Category: Book

Vol. I xxx+532pp, Vol. II (Abbreviations and Indices) vii+119pp.
LIM, 2015. ISBN: 9788870968101. €50

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat follows is a preliminary response rather than a thorough review, let alone a comparative one of the new publication respect to the previous one. The earlier editions of Roberto Pagano’s greatest work, the culmination of 40 years of research, are already known to interested Italian and English readers. Sadly, Pagano passed away last July 13, only a few weeks before LIM issued his re-revised dual biography of Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti. Reviews, some polemical, of the 1985 and 2006 editions, can be found online, which induces me, instead of covering any of the same ground, to describe the new format and to translate some of Pagano’s prefatory remarks.

The Bibliography and the Index, both formatted in detailed tables, now occupy a separate, smaller volume, ideal for carrying to a library, or for browsing topics, works, names, events, and subjects discussed in the text or footnotes (which are on the appropriate pages of the text). Under the author’s name 17 of his publications on the Scarlattis between 1969 and 2015 are cited. Under ‘A. Scarlatti’ and ‘D. Scarlatti’ one finds five and seven pages respectively of references to works, events, historical hypotheses, motives, opinions, and important discussions in the book.

The original dual biography, Scarlatti: Alessandro e Domenico. Due vite in una  was published 1985. Twenty years later the first revision was made for the English translation by Frederick Hammond: Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti – Two Lives in One  (Pendragon Press, 2006). Thanks to Hammond, a Scarlatti scholar in his own right, English readers have access to a version updated only ten years ago. To readers of either previous edition Pagano now explicitly points out new findings or new deductions that affect his original conclusions. He also answers his critics again. New readers may be somewhat distracted by these work-in-progress ‘flashbacks’, but they are valuable, if only because so much general Scarlatti research, still in print and circulating, has turned out to be incorrect.

In 2006 Pagano still surmised, as Kirkpatrick had done, that Antonio Soler (1729-1783), who had been apprenticed with Domenico, was possibly the main scribe of the large Venice and Parma codices of Domenico’s sonatas. This hypothesis has now been modified, reluctantly, by the research (2012) of Águeda Pedrero Encabo (in favour of the copyist Joseph [José] Alaguero), though the new discussion includes convincing evidence for Soler’s involvement in supervising the copying of the two collections, and also in making copies of other sonatas, possibly realized from various types of shorthand, such as keyboard tablature or continuo notation, or indeed by dictation, while hearing them improvised or played by Domenico. This information comes from Soler’s testimony to that effect in his Llave del la Modulación, along with his reason for not writing double sharps (e.g. writing G instead of #[#]F), which he said Scarlatti did not use.

Pagano wrote the entries on both Scarlattis in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians  of 2001. After the second version of his book he wrote an article for Early Music  xxxvi/3 (2008), ‘The Two Scarlatti’, which began:

First of all I am surprised to find unnoticed an important element of my biographical hypothesis, openly announced in the title of my book: the complementarity of the human and artistic lives of the two Scarlattis. It is impossible to re-examine in detail here their parallel biographical trajectory, but the most recent discoveries make even clearer Domenico’s metamorphosis after the death of his father; the year of black-out and sickness following Alessandro’s death is highly significant and his subsequent development arose from impulses that combined emulation with a desire for identification…

Other important contributions between the middle and final versions of the biography are found in the Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, XLI, 2006/2, in Domenico Scarlatti: Musica e Stori a (Turchini Edizioni, 2010), in Studi musicali  XXXVIII/I 2009, and in Devozione e Passione: Alessandro Scarlatti nella Napoli e Roma Barocca  (Turchini Edizioni, 2014).

All the above and more is in the present posthumous edition. The twists and turns of Pagano’s Italian are extremely challenging, even to Italian readers, and a distinct pleasure at the same time. A quote from his preface (p. xiv) will give not only a taste of his style and standpoint, but of the task of a biographer as he saw it:

Forty years ago, while writing Alessandro Scarlatti’s biography, I happened to bring to light certain aspects of his personality that tarnish his halo as the saint at the head of the controversial Neapolitan School, a gallery of myths. It is always risky to swim against the current in the streams of tradition: the few remarks made about my efforts by generous and illustrious reviewers mainly concerned my suggested resizing of the image of a boss whom evidently all would have liked to continue to see as a long-bearded God-father, eternally intent at radiating benevolent influence on relatives and disciples.

