Handel

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The COMPLETE HANDEL EDITION contains as supplements several volumes of works by various Italian and German composers, which Handel has utilised in his compositions, namely:—

• 1. Magnificat said to be by Erba.
• 2. Te deum said to be by Urio.
• 3. Serenata by Stradella.
• 4. Duetti by Clari.
• 5. Componimenti musicali by G. Muffat.
• 6. Octavia by Reinhard Keiser.

Friedrich Chrysander, G. F. Handel. 3 vols., 1858-67, Leipzig.

(The name of Chrysander ought to be attached permanently to that of Handel, for his life was entirely devoted to him. It was he who founded in 1856, with Gervinus, the German Handel Society and who accomplished nearly the whole of the Complete Edition of the Works of Handel in one hundred volumes by himself alone. His biography is a monument of science and devotion comparable with Philipp Spitta’s J. S. Bach and Otto Jahn’s Mozart. Unfortunately the work remained unfinished: it stopped at the year 1740. Max Seiffert completed it.)

Schoelcher, The Life of Handel. 1857.

(Schoelcher’s works, anterior to those of Chrysander, are valuable on account of their collection of documents rather than that of the general laying out of the works. As we have seen, the priceless collection of these documents is housed at the Paris Conservatoire.)

Hermann Kretzschmar, Georg Friedrich Handel (published in the Sammlung musikalischer Vorträge by Paul Graf Waldersee).

Fritz Volbach, Georg-Friedrich Hændel (Collection: Harmonie. 1898, Berlin).

J. A. Fuller-Maitland, The Age of Bach and Handel (The Oxford History of Music, Vol. IV). 1902, Oxford.

R. A. Streatfeild, Handel. 1909, London.

(This book is one of the first in England which has freed the figure of Handel from the false mass of moralising and teaching under which the author of the Messiah was buried. He shows the richness and freedom of Handel’s work and rectifies several points in the German biographies.)

Adimolo, G. F. Handel in Italia.

Sedley Taylor, The Indebtedness of Handel to Works by other Composers. 1906, Cambridge.

P. Robinson, Handel and his Orbit. 1908, London. (These two last books are concerned with the question of Handel’s plagiarisms.)

F. Volbach, Die Praxis der Hændel-Aufführung, 1889. Thesis for Doctorate.

(On the Orchestra of Handel.)

Hugo Goldschmidt, Die Lehre von der vocalen Ornamentik. 1907.

(On the vocal execution of Handel’s works, and particularly on the question of Handel’s ornaments. This matter has been the subject of numerous discussions in the numbers of the International Musical Gazette, especially by Max Seiffert.)

Weitzmann, Geschichte der Klaviermusik, Vol. 1, 1899 (continued and completed by Seiffert and Fleischer). (For the Clavier Works of Handel.)

Ernest David, Handel. 1884.

For readers desirous of consulting the sources of the biographies of Handel, the most interesting works written by his contempories are:

Johann Mattheson, Handel (in his Ehrenpforte, 1740).

Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the late G. F. Handel. London, 1760. (Translated into German with annotations by Mattheson, 1761; into French by Arnaud and Suard in 1778.)

Burney, Commemoration of Handel. London, 1785.

Hawkins, General History of Music. London, 1788.

W. Coxe, Anecdotes of G. F. Handel and Smith. London, 1799.