Handel's first oratorios Il trionfo del Tempo and La Resurrezione were produced at Rome in 1707 and 1708, respectively, under circumstances of private patronage, and the domestic records of his patrons Cardinal Pamphili and Marquis Ruspoli provide some clues about practical details of the performances. Pamphili's accounts include a payment for copying the performing material for Il trionfo – four part-books for the vocal soloists, and parts for a substantial chamber orchestra of strings and oboes. The copying account, dated 14 May 1707, gives us our only documentary evidence for the period of the oratorio's composition, but it tells us neither the exact date nor the place of the performance, which had presumably taken place in Pamphili's Roman palace at some time during the preceding couple of months. For La Resurrezione, Ruspoli's accounts provide rather fuller information, including a complete list of the orchestral performers employed (which does not exactly match the resources required in Handel's score). There were two performances, and the larger scale of the enterprise is indicated by the fact that 1500 copies of the libretto were printed: although the performance may have been a private one in Ruspoli's Bonelli Palace, it was hardly a chamber-scale event.

Handel's operas belong to a tradition, based on virtuoso singers (many of them castratos) and the almost exclusive dominance of the da capo aria, that has not only been totally lost but, since it differed radically from later developments in operatic genres, was for long universally condemned as naive, primitive and beyond hope of revival. Although the operas were acknowledged to be full of beautiful music, until very recently anyone who claimed that they qualified Handel as not merely an inventor of marvellous tunes but one of the greatest of dramatic composers would have been dismissed as a crank. To justify such a claim it is necessary to demonstrate the dramatic as well as the musical potency of the operas, and to show that the two components amount to something more than the sum of the parts. Great opera is great theatre, but recognisable as such only if both the musical and the stage performance attain the highest standard.

Although the tradition of performance was lost, it is not beyond recovery. On the musical side recent years have seen much progress, thanks to the movement for reviving early music in a form approximating as closely as possible to the manner of its original performance (the term ‘authenticity’ begs too many questions). It is the theatrical side that lags behind. From writers of the period and the research of modern scholars, backed up by the evidence of librettos and scores, we know a great deal about the theatres in which Handel's operas were performed and how they operated, about the scenery and costumes, about stage movement and the style of acting and singing.

The term ‘chamber music’ is normally understood today as referring to music for two or more instruments with a single player to each part. Anyone invited to a concert of chamber music might expect to hear works for string quartet, wind ensemble, violin and piano and so on. If the programme turned out to consist entirely, or even largely, of vocal pieces the modern concert-goer might well feel let down in his or her expectations.

This would not have been the case in Handel's lifetime. Chamber music (musica da camera) would then have been understood as including those genres, vocal as well as instrumental, which were not encompassed by church music (musica da chiesa) or theatre music (musica da teatro). The identification of ‘chamber music’ with works for small instrumental ensembles (or with the ensembles themselves) is the product of a later age, when the string quartet and allied genres (as well as the ensembles that performed them) assumed a leading role in domestic music-making and, to a considerable extent, in public concert-giving. One result of this has been that the sonatas and other instrumental works of Handel and his contemporaries have in modern times been not only heard, but also studied and discussed, separately from the vocal genres with which in the eighteenth century they would have shared a platform – and this despite the fact that the two principal vocal genres are frequently referred to specifically as the chamber cantata and the chamber duet. The present chapter will focus on some of the structural and textural features that the instrumental and vocal chamber works of Handel have in common.

None of Handel's English writers could be described as professional librettists in the sense of making their living by writing librettos, though all of them except the wealthy Charles Jennens (1700–73) had to earn their livings. It is not certain whether oratorio libretto-writing was a money-earning activity; we do not know if librettists shared in composers' benefit nights, or if there was a royalty arrangement on the sale of wordbooks. As with other forms of writing, there could be an expectation of financial return from a dedication. Thomas Morell (1703–84) dedicated his first libretto, Judas Maccabaeus, to the Duke of Cumberland, ‘as a compliment … upon his returning victorious from [quelling the Rebellion in] Scotland’, and was rewarded with ‘a handsome present’. Some phrases of Handel's suggest that he may usually have paid his English librettists. Having received the second instalment of the libretto of Belshazzar he writes to the author, Charles Jennens: ‘I profess my Self highly obliged to You, for so generous a Present’, and once the final instalment has arrived, he reiterates his ‘grateful acknowledgments for your generous favours’, which implies gratitude for something not only estimable but not ordinarily given. But libretto-writing was only one intermittent activity among many others for Handel's English collaborators; none was as fully engaged in this occupation as, for example, Paolo Rolli was with Italian opera librettos. Only John Gay (1685–1732) and Samuel Humphreys (c. 1698–1738), the earliest collaborators, were writers to the exclusion of other occupations.