When… Malcolm Boyd declared… that my judgment on the disparity between [A. Scarlatti’s] artistic merit and human weaknesses… was in contradiction with everything I had narrated about the musician, I, in turn, was thunderstruck, because I continue to believe – and this book ought to finally make it clear – that all the elements of that biography contribute to reveal the fragility of the man: a fragility rooted in that very Sicily that I am certain to know better than others, as Boyd himself was loyally to admit [in 1986] when he saw in my new book a happy combination of “scientific accuracy” and “profound knowledge of Sicilian history and culture”, judging me absolutely “without rivals” in my knowledge of the Sicilian “psyche”.

(My translation)

It goes without saying that the new edition ought to be translated into English, an enterprise which would take quite a while to realize. For now I’d recommend a compromise for English readers: have both the 2006 Frederick Hammond version and the 2015 final version, and use the fabulous new index to update the information in the former as needed. Enjoy what you can of Pagano’s interpretive dialogue with his readers, whom he invites to engage with his methods, both rigorous and imaginative.

Barbara Sachs

ed. Guido Olivieri and Marc Vanscheeuwijck
(LIM, 2015) In Italian and English.
xxviii+538pp. €50
ISBN 9788870967975

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]f the 16 papers delivered at the 7th Corelli convention held in Fusignano, ‘Arcomelo 2013’ in honour of the 300th anniversary of Corelli death, six are in English, as are all 16 abstracts. One aim of the congress was to connect musicians and musicologists, applying the latest research to questions of musical analysis and performance. The volume places the papers in five areas of study, though they can be read in any order. I decided to begin with one paper from each group, making the rounds successively, in order to let the historical, musical, technical, and documentary contributions relate to each other. The considerable size of this volume (566 pages counting the preface by Enrico Gatti and the introduction by Guido Olivieri and Marc Vanscheeuwijck) should insure its value to many readers.

Corelli and the Bolognese Instrumental Music Tradition
The opening ‘prosopograhical’ essay by Sandro Pasqual is on violinists, violins, and violin teachers in Bologna in Corelli’s time, along with the rise of music publishing houses and violin makers there. Pasqual, a cellist, historian, and economist, sets the stage for Corelli – whom his contribution doesn’t include. His aim is to show to what extent the violin created a revolution in Bologna in the mid-1600s, what activities and sectors offered work to violinists, what repertoire emerged, and therefore why one can speak of the Bolognese ‘violin school’ between 1660 and 1720. The violinists were street musicians, part-time well-trained free-lance players, professionals, and teachers of several generations of pupils. Their prestige grew in the 18th century as Bologna became the fertile centre reflected in the seminal influence of Corelli himself.

Andreas Pfisterer’s contribution Corelli and Vitali: On the Reworking of Dance Movements  compares the former’s Op. II, no. 9/1 of 1685 with the latter’s Op. 8 no. 8 Balletto Largo  of 1683. He considers Allemande  and Balletti  here as identical, and I imagine that at the Convention he must commented on the Balletti  and Allemande  in the Assisi manuscript attributed to Corelli. His analysis is enlightening, in that Corelli apparently adopted the Vitali piece as a model, but reworked it in significant, idiosyncratic ways, all illustrated well by his musical examples.

Guido Olivieri introduced Enrico Gatti’s edition of 12 ‘sonatas’ from a manuscript of 1748, I-Af MS 177, in which they are attributed to Corelli. (See the review of their edition for more about these brief suites.) At the convention, Olivieri’s longer paper Le Sonate da camera di Assisi: una nuova fonte corelliana?  investigates the plausibility of the attribution. He compares the form, harmony, cadences and melodic characteristics of these Preludi  and dances to examples from Corelli’s op. I-IV, and to works of other composers active near Bologna in the 1660s, 70s and 80s. As ‘Devil’s Advocate’ he makes hypotheses about conceivable motives for a deliberately spurious attribution, but these are not convincing; instead, as hoped, the existence of a complete set of sonatas that could have been composed by Corelli for violin and cello in the 1670s, formally dissimilar to the mature solo sonatas of Op. V, makes the case all the more interesting.

