The Organ Concertos of Henry Burgess (1718–1786)

Henry Burgess, Junior, ­published in 1743 the earliest known set of organ concertos by an English composer. These show strongly the influence of George Frideric Handel, whose organ concertos published as Op. 4 in 1738 invented the genre, but also reveal that of Antonio Vivaldi and – more surprisingly – the English song tradition. Though still little known, Burgess is a capable and inventive composer, whose sparkling concertos, performable either with or without orchestra, deserve a place in the repertoire.

The Musical Discourse of Servitude

The Musical Discourse of Servitude examines the music of Johann Joseph Fux (ca. 1660–1741) in relation to that of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Its principal argument is that Fux’s long indenture as a composer of church music in Vienna gains in meaning (and cultural significance) when situated along an axis that runs between the liturgical servitude of writing music for the imperial court service and the autonomy of musical imagination which transpires in the late works of Bach and Handel. To this end, The Musical Discourse of Servitude constructs a typology of the late Baroque musical imagination which draws Fux, Bach, and Handel into the orbit of North Italian compositional practice. This typology depends on two primary concepts, both of which derive and dissent from Lydia Goehr’s formulation of the “work-concept” in The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992), namely, the “authority concept” and a revised reading of the “work-concept” itself. Both concepts are engaged through the agency of two musical genres—the oratorio and the Mass ordinary—which Fux shared with Handel and Bach respectively. These genres functioned as conservative norms in Fux’s music (most of Fux’s working life was spent in writing for the church service), but they are very differently engaged by Bach and Handel. To establish a continuity between Fux, Bach and Handel, and between the servitude of common practice and the emerging autonomy of a work-based practice in the early eighteenth-century musical imagination are the principal objectives of this study.

Critical Reflections on the Operatic Canon

This chapter looks back at the core canon in opera, tracing its evolution and mutation during the half century when its author served as a professional critic and then festival director. The chapter sees the core canon as either fixed or shrinking over the last ninety years. The public’s resistance to Modernist dissonance led to an explosion of repertory in areas immediately outside what had been the traditional canon. The need for novelty has been sated by directorial innovation (Regietheater), the early music revival (with George Frideric Handel the principal operatic beneficiary), and the ceaseless search for new curiosities to revive from the past. Moreover, the operatic canon has been enlarged by lighter forms of musical theater (West Side story and Sweeney Todd) and also by influence from non-Western cultures bearing their own canonic traditions and repertories. This chapter is paired with Kasper Holten’s “Inside and outside the operatic canon, on stage and in the boardroom.”

Lessons in Madness

Orlando Furioso had a life in the European imagination well beyond the poem itself, and ranging from the visual arts to the operatic stage. Over a hundred operas based on it were composed between 1619 and 1924, and they tell us a great deal not only about the reception of Orlando Furioso across time and space, but also as regards the contribution of a particularly ‘mad’ genre to issues that variously dominated particular political, social, and cultural contexts. The settings of Orlando, Ariodante, and Alcina by George Frideric Handel, composed for London in the early 1730s, provide good examples: they reveal the fashion in England for matters Turkish (seen also in the architecture of Vauxhall Gardens), as well as emerging notions of the nature of madness and of the ways in which it might be treated.