engleski

Handel as Outsider in the World of Opera Seria in London. Attempts at a Comparison with a Special Emphasis on Duets and Ensembles

When he compared Handel’s opera arias with those by his older and younger Italian contemporaries in his Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin pointed out “the somewhat paradoxical relationship of this great outsider to the tradition on which he fed”. For it is “Handel who, for many modern historians and the small modern audience that still relished revivals of opera seria, displays the genre at its best, owing to the balancing and tangling of musical and dramatic values just described”. Indeed, from the point of view of performance practice Handel’s work has become almost synonymous with the genre of 18th- century “serious” opera. Given the fact that Handel’s contribution to opera seria is neither typical nor representative of his time, this study aims to examine Handel as an “outsider” in the context of the performance of Italian opera in London. Since being “imported” to the British capital in 1706 this tradition underwent considerable intercultural transformations, so that the context for comparison will be narrowed down to the parallel performance of operatic works by Italian composers alongside Handel’s in the first three decades of the 18th century. Instead of arias, emphasis will be placed on duets and ensembles as less common and seemingly more standardised structural elements with the aim to see to which extent the following statement by Taruskin holds ground: “Handel’s work is indeed more craftsmanly and structurally complex than that of his actual Italian contemporaries, who were much concerned with streamlining and simplifying those very aspects of motivic structure and harmony that Handel continued to revel in.”

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