The complete Assisi manuscript is in two hands and was made in Bologna. One copyist wrote out these sonatas, as well as Corelli’s 12 sonatas of Op. 5, Albinoni’s sonata op. 2 no.10 and part of no. 6, a sonata attributed to Torelli, and the parchment cover, dated 1748. The other scribe inserted arias and minuets for trumpet. It belonged to a Franciscan lay brother in Assisi, who was praised as a cello player and bass singer, Giuseppe Maria Galli (ca. 1720-1781). He must have personally used the music; he may have been the main copyist.

Aspects of Composition and Performance
Gregory Barnett, in Tempo, Meter, and Rhythmic Notation in Sonatas of the Corellian Era, begins with three cases requiring interpretation in performance, supported by indisputably clear examples: (1) mensural proportions, which only occur marginally in music as late as Corelli’s; (2) successive meters devised so that the same pulse in one section could be indicated by different note-values in the next; and (3) verbal tempo indications altering the durations of the same note-values. It is the second case that interests me the most, because it requires the intuition of performers: infrequently if ever mentioned in writing, this occurs over and over again in vocal music (I’m thinking of Monteverdi, Purcell, Tenaglia, Steffani, and many others), enabling smooth transitions from one section to another which the other sets of early notational rules cannot define. The author also touches on the unsolved problem of Gigues. The article contains 28 musical examples, 4 tables of tempo indications (those in combinations, those projecting affects, those implying articulated bowing, and those implying sustained bowings), and a long bibliographical list of the compositions referred to.

The title of Alberto Sanna’s Between Composition and Performance: Generic Norms and Poetic Choices in The Work of Arcangelo Corelli  would have been more inviting had it referred to Corelli’s compositional priorities or the protracted debate over ‘The Affair of the Fifths’ that raged from 1685 into the early 1700s, and which still gets treated polemically today, most recently as a confrontation between the musical circles of Rome and Bologna. Even though Sanna devotes half of his paper to the disputed parallel intervals, with redundant examples and explanations of how suspensions save the fifths, he only cites one sentence of Corelli’s defensive arguments, which allegedly were long and detailed. So the impression I was left with, besides appreciation of my responsibility as a continuo player to bring out the harmonic complexity that Corelli had in mind, was that Sanna’s conclusions about how Corelli’s practical experience informed his aesthetics were too generalized to be supported by what he actually showed. His discussion of Corelli’s Allemandes ties in nicely with Pfisterer’s contribution.

Pierre-Alain Braye-Weppe, a composer and teacher of basso continuo, discusses in the most organized and well-illustrated manner the various roles and sonorities Corelli used the viola for. The Viola Part in the Concerti Op. VI  is long but quickly read, and parts tie in beautifully with Salvatore Carchiolo’s treatise-supported recommendations for passing-note contaminations of simpler harmonies. Like Sanna, Braye-Weppe attributes Corelli’s compositional bravura to his innovative ‘thinking outside the box’, as well as to his experience as a violinist and conductor. But he doesn’t just say so: the strength of this paper is the analytical grouping of musical examples.

Bass instruments and Basso Continuo Realization in Rome at the Time of Corelli
In the 17th and early 18th centuries the violin family included a variety of instruments larger than the viola. They differed in size, tuning, playing technique, and especially in nomenclature. Marc Vanscheeuwijck has reviewed the specific situation in Bowed Basses in Corelli’s Rome. Corelli used the designation violoncello del concertino  only once, in his Concerti Grossi, Op. VI, generally calling the instrument that plays the bassline – in sonatas and trios – a violone. The article adds other data to be considered, without claiming to solve the confusing regional and organological distinctions. Although the study is in English, I think Vanscheewijck assumes that we all know that the Italian diminutive suffix ‘-cello’ is not a common one. More usual ones are -ino, -etto, -cino, -ello, some of which express affection or suggest ‘cuteness’; but ‘-cello’, also a quantitative modifier, means ‘slight’. It qualifies the suffix already present in violone  (i. e. a large viola) to distinguish the various slightly smaller large violas from each other, and from the contrabbasso, before standardization, when some players could play different sizes of instruments in more than one tuning. One other thing leaves me not quite appreciative of this dilemma: why not examine the basslines themselves, their ranges, and the techniques they require, in order to conclude definitively what the violone  in question had to be?