There is plenty of evidence that Handel was a good linguist. According to one eighteenth-century account he

Ferdinando de'Medici, in a letter of recommendation to Carl Philipp von Neuburg in Innsbruck in 1709, wrote that among Handel's many talents was a ‘gran pratica delle lingue’ (an ‘excellent knowledge of languages’). As well as his native German (and some Latin learnt at school), he had a good command of French, a necessary skill in those days for all educated Germans, whose own tongue was in some circles considered unsuitable for formal discourse. He wrote French stylishly in letters to his compatriots such as Telemann, Mattheson and his own brother-in-law in Halle; in addressing the latter as ‘Monsieur mon très Honoré Frère’ he was following the same cultural tradition as his fellow German King George II of England, who, as his wife Caroline lay dying and urged him to marry again, uttered the immortal words ‘Non, non, j'aurai des maîtresses’; and, according to Mainwaring, when Cuzzoni grew temperamental about singing an aria in Ottone, it was in French that Handel threatened to throw her out of the window.

Studies of Handel's compositions have in general understandably stressed his use of and sensitivity to the human voice: studies of his orchestral works have, also understandably, dwelt on the Concerti Grossi and other purely instrumental works. Yet the orchestra was the underpinning for the vast majority of his compositions – for all of the operas and oratorios, for example, which are the heart of his output. It was the working musical ensemble at the core of Handel's career, but apparently he did not consider it a viable separate concert ‘instrument’: in his own performances, the orchestra was merely a part of a larger entertainment, featured at times, but never self-sufficient.

We know almost nothing about the orchestra at Hamburg's Theater am Gänsemarkt, where Handel's first surviving major work involving orchestra was performed. Johann Mattheson, Handel's mentor and friend in Hamburg, tells us only that the orchestra used just one harpsichord, and that he (Mattheson) favoured orchestral direction from the keyboard. Almira (HWV 1, 1705), the only surviving Handel score from this period, uses an orchestra of two upper wind parts (mainly oboes, occasionally recorders), one bassoon part, three trumpets, timpani, and strings (up to three violin parts, one viola part and basso continuo). It is not known how many string and woodwind players performed each part, or how many other realising continuo instruments were present. Even further from view is knowledge of the workings of the orchestra in terms of the division of continuo labour, or the extent to which the full string section may have been reduced occasionally to concertino players.

When George Frideric Handel touched English shores late in the year 1710, he arrived in a country that was in an alarming condition of social change and political turmoil. The composer immediately thrust himself into London's public life on its highest levels. He acted in a diplomatic as well as a musical capacity upon arriving there, emerged as the leading figure in one of the key cultural activities of the upper classes, and in so doing participated directly in the fast-moving changes that were taking place in English life.

What was going on in British politics at the turn of the eighteenth century was novel and forward-looking, but very dangerous. Britain was the first Western nation in which political dispute became public, uncensored, and driven by parties. Despite the triumph of Parliament over the Crown in 1688–89, the country remained deeply divided constitutionally, threatened by the prospect of a new civil war, and shaken by openended ideological conflict which was publicly promoted in uncontrolled pamphleteering. If anything, people from other countries saw the English as the wild men of Europe. But in many respects the political activities that began in this period marked the start of modern, ideologically defined political parties. While we must be careful not to cast this history in the terms of mid-Victorian Peelites and Conservatives, a new political order was being established in England at the turn of the eighteenth century.

