violin concertos dramatizing the four seasons marked a substantial shift in the way that the seasons were depicted in the arts. Moving away from religious and mythological allegory, they exemplify a growing interest in descriptive representation of nature's power and in humanity's complex physical and emotional relationship with elements beyond its control. Positing new connections to Arcadian reform ideals of verisimilitude, this article addresses important questions concerning Vivaldi's pairing of sonnets with concertos and the aesthetic factors behind his choice of narrative topics to depict in the music. The article also demonstrates how Vivaldi used diverse textures and sonorities to create powerful contrasts that heighten the emotional impact of the aural imagery while underlining recurring expressive and pictorial motifs throughout the cycle. These last aspects, in particular, provide a new understanding of the historical significance of Vivaldi'sFour Seasonsas a powerful demonstration of both the expressive potential of the concerto genre and the still underappreciated art of orchestration during the early eighteenth century.

Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Hone
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Alexander Pope ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Nahum Tate ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Generation ◽  
First Time

This book is the first detailed study of the final Stuart succession crisis. It demonstrates for the first time the centrality of debates about royal succession to the literature and political culture of the early eighteenth century. Using previously neglected, misunderstood, and newly discovered material, it shows that arguments about Anne’s right to the throne were crucial to the construction of nascent party political identities. Literary texts were the principal vehicle through which contemporaries debated the new queen’s legitimacy. This book sheds fresh light on canonical authors such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison by setting their writing alongside the work of lesser known but nonetheless important figures such as John Tutchin, William Pittis, Nahum Tate, John Dennis, Henry Sacheverell, Charles Leslie, and other anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Through close historical readings, it shows how this new generation of poets, preachers, and pamphleteers transformed older models of succession writing by Milton, Dryden, and others, and imbued conventional genres such as panegyric and satire with their own distinctive poetics. By immersing the major authors in their milieu, and reconstructing the political and material contexts in which those authors wrote, this book demonstrates the vitality of debates about royal succession in early eighteenth-century culture.

The Musical Activities of the Spalding Gentlemen's Society

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 65-90
Author(s):  
Simon David Iain Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The World ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
First Time ◽  
Musical Activities

The Spalding Gentlemen's Society is one of the oldest extant learned societies in the world. At the time of its foundation over 300 years ago such societies were popular and membership was viewed as an important attribute of middle-class life. Most societies were short-lived and extant references to them are rare. What sets Spalding over all others is not only its longevity but also the quality of its records, which contain numerous references to music. This article aims to present the musical activities of the Society and to put them into the context of the early eighteenth-century English and European musical world. It begins with a discussion of the annual anniversary concerts and a detailed study of the 1738–46 programmes, commenting on the music performed and those who took part; these programmes are given as appendices. This research is further augmented by an examination of the music-related matters discussed at their meetings and other events that took place in Spalding. It may be impossible to ascertain how unique the Society's musical activities were, but it is rare to have such detail, and this is the first time that these important records, at least in relation to music, have been discussed in any depth.

LOVE CONQUERS ALL: CUPID, PHILIP V AND THE ALLEGORICAL ZARZUELA DURING THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION (1701–1714)

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
MARIA VIRGINIA ACUÑA
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Instability ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Cultural Understanding ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
First Time

ABSTRACTAn unprecedented shift in the portrayal of Cupid took place in the Spanish mythological zarzuela during the years surrounding the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). For the first time ever, Cupid was depicted not as a god of chaste or erotic love, but as a god at war with other deities. And in every work, a female actor-singer, not a male performer, played the fiery but mournful character. In this article I first explore the cultural understanding of Cupid in early eighteenth-century Spain as articulated by Spanish mythographers of the era, and as seen in the earliest representations of Cupid in Spanish theatre. I then investigate the intersection of myth, allegory, war and music theatre in a case study – the zarzuela Las nuevas armas de amor (Love's New Weapons, 1711) – suggesting that in this work Cupid functioned as an allegorical representation of the Spanish king, and that the deity's struggles for power mirrored the monarch's plight during a time of great political instability. Moreover, I argue that the pre-existing local theatrical practice of cross-dressing allowed for the portrayal of a defeated and sobbing Cupid in the zarzuela.