Previously enigmatic archlute tablatures, which seemed to produce senseless or bad voice-leading, are solved by restringing the 4th, 5th and 6th stopped double courses in octaves instead of unisons. Marco Pesci in L’arciliuto e il basso continuo nella Roma di Corelli: osservazioni sull’uso di ottave e acciaccatura, thus confirms these tablature readings, which are shown to produce the type of full (and harmonically contaminated) accompaniment specifically called for in Corelli’s time. The stringing required is an older, 16th century one. Therefore the Roman 17th-century “earlier music” practitioners reinstated it in order to have three extra voices adding and resolving dissonances, thanks to three octave doublings, and also for playing higher melodies at the same time. All the examples are given in notation as well as tablature, and the article should be read together with the following ones of Salvatore Carchiolo and Giovanni Togni. It is too bad for English readers that all three of these articles are in Italian, but they do have a great number of musical examples, and their abstracts are in English.

Salvatore Carchiolo, as expected from the highest authority on Italian continuo practice as a performer and researcher, takes a group of related anonymous treatises, establishes their appropriateness to Corelli’s music by their date and Roman origin, and applies their very particular recommendations to passages from Corelli’s opera I, II, III and V. La prassi esecutiva del basso continuo al clavicembalo nella musica di Arcangelo Corelli alla luce delle ‘Regole per accompagnar sopra la parte’ della Biblioteca Corsiniana di Roma  therefore is not only detail-specific for those wanting to accompany Corelli better, but explains ‘Rules’ which are still little known, or, when known, often conflated with every other style of accompaniment. His illustrative realizations may speak for themselves, but for those who read Italian, the distinctions he draws about them are most illuminating. Harmonic contamination has its rhyme and reason, its means and place, in short… its rules.

Giovanni Togni also analyzes the various uses of extemporized and almost ubiquitous dissonances in full accompaniments of Corelli’s time – those discussed in the above study by Carchiolo and referred to as ‘false’ in the writings of Gasparini (1708), Marcello (1705), and the anonymous tract Regole per accompagnare sopra la part d’autore incerto  (circa 1700). His contribution is titled Le ‘false’ che dilettano  (The ‘inharmonic notes that delight’), a phrase from the tract, which included an illustrative arietta written and realized by the ‘uncertain’ author, showing chords with five to ten notes (some held, some released). Carchiolo applied the technique to music of Corelli. Togni instead compares these various writings, adding illustrations from still other printed pieces and manuscripts (one from 1680-90), noting differences in their usage of the terms. His examples enable him to specify where they can be employed, which is the main value of his study. His statistical analysis might raise some eyebrows (e. g. 16 acciaccature  in 89 bars of a set of Passagagli, or 5.8%, versus 51.66% in the first 23 bars of the anonymous arietta), but he admits that this serves to measure the huge discrepancy between actual pieces and theoretical examples, which ought to warn us not to overdo techniques recommended for wherever appropriate, not for wherever possible.

History Context Documents
The title of Teresa Chirico’s ‘Et iusti intrabunt in eam’. Committenza ottoboniana, macchine e musiche per la festa delle Quaranta ore (1690–1713)  is a challenge, but in fact the study is concretely descriptive of the theatrical machinery, the elaborate staging and the exact musical forces used in the Church (of San Lorenzo in Damaso) in Cardinal Ottoboni’s residence for an annual marathon of solemn celebrations in the presence of the pope. Corelli’s contribution (composing, directing and playing) was essential, and after his death this so-called Roman ‘Carnival’ continued until 1740 in a reduced form.

More than 30 of the 49 documents that constitute the second and main part of Luca Della Libera’s Nuove fonti corelliane: il Fondo Bolognetti nell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano e i documenti nell’Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu  contain references to Corelli’s work as a performer or conductor in Rome. They are single journalistic paragraphs from 1691-1703 describing occasions, the music performed, by whom; or lists of payments from 1676 to 1692 for sacred music performed in Sant’Andrea al Quirinale (renovated by Bernini with funds from G. B. Pamphilj). Musicians are named (e.g. Carlo Mannelli, Bernardo Pasquini), or listed by first name and function or provenance (e. g. Violino Archangelo; Perugino della Chiesa Nuova) or by surname (e. g. Organista De Sanctis), or function (e. g. Alza mantici or Bellows pumpers). The journal entries are selected from over 200 published by Della Libera and J. M. Domínguez in 2012. The payment lists from the Bolognetti family and Ottoboni court are published here for the first time, and in their entirety.