In seventeenth-century Italy the term ‘oratorio’ was applied to certain vocal musical works having characteristics in common but often quite different in scale and style. The fact that the word did not appear in the title of a work did not necessarily debar it from being considered a member of the genre. Almost any vocal work having a non-liturgical religious text, written for more than one singer and of greater extent than a single aria or chorus, could be considered an oratorio. Since the form was largely confined to Catholic Italy, the texts were invariably in Italian or Latin, and generally there was an implication that the work was dramatic – that is, the singers, at least when performing solo, represented named characters, whether historical, mythical, supernatural or allegorical. The text might include narration, sung either by a single voice or shared among a number of singers, thus setting the work at a distance from pure theatrical drama, while by no means precluding highly personalised emotion. The best-known example of an oratorio of the mid-seventeenth century, Giacomo Carissimi's Historia de Jepthes, has several narrative solos, but the main characters of Jephtha and his daughter are impersonated consistently by a tenor and a soprano, and the Israelites by the chorus. Their music is powerfully expressive, and clearly designed to involve the listener in the events of the tragic story and its effects on the participants.

Handel first came to London in his capacity as an opera composer, and that remained his primary occupation for more than twenty-five years. Consequently the ‘theatre system’ in London had a profound effect on the conditions in which he worked. The fledgeling opera company was far from stable when he arrived in 1710 and underwent several major revolutions in the course of Handel's life: confusing as these are, one must try to make sense of them if one is to understand Handel's often stormy career in the theatre.

London was (in theatrical terms) quite different from any other European city of its time. The multiple theatres that had flourished in Shakespeare's day had been abolished by the Puritans in 1642, and after Charles II was restored in 1660 he granted a pair of perpetual patents, creating a monopoly for two favoured courtiers. Neither Charles nor any of his successors could afford to create a court theatre or to patronise the arts on a lavish scale comparable to the promotion of masques by James I and Charles I before 1642. The London theatres were commercial enterprises dependent on daily ticket sales. The patent grants of the 1660s limited London to just two active theatre companies for more than fifty years: opera (or semi-opera, to be precise) was presented occasionally by the resident companies as part of their regular repertories. When Handel arrived, the patent theatres were Drury Lane (opened in 1674) and the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket (opened in 1705).

When Handel arrived in London in the last weeks of 1710, Henry Purcell had been dead for just fifteen years. His younger brother Daniel, though still active as a professional organist, was no longer a productive composer, and much the same is true of the long-lived William Turner (1651–1740), who, with John Blow (d. 1708), had been the most distinguished of Purcell's colleagues and contemporaries in the Chapel Royal. Likewise John Eccles, the leading English theatrical composer at the turn of the century, and official court composer from 1700 until his death in 1735, had by this time retired from the hurly-burly of life in the city and gone to live in Hampton Wick where, according to Hawkins, he spent most of his time fishing. As for Jeremiah Clarke, one of the more impressive creative talents of the next generation, he had, seemingly for love, put a pistol to his head in late November 1707. Of those native composers still left and active on the London musical scene, much the most gifted were John Weldon (1676–1736) and William Croft (1678–1727), both of whom Handel must surely have encountered quite early on in his first visit.

A former organist of New College, Oxford, Weldon moved in 1701 to London where, as a rank outsider, he immediately succeeded in winning first prize (over the heads of both Eccles and Daniel Purcell, who came second and third respectively) in a celebrated competition for a setting of Congreve's masque The Judgment of Paris. In 1708 he succeeded Blow as one of the two organists of the Chapel Royal, and not long after he was also appointed second composer for the Chapel, at which point he seems more or less to have dried up.

For the sheer number of issues that it raises and potentially illuminates, the investigation of Handel's compositional process constitutes a particularly bountiful field of inquiry. It has yielded new insights into Handel's concept of musical style and structure, his approach to text and drama, and his interactions with singers and librettists. As a result of recent studies we can identify many of Handel's creative tendencies: his attempts upon revision to mitigate thematic garrulousness and to achieve a continuous musical surface, his use of ‘cut and paste’ techniques akin to eighteenth-century ars combinatoria, his concern with musical imagery and drama and with the roles of specific singers in the creation of the operas and oratorios. Yet more remains unknown than known about Handel's compositional process, and even the most basic of received views must sometimes be questioned.