Alchemy and Counterpoint in an Age of Reason

1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Yearsley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Aesthetic

This essay demonstrates the importance of alchemy to the theory and practice of learned counterpoint as articulated in the writings of a group of early eighteenth-century German musicians, in particular, those of canon enthusiast and alchemist Heinrich Bokemeyer (1679-1751). While leading eighteenth-century theorists such as Johann Mattheson argued vigorously against the persistence of occult beliefs in music, the correspondence of J. G. Walther with Bokemeyer reveals a lively discourse on the principles of Hermeticism in conjunction with the exchange of counterpoint manuscripts, one of the most important of which was Johann Theile's Musicalisches Kunstbuch. The title and contents of this collection, as well as the pictorial and contrapuntal features of another of Theile's creations, the Harmonischer Baum, suggest further links with alchemy. In 1723-24, Bokemeyer became engaged in a dispute with Mattheson over the merits of canon; this debate was published as "Die canonische Anatomie" in Mattheson's periodical Critica musica. Bokemeyer's lengthy defense of learned counterpoint draws heavily on alchemical metaphors and Hermetic concepts. Bokemeyer would later become a member, along with J. S. Bach, of Lorenz Mizler's Societät der Musicalischen Wissenschaften. Bokemeyer may have seen in Bach's Canonic Variations (BWV 769), presented to the society on Bach's admission in 1747, a reflection of the aesthetic principles articulated in "Die canonische Anatomie." While learned counterpoint's role in composition and pedagogy diminished in the years following the publication of "Die canonische Anatomie," midcentury theorists such as F. W. Marpurg continued to explore the complex workings of canon, but they did so as enlightened encyclopedists holding none of the occult views that had informed the musical belief system of Bokemeyer and the counterpoint devotees of the previous generation.

Love in a Village and a New Direction for Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century America

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-102
Author(s):  
Sterling E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
New World ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Early American ◽  
Production Concept ◽  
History Of ◽  
Compositional History

This chapter reviews the compositional history of Love in a Village, a pastiche—a form in which borrowed songs are blended with original music--by Arne, Giardini, Geminiani, and Boyce, among others. In this case study, Murray examines the foundations of music theater in eighteenth-century America through the lens of David Douglass’s American Company, which first performed Love in a Village in the New World in Charleston in 1766. The author raises the question of how Douglass’s troupe succeeded financially and how in doing so it created a “new direction” for early American musical theater, an orientation and production concept that required trained voices and fuller orchestras, forces well in excess of those typically used for older ballad operas.

scholarly journals Hanswurst and Herr Ich: Subjection and Abjection in Enlightenment Censorship of the Comic Figure

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Jürs-Munby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Historical Movement

The well-known ‘banishment’ of the popular comic figure Hanswurst from the German stage by Gottsched and the Neuber acting troupe in the early eighteenth century is usually read as part of the historical movement from improvised folk theatre to bourgeois literary theatre. In this article Karen Jürs-Munby goes beyond that received wisdom to discuss what kind of acting, what kind of body, and what kind of relationship between stage and audience were censored by banishing Hanswurst. Considering this censorship as part of the larger historical relationship between discourses on acting and the emergence of a modern self in the Enlightenment, she argues that the osmotic body and stage that Hanswurst stood for prevented the aesthetic mirroring relationship sought by eighteenth-century stage reformers in an increasing need for bourgeois self-representation. The Hanswurst banishment can be theorized with reference to Julia Kristeva as an abjection of grotesque acting – a form of acting whose political power to question the autonomous bourgeois subject was to be rediscovered by practitioners in the twentieth century. Karen Jürs-Munby is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University; she has published articles on theories and discourses of acting in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and recently translated Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre.

scholarly journals Irus and his Jovial Crew: Representations of Beggars in Vincent Bourne and other Eighteenth-Century Writers of Latin Verse

Rural History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN T. GILMORE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Great Emphasis ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Elite Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Latin Verse ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
First Time

AbstractAlastair Fowler has written, with reference to the time of Milton, of ‘Latin's special role in a bilingual culture’, and this was still true in the early eighteenth century. The education of the elite placed great emphasis on the art of writing Latin verse and modern, as well as ancient, writers of Latin continued to be widely read. Collections of Latin verse, by individual writers such as Vincent Bourne (c. 1694–1747) or by groups such as Westminster schoolboys or bachelors of Christ Church, Oxford, could run into multiple editions, and included poems on a wide range of contemporary topics, as well as reworkings of classical themes. This paper examines a number of eighteenth-century Latin poems dealing with beggars, several of which are here translated for the first time. Particular attention is paid to the way in which the Latin poems recycled well-worn tropes about beggary which were often at variance with the experience of real-life beggars, and to how the specificities of Latin verse might heighten negative representations of beggars in a genre which, as a manifestation of elite culture, appealed to the very class which was politically and legally responsible for controlling them.

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