CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Ton Koopman Young Artists Concert

Zankel Hall
Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Orchestra of St. Luke's
Ton Koopman, Conductor
The Ton Koopman Young Artists Choir
Andrew Megill, Choral Preparation

HANDEL Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day
HANDEL “Dettingen” Te Deum

Programs of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall are generously supported by the City of New York: Office of the Mayor, the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York City Council; and by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Program Notes:

By Harry Haskell

GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, HWV 76
Born February 23, 1685, in Halle; died April 14, 1759, in London.

Composed in September 1739, the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day was first performed in London on November 22 of that year.

Scoring: soloists (soprano, tenor), chorus (SATB), flute, 2 oboes, 2 trumpets, timpani, 2 violins, viola, and basso continuo

Musicians and music lovers have long revered the Sicilian martyr Cecilia as the patron saint of their art, despite the fact that her connection to music—indeed, her very existence—is shrouded in mystery. Recent scholarship suggests that Cecilia’s name is derived not, as previously supposed, from the clan name of the Roman Caecilii but from the Latin word caecitas, meaning blindness. The association of blindness and music has a venerable history, dating back at least to Homer. Since the 17th century, Cecilia’s feast day, November 22, has been celebrated throughout Europe with performances of eponymous works by composers as diverse as Henry Purcell, Alessandro Scarlatti, Charles Gounod, and Benjamin Britten.

Handel’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day is a sequel to his hugely popular Alexander’s Feast, or The Power of Music of 1736. Both works are set to Cecilian texts by John Dryden, whose magisterial verses inspired a long line of English composers. By the late 1730s, Handel’s lucrative heyday on London’s operatic stages was drawing to a close. For reasons both artistic and financial, he had begun turning his energies to sacred oratorio—a genre for which the British public had a seemingly insatiable appetite—and secular works of a dramatic or quasidramatic nature. Lasting less than an hour, the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day was too short for a full evening’s entertainment and was therefore coupled with a revival of Alexander’s Feast, as well as three of Handel’s organ concertos, at its first performance on November 22, 1739, in London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

One can well imagine the warming cheer that Handel’s radiant score spread among the shivering concertgoers during that legendary winter when the River Thames froze over. “From harmony, from heavn’ly harmony this universal frame began,” the tenor soloist announces after the sprightly instrumental overture. Whereupon, against a backdrop of mysteriously throbbing eighth notes, Handel conjures a vivid depiction of nature arising from “a heap of jarring atoms” at Music’s behest. The effect is no less entrancing for being so transparently calculated. Handel’s genius for tone painting was well matched with Dryden’s image-laden poetry. In the ensuing chorus, the voices skip up and down an octave scale, while singing the words “through all the compass of the notes it ran.” To 18th-century listeners, such literal-minded correspondences between text and music betokened Cecilia’s beneficent power.

Taking his cue from Dryden, Handel structured the Ode as a catalogue of various human “passions,” running the gamut from unrequited love and holy devotion to martial valor and jealous rage. Each passion is paired with an instrument of analogous character, which introduces the aria with a substantial prelude and joins the singer on equal terms. For example, the soprano’s “What passion cannot Music raise and quell,” with its elaborate cello obbligato, is not so much a solo aria as a concerted duet. Other instruments follow suit, each speaking in its distinctive voice: the “trumpet’s loud clangor,” the “soft complaining flute,” the sharp-tongued violins, the awe-inducing organ. In the final movement, chorus and orchestra swell to a mighty fugal climax, affirming the poet’s prophecy that “Music shall untune the sky.”

Cecilia’s association with blindness had ironic significance for Handel. Within a dozen years of composing the Ode, the composer’s eyesight was failing rapidly. “Noble Handel hath lost an eye,” a friend reported, “but I have the rapture to say that St. Cecilia makes no complaint of any defect in his fingers.” An operation by the royal surgeon proved unsuccessful, and by early 1753 Handel had gone completely blind. Six years later he died, having bequeathed an endowment for his own monument in Westminster Abbey. In Louis-François Roubiliac’s bas-relief sculpture, the composer stands in front of an organ, Cecilia’s iconic instrument, his unseeing eyes open wide, proudly displaying a page from the score of Messiah.


“Dettingen” Te Deum
Composed in July 1743, the “Dettingen” Te Deum was first performed on November 27 of that year in London.

Scoring: soloists (alto, tenor, bass), chorus (SSATB), 2 oboes, bassoon, 3 trumpets, timpani, strings, and basso continuo

If the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day shows Handel as a master manipulator of moods and tone colors, anticipating such richly atmospheric works as Haydn’s Creation, the “Dettingen” Te Deum represents what British critic Ernest Newman facetiously labeled the “big bow-wow” school of composition. In this, his last major liturgical work, Handel was concerned less with passions and tone painting than with the pomp and circumstance of a grand public ceremony. In the event, the celebration originally planned for St. Paul’s Cathedral was transferred to the relative intimacy of the Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace. There, at a private service held on November 27, 1743, the Te Deum was first performed in the presence of King George II, together with Handel’s newly composed anthem The King Shall Rejoice.

The inspiration for both works was the victory, five months earlier, of the combined British, Austrian, and Hanoverian armies at the battle of Dettingen in southwestern Germany. King George himself had led the British troops in routing the numerically superior French forces of Louis XV. George’s enthusiasm for arms was equaled only by his love of music. Handel, who had composed the anthems for the monarch’s coronation in 1727, once again rose to the occasion, producing a suitably festive setting of the hymn traditionally associated with military triumphs and public thanksgivings. It had been just three decades since he wrote his first Te Deum to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht. The “Dettingen” Te Deum would soon supplant that work in the British public’s favor, becoming a perennial staple of state ceremonies.

After a military-style fanfare featuring trumpets and timpani, the chorus intones “We praise Thee, O God” in broad, sustained chords. Soon a short, imitative duet for solo alto and trumpet introduces a characteristically Handelian choral fugue. Here and elsewhere, the musical contrast between grandeur and intimacy mirrors the juxtaposition of private devotion and public affirmation of faith in the liturgical text. Unlike the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, the Te Deum awards the leading role to the chorus, highlighting the work’s predominantly extroverted character. The scoring for three trumpets—two high, one low—imparts an extra measure of brilliance and makes the more introspective movements, such as the bass aria “When Thou Tookest upon Thee” and the chorus “Thou Sittest at the Right Hand of the Father,” all the more striking. Handel pauses for a last moment of quiet reflection, in the bass recitative “Vouchsafe, O Lord,” before letting out all the stops in a majestic chorale finale.

Not surprisingly, both the general style and specific passages of the “Dettingen” Te Deum are strongly reminiscent of Messiah, which Handel had written just two years earlier. Like many Baroque composers, Handel was a compulsive and unabashed borrower, of both his own and other composers’ music. If any of his listeners noticed the marked resemblance between, say, the trumpet duet that follows the chorus “We believe that Thou shalt come to be our judge” and the opening of “The trumpet shall sound” in Messiah, they most likely gave it no more thought than he did. Nor does it reflect poorly on Handel that portions of the “Dettingen” Te Deum are loosely modeled on an older setting by an obscure Italian composer named Francesco Urio. Like his patron George II, Handel was sovereign in his own realm.


Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Harry Haskell is the editor of The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism (Princeton University Press) and the author of The Early Music Revival: A History (Dover).