Such is the case with one of the traditional models for Handel's compositional procedures, invoked whenever the genesis of a work must be described, which is generally stated roughly as follows: ‘Handel began composing by writing down a skeleton score, drafting the principal melodic lines and bass for arias and choruses (the lines for accompanying instrumental parts were left blank), and writing the recitative texts between the set pieces. At a later stage, he went back and “filled up” the score, providing music for the recitatives and writing out the orchestral parts.’

Handel is remembered above all as a great composer for the human voice, the creator of operas, cantatas, anthems and oratorios; but in his lifetime he was also renowned as a brilliant keyboard player. As well as displaying his gift for improvisation, for which he was particular admired, he composed some superb music for keyboard instruments. The organ concertos of his later years were written for public performance, but his harpsichord music was no doubt composed for his own pleasure, the enjoyment of his friends and the instruction of his pupils; most of it was written by the time he was thirty-five, and was concentrated into two comparatively brief periods of his life.

The first of these periods covers his earliest years up to 1706, which is not surprising when we consider that the training he received as a boy in Halle from the excellent Zachow laid considerable emphasis on music for keyboard instruments. Zachow's world was that of the seventeenthcentury German Protestant organist, whose art was based on the solemn counterpoint of the Lutheran chorale, on the well-wrought fugue, the church cantata, and sets of variations on choral tunes, with some light relief in suites and chaconnes in the French style. Earlier in the century French composers had developed a true harpsichord idiom distinct from that of the organ, involving among other techniques the style brisé accompaniments used by lutenists; but although their influence on German keyboard music after 1650 was considerable, initially conveyed through the works of Froberger, the distinction between the textures and figurations appropriate for the harpsichord and those for the organ was hardly observed in Germany.

During the fifty years preceding Handel's half-century in London, Italian music gradually eclipsed the French, which had enjoyed much favour after Charles II returned from France in 1660. Purcell had abetted this change in taste, for he had ‘faithfully endeavour'd a just imitation of the most fam'd Italian Masters; principally, to bring the seriousness and gravity of that sort of Musick into vogue, and reputation among our Country-men, whose humor, 'tis time now, should begin to loath the levity, and balladry of our neighbours’. Italian music had overwhelmed the English as well as the French by 1714, when John Macky noted that the decade-old theatre ‘for Opera's at the End of the Pall-Mall, or Hay-Market, is the finest I ever saw, and where we are entertained in Italian Musick generally twice a Week … The English affect more the Italian than the French Musick; and their own Compositions are between the Gravity of the first, and the Levity of the other … They have now a good many very Eminent Masters; but the Taste of the Town being at this Day all Italian, it is a great discouragement to them’. This was true for instrumental as well as vocal genres. When reflecting upon the ‘circumstances which concurred to convert the English Musick intirely over from the French to the Italian taste’, Roger North (c. 1650–1734) found the decisive step to be the arrival of Corelli's sonatas and concertos, which ‘cleared the ground of all other sorts of musick whatsoever’ and ‘are to the musitians like the bread of life’.

Handel was involved in the composition of sacred music throughout his career, although it was rarely the focal point of his activities. Only during the brief period in 1702–3 when he was organist for the Cathedral in Halle did he hold a church job which required regular weekly duties and, since the cathedral congregation was Calvinist, these duties did not include composing much (if any) concerted music. Virtually all of his sacred music was written for specific events and liturgies, and the choice of Handel to compose these works was dictated by his connections with specific patrons. Handel's sacred music falls into groups of works which were written for similar forces and occasions, and will be discussed in terms of those groups in this chapter.

During his period of study with Zachow in Halle Handel must have written some music for services at the Marktkirche or the Cathedral, but no examples survive. His earliest extant work is the F major setting of Psalm 113, Laudate pueri (HWV 236), for solo soprano and strings. The autograph is on a type of paper that was available in Hamburg, and he may have written it there in late 1706 to take with him to Italy; alternatively, he may have written it at Rome early in 1707 on paper brought with him from Hamburg. The jagged vocal lines for the solo soprano are typical of his early style and may be related to Mattheson's comment that Handel knew a great deal about fugue and counterpoint but ‘very little about melody’ in this period.