United States or China ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Butler was not satisfied with having written only half of this work; he wanted it to have a successor, so that by adding his two halves together, he could say he had written a whole Handelian oratorio. While staying with his sisters at Shrewsbury with this idea in his mind, he casually took up a book by Alfred Ainger about Charles Lamb and therein stumbled upon something about the Odyssey.
For the greater part of the nineteenth century the Handelian type of opera was the laughingstock of musical critics; they wondered how any audiences could have endured to sit through it, and why the fashionable society of London should have neglected native music for what Dr. Johnson defined as "an exotic and irrational entertainment."
'Princess Ida' contains some of his most brilliant excursions into the realm of parody parodies of grand opera, parodies of the traditional Handelian manner, parodies of sentimental love-making but it also contains some of the purest and most beautiful music he ever wrote. Some of Sullivan's melodies, indeed, would be more fitting on the lips of Tennyson's romantic princess than on those of Mr.
The operas of Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini, as a whole, do not demand great histrionic exertion from their interpreters and for a time singers trained in the old Handelian tradition met every requirement of these composers and their audiences. If more action was demanded than in Handel's day the newer music, in compensation, was easier to sing. I need only speak of Ronconi and Mme.
Jones and I had been listening to Gaetano Meo's girls playing Handel and were talking about him and Shakespeare, and how those two men can alike stir us more than any one else can. Neither were self- conscious in production, but when the thing had come out Shakespeare looks at it and wonders, whereas Handel takes it as a matter of course. A Yankee Handelian
As to the conventionality of the music, and its forms of air and recitative, it can only be said that all serious Italian music was written in these forms; it was simply the normal musical style of the period, and must have been as natural to its own audiences as the style of Puccini or Richard Strauss at the present day. Handelian opera has often been described as a concert in costume, and Dr.
A few, however, resisted the charm of her singing. Miss Seward was breakfasting one morning with Mr. Joah Bates, one of the conductors, and delicately flattered his wife's singing of the Handelian music by saying that Mara put too much gold and fringe upon that solemn robe of melody, "I know that my Redeemer liveth."
Yet the masque afforded him opportunities of which he made splendid use. The overture is a noble piece of workmanship. There is a Handelian dignity without any bow-wow or stiffness, and the freshness and freedom are of a kind that Handel never attained to. Of course, it has no connection with the drama: it would serve for many another play just as well.
Narcissus: a Cantata in the Handelian form, words and music by Samuel Butler and Henry Festing Jones: MS. of the piano score in the British Museum. MS. of the orchestral score with H. F. Jones. In this and the two following years contributed some articles to the Universal Review, most of which were republished after his death as Essays on Life, Art, and Science .
Handel protested perpetually against the length of the work, for the Handelian style of composition naturally extended the prolixity of the words; Jennens greatly resented the musician's criticism, and insisted on printing the poem in full.
Word Of The Day