Constance Frei I tipografi romani e bolognesi di Corelli. Stampa e ristampa. In the 17th century Corelli’s works were printed by various typographers. In Rome, Op. I and II by G. A. Mutij, Op. II and IV by G. G. Komarek, and Op. V by G. Pietrasanta. All these were reissued in Bologna numerous times during the composer’s lifetime by the printing houses of G. and P. M. Monti and M. Silvani. This essay asks whether these prints and reprints were identical, whether movable-type prints could reproduce the complex bowings, articulations and innovative ideas of the composer, or rather what limitations movable type imposed, and what was the relationship of the typographers to the musical text. It compares the Roman and Bolognese editions, underlines aspects of Corelli’s style, defines the characteristics of each typographer, and enables players to better interpret the passage-work as presented by these prints. Appreciating the decisions the printers made is actually fundamental to reading printed music, and even the small number of examples given to support her answers will perhaps generate other questions in interested readers. I would like to ask her why groups of four semiquavers were so rarely spatially separated, and which printing houses had, or didn’t have, demisemiquaver characters.

Agnese Pavanello, in her study Corelli ‘inedito’: composizioni dubbie o senza numero d’opera. Percorsi tra fonti, attribuzioni e fortuna della trasmissione, while acknowledging with appreciation the immense cataloguing work of H. J. Marx, a pioneer of Corelli studies, shows how the works without opus numbers (WoO #) and the works catalogued as dubious or even spurious (indicated Anh. #), were not so deemed according to sufficiently clear criteria. Many of the latter are now turning out to be good attributions, and this involves over a hundred ‘dubious’ violin sonatas, and other works. Therefore her study underlines how important the situation is. A very large number of so-called dubious works are from English sources: Anh. 16–18 from the 1680s contain Op. I, II and III and WoO5. James II married Maria Beatrice d’Este, and Christina of Sweden used her influence in Rome to sustain the Catholic king of England, organizing large spectacles led by, played by, or composed by Corelli. This was but one channel for the spread of Roman music (not only Corelli’s). It is an example of how dating, transmission and style must all be considered, as well as concordances with other sources, an example of which ties in with the article by Guido Olivieri. And perhaps some of the dubious works, which we have thanks to the foreign channel of diffusion, simply did not enjoy the ultimate care that Corelli devoted to his published works (especially Anh. 62–64). This study is, by the way, a good read, even though and indeed because (!) it points out what a staggering amount of research remains to be done on Corelli as a composer.

Influences
Lowell Lindgren’s ‘Fugga, Fugga, or the Italian Rant’, which Supplied Corelli, Cosimi and Haym with ‘the Sense of Sound’  does well to show that Corelli’s pupils, in their flight from the Roman musical scene after the pope closed opera houses and banned secular music in 1697, carried away to England the excited, passionate, eloquent, even ranting (really?) style of their master in their performances and compositions. But the knot of cross-references Lindgren tries to knit, identifying Corelli’s ‘Non udite lo parlare?’ (Do you not hear speaking?) or R. Frost’s ‘the sound of sense’ (sic) with the joyful-wistful Renaissance tune called ‘The Italian Rant’ by Playford (1652) – a traditional melody that reappears in many guises (he mentions Smetana’s The Moldau, which in turn summons up HaTikvah) – only takes away from the evident influence of Corelli’s music on Geminian, Nicola Cosimi and Nicola Haym. It is hard not to lose the tenuous thread, but various movements of Cosimi and Haym, which Lindgren considers ‘rants’, are described in detail.

No need to fear for the robust mental health of Veracini from the complicated title of the paper by Antonella D’Ovidio, Corelli e «l’angoscia dell’influenza»: declinazioni corelliane nelle sonate di Francesco Maria Veracini. The subject is influence, one which was profoundly retrospective, innovative, voluntary and hardly anguished. This is a very observant and useful account of Veracini’s lifelong, conscious debt to Corelli, not to mention his passionate aesthetics of music. D’Ovidio compares Veracini’s three collections of violin sonatas, 1716, 1721, 1744, quotes from his preface to Op. 2 (1744) and his treatise Il trionfo della pratica musicale  (1760), and underlines the importance of his Dissertazioni sopra l’opera quinta di Corelli  in which, at the end of his life, he rewrote Corelli’s Op. V in his new style, which was not at all the one in fashion, as he extended their contrapuntal potential and the role of both the solo violin and the basso continuo, making the sonatas closer to concertos.

