Fall 2013 Offering:

(Twelve weeks beginning on September 11/12)

Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios

Handel

Handel’s dramatic oratorios, virtually all of which have been staged as operas, rank among the masterpieces of music drama. In them, states Handel scholar Winton Dean, “Handel solved the problem that baffled him in opera seria: the creation of an organic form satisfying the strictest musical and dramatic canons.”  This course will thus show how Handel carried into the oratorio many structural devices from opera.  Freed from opera’s rigid conventions and from the expense of scenery and costumes as well as from the dependence on costly virtuoso singers, he created a dramatic synthesis representing – in its spiritual themes, its treatment of the chorus, and its combination of elements from music, drama, ritual, spectacle, and dance – a striking parallel with the tragedy of the Greeks as well as a viable operatic ideal.

While more grand in scale than his operas, their essence is still, in Winton Dean’s words, “the dramatic conflict enacted by individuals to whom Handel extended the profound sympathy for every human weakness that informs his operas....In them he celebrates to the last the precarious joys and sorrows of humanity.”

Among the works to be included are:  Ahtalia, Saul, Israel in Egypt, Samson, Semele, Judas Maccabaeus, Solomon, Susanna, and Theodora.

Come share the glory of Handel’s dramatic oratorios!