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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1981
When we study the rise of the Handelian tradition in eighteenth-century England, we are studying the early history of musical classicism. Here the term ‘classicism’ does not refer to musical style, to the classical style, but rather to a performing repertory of music from the past which is valued as a set of masterpieces, as models for judgment of new works. Before this time musical life had had no classicism of the kind found in literature or the plastic arts. Even if the names of a few composers were passed on as great men, their music was performed only in exceptional circumstances. Rarely did Italian operas appear after the death of the composer; most did not even last ten years. Handel was the first composer a large body of whose works were performed continuously after his death. Most significant of all, his name was the first to be enshrined in the highest reaches of the modern musical Pantheon, to be linked to those of Haydn, Mozart and Beedioven. That such composers as Pergolesi or Corelli also enjoyed English performances after their death for a few of their works, shows how a broad movement toward historical repertory began in the eighteenth century. Handel's music did not persist alone; it was part of a new musical order.
1 The principal works on the early Handelian tradition include: Robert M. Myers, Handel's Messiah, A Touchstone of Taste (New York, 1948) and Handel, Dryden and Milton (London, 1956); Winton Dean, The Oratorio and English Taste', Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London, 1959); Percy M. Young, ‘Die Händel-Pflege in den Englischen Provinzen’, Händel-Jahrbuch, iii (1960), 31–50; and Michael F. Robinson, ‘The Decline of British Music’, Studi Musicali, vii (1978), 269–84.Google Scholar
2 Among my publications, see ‘Learned and General Musical Taste in Eighteenth-Century France’, Past and Present, no. 89 (1980), 58–85; ‘The Contemporaneity of Eighteenth-Century Musical Taste’, forthcoming in The Musical Quarterly, ‘La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien Regime’, forthcoming in the Journal of Modern History. See also Percy Lovell, ‘“Ancient” Music in Eighteenth-Century England’, Music & Letters, be (1979), 401–15; and Lawrence Lipking, Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Christoph Wolff, Der Stile Antico in der Musik J.S. Bachs (Wiesbaden, 1968); Karl Gustav Fellerer, Das Palestrinastil and seine Bedeutung in der vokalen Kirchenmusik des 18. Jh. (Augsburg, 1929); Thomas Day, ‘Echoes of Palestrina's Missa ad fugam in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xxiv (1971), 462–69.Google Scholar
4 Three Treatises on Art, Music, Printing and Poetry (London, 3rd edn., 1772), 68–9.Google Scholar
5 Ibid., 67n., 99n.Google Scholar
6 Myers, Handel, Dryden and Milton, passim.Google Scholar
7 Dean, 326.Google Scholar
8 Lovell, 401–03.Google Scholar
9 Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Handel: A Documentary Biography (London, 1955), 851.Google Scholar
10 Myers, op.cit., 47, 131.Google Scholar
11 Hawkins collected information through correspondence in much the same manner as writers on natural history did for their own. See Noblett, William, ‘Pennant and his Publisher’, forthcoming in Archives in Natural History.Google Scholar
12 On the dominance of musical aesthetics by literary considerations, see Snyders, Georges, Le goút musical en France aux XVIIIe et XVIIIe siécles (Paris, 1968).Google Scholar
13 ‘Mainwaring's Handel: Its Relation to English Aesthetics’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xvii (1964), 170–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 Ibid., 178. I owe to Dr. Colin Timms the observation that mention of Pepusch as still alive in the biography of Steffani (p. v) makes that work earlier than the Mainwaring.Google Scholar
15 [William Coxe], Literary Life and Select Works of Benjamin Stillingfleet, 2 vols. (London, 1811), i, 151–53, 205–07, ii, 172–73. Similar influence of Longinus in the idea of Genius appears in John Potter's Observations on the Present State of Music and Musicians (London, 1762), 31n.Google Scholar
16 The Critical Review, ix (1750), 306–08.Google Scholar
17 The English Review, ii (1784), Part iv, 142.Google Scholar
18 pp. 2–3.Google Scholar
19 p. 25.Google Scholar
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21 Ibid., i, 16.Google Scholar
22 Ibid., i, 706.Google Scholar
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24 Ibid., i, xxiii.Google Scholar
25 Ibid., ii, 914.Google Scholar
26 An Account of the Institution and Progress of the Academy of Ancient Music (London, 1770), 13.Google Scholar
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29 H. Diack Johnstone, ‘The Genesis of Boyce's “Cathedral Music'”, Music & Letters, lvi (1975), 26–40; Thomas Day, ‘A Renaissance Revival in Eighteenth-Century England’, Musical Quarterly, lvii (1971), 575–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30 Edward Turnbull, ‘Thomas Tudway and the Harleian Collection’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, viii (1955), 203–07.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
31 pp. 403–07.Google Scholar
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35 Samuel Arnold, Cathedral Music, (London, 1790), 5.Google Scholar
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37 Deutsch, 352. On the rivalry see Johnstone, H. D., The Life and Work of Maurice Greene (diss., Univ. of Oxford, 1967), 187–93.Google Scholar
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44 Motets, Madrigals and Other Pieces Performed at the Academy of Ancient Music, individual programmes between 1733–1791, Leeds Public Library. I am indebted to Dr. Johnstone and to Mr. Christopher Hogwood for access to other wordbooks.Google Scholar
45 Memorandum, 26 May 1731, Minute Books, British Library.Google Scholar
46 Words of Music Performed at the Concert of Ancient Music, 1779–1800. In the absence of wordbooks from 1776 to 1778, I have reconstructed programmes for those seasons from ‘Concert of Ancient Vocal and Instrumental Music with a Catalogue of the Several Pieces Performed since its Institution’ [1792], British Library. The listings are not, however, complete.Google Scholar
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50 On the claret, see Papers of the Catch Club, Minute Books, 23 May 1767, 11 May 1779; on the repertory, see Minute Books and Burney, ii, 106, 1022.Google Scholar
51 Minute Books, 31 January 1763; Attendance Books, 1761–91. At least three other people were on both lists: Thomas Bever, Offield Bowes and Lady Cornwall. The Earl of Exeter subscribed to the Boyce edition as well.Google Scholar
52 Hawkins, Central History, ii, 676; The World, 28 January '753, cited in Deutsch, 744.Google Scholar
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54 ‘Ancient Music’, cited in A Catalogue of Political and Personal Satins Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols., ed. M. Dorothy George (London. 1870–1954), vi, 414–15. See also ‘Catch Singers’ featuring Lord Sandwich, ibid., v, 226. For discussion of political themes in Handel's career, see Lang, PaulHenry, George Frederic Handel (New York, 1966), 464–5, 483, 540–1.Google Scholar
55 The Hibernian Magazine. February 1782, 93. See also William Jackson, Observation on the Present State of Music in London. (London, 2nd edn., 1791), 26–8.Google Scholar
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