Barbara Sachs

The Boydell Press, 2015. xvii + 515pp, £30.00.
ISBN: 9781783270613.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] wasn’t too impressed at the start of this volume, but it grew on me. I started making notes, but realised that I couldn’t write in any great detail, and anyway it wasn’t easy to make notes while reading on a ship in the Caribbean. Each chapter has an individual subject, which includes a large amount of information that is not just checking all the details of what is known about Handel or how he fitted into England. Handel’s position there was very much of the upper circle: he was attached to royalty (who paid him £200 a year) before he was famous. He had written a few operas and also spent some time with James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, producing 11 anthems before 1720 and two works not called oratorios – Acis & Galatea  and Esther. His first London opera was Rinaldo, though it isn’t as important as most Handelians have thought: much of it is adapted from previous sources, but Agrippina  (1706 perhaps) is a more impressive opera in a very different style. He was strongly involved in the Academy planned in 1719 with the first performance of Radamisto  in 1720. For 21 years, he maintained his activity in the theatre, though his financial “success” was dubious. The clientele was a small element of the top members of society. In the early 1720s, however, Handel had significant respect, and Orlando  and Alcina  of the mid 1730s are now particularly popular – at least, to my taste!

His health deteriorated in the latter part of the 1730s. There are various reasons, one being his excess of food and drink, the other the ubiquitous danger of lead, whether drinking water or wine. Whatever his earlier health (which probably wasn’t particularly good), in 1737 he was struck by saturnine gout, and used spas at Tunbridge Wells and Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen); he also suffered with a palsy in Dublin in 1741-42. His final weakness was blindness, one eye being weak in 1751 and lost in 1752; the other eye failing (or ruined by his oculist) in 1758.

Handel probably didn’t have much of a different clientele for the oratorios. Finances were low, since he only performed in Lent. However, from 1723 till his death he received £600 per annum. (He wasn’t renowned for spending more than the normal fees for performers, but the charity for the Foundling Hospital Messiah  from 1754 was not connected with Handel.) He had invested finances abroad, and, despite problems, on his death he left aroud £20,000. Hunter assumed that Handel held responsibility for slavery in 1720, but I wonder whether he just offered money for income without considering whether slavery was mentioned when experts laid out a good scheme –more information is needed.

I wasn’t too happy about Chapter 1 –The Audience: Three Broad Categories, Three Gross Errors. The rest are mostly fine, though some are longer than necessary:

2. The Audience: Partner and Problem

3. Musicians and Other Occupational Hazards

4. Patrons and Pensions

5. Musical Genres and Compositional Practices

6. Self and Health

7. Self and Friends

8. Nations and Stories

9. Biographers’ Stories

Conclusion

Here are just a few comments:

• Hunter hasn’t realised (pp. 215-6) that The Ways of Zion do Mourn  (subsequently Act I of Israel in Egypt) isn’t just taken direct from Handl/Gallus, published in the 1580s. In fact, Ecce quam modo  was familiar in Germany, and no doubt elsewhere, for funerals. Queen Caroline was German but came to London at almost the same time as Handel. The funeral was in Westminster Abbey on 17 December 1737 with a large number of performers (around 130) but not for the public. It is rarely performed, but there was an excellent day’s rehearsal and run-through in Cambridge in October last year, with Peter Holman at his best.
• Hunter concentrates on the public rehearsal at the pleasure gardens of the Music for the Royal Fireworks  at Vauxhall. All the relevant numbers are exaggerations, including the travel from north of the Thames. Incidentally, there’s a nice story of John Byrom, who was sitting under one of the trees on St James’s Park on the night of the Fireworks, writing a letter to his wife. He saw the fireworks, but didn’t mention the music. He was also the writer of Christians, awake, salute the happy morn…
• A more general point is that the oratorios from the 1730s are based on the Old Testament, except for two exceptions. Handel took Theodora, a Christian martyr, from around 304 AD, based on a more recent source that was borrowed from what we would now call a historical novel. It has become popular over the last few decades, and is sometimes staged. The other is Messiah, which is mostly Old Testament but has a few direct quotes from the New and is unlike any normal oratorios.

I leave it to the readers to judge the book for themselves though £30 is certainly very good value for so substantial a book!

Clifford Bartlett