Winter Offering 2015

Ten Sessions beginning on January 28/29

Handel in Italy: The Road to Agrippina

Handel

“To Handel, I bend the knee,” Beethoven is supposed to have said.  What prompted Beethoven’s unusual gesture of respect was Handel’s prowess as a composer of vocal music, both solo and choral.  Where did Handel learn to write for the voice?  In Italy, of course!  This Opera con Brio survey, an expansion of an OCB mini-course offered ten years ago, makes a thorough examination of Handel’s three-year stay in Italy early in his career (from 1707-1710). That became, In the words of Handel scholar Winton Dean, “a virtual self-taught master class in vocal composition.” The course concludes with one of Handel’s greatest triumphs ever, the opera Agrippina, which also represents a true summary of Handel’s three years of extraordinary artistic growth.  This brilliant score will be a highlight of both the Boston Baroque 2014-15 season in late April and of the 2015 Göttingen Handel Festival the following month, to which there will be an option for an Opera con Brio tour.

Although this seminal period contains two large oratorios, two operas, and a few Latin motets, the bulk of Handel’s output was more than one hundred secular cantatas – miniature operatic scenes which became not only Handel’s “school” for vocal composition, but which are regarded by many as the jewels of his entire vocal output.  In Handel’s hands, these cantatas ranged from a single aria with solo continuo to such large-scale dramatic works as Apollo and Daphne and Aci, Galatea e Polifemo with full orchestral accompaniment.  Not only did Handel forge his operatic style with these daring and beautiful works, but also they became, literally, a grab bag he would dip into his entire life for later compositions, beginning with Agrippina, many of whose fifty-two some arias had their birth in these earlier cantatas.

States Winton Dean:

Handel arrived in Italy [at age 21] a gifted but crude composer with an uncertain command of form, and left it [at age 24] a polished and fully equipped artist. The most important lesson he learned there, chiefly from the operas and cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti, was the command of a rich, free and varied melodic style, long breathed but rhythmically flexible, which distinguished all his later music. With it he won an absolute mastery of the technique of writing for the voice.

Hear for yourself. You’ll agree with Beethoven: “To Handel, I bend the knee.”