Handel: Acis And Galatea

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Cat No: 8553188

Release Date: 12 January 1999

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 730099418829

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: HANDEL

Description
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) Acis and Galatea, HWV 49b There is an element of paradox about the career of George Frideric Handel. Born in Hallé in 1685, the son of a distinguished and elderly barber-surgeon by his second wife, he gave up other studies in order to become a musician, working first in Hamburg at the opera, as composer and harpsichordist. From there he moved to the source of all opera, Italy, where he made a name for himself as a composer and performer. A meeting in Venice with Baron Kielmansegge led him to Hanover as Kapellmeister and from there, almost immediately, to London, where he was invited to provide music for the newly established Italian opera. It was, then, primarily as a composer of Italian opera that Handel made his early reputation there. Xenophobia has always run strong in England, and while ready, in the interests of Protestantism, to accept a German king as successor to Queen Anne, the public was less whole-hearted in its support of foreign opera. Common sense found some objection to the artificiality of the form, supported by the strong existing literary and dramatic traditions of the country. It seemed that The Beggar's Opera, a political parody of grand opera, in the satirical vein of Henry Fielding's novel Jonathan Wild, appealed to a much wider public than any foreign entertainment ever could. Handel was deeply concerned in the business of Italian opera, and when rivalry of an opposing company and fickle popular taste suggested the need for change, he turned instead to a form of music that seemed admirably suited to London audiences. English oratorio provided what was essentially an Italianate operatic entertainment, at least as far as the music was concerned. It had the advantage, however, of being in English, and the further attraction of an appeal, through its choice of subjects and texts, to Protestant religious proclivities. Although Handel's oratorios were to fascinate generation after generation of English choral singers and exercise an effect so overwhelming as to paralyse future English musical creativity, in their own time they suffered variable fortunes at the box-office. There were critics who found something unsuitable in the mixture of sacred and secular, and audiences came and went as fashions changed from season to season. In the end, though, it was the creation of this new and peculiarly English artistic and religious compromise that ensured Handel's lasting fame, with a series of works that continued in performance until shortly before his death in April 1759 and subsequently formed the basis of popular English choral repertoire into the following centuries. The pastoral has a long history in European culture, stemming from Theocritus and his Alexandrian contemporaries, handed on through Virgil to find further development in Renaissance Italy and in the newly developing form of Italian opera. The essence of pastoral, which takes for its subject the lives and loves of shepherds and
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