Twenty-seven scholars from all over Europe, as well as from North America and Australia, had responded to the invitation from the Institut für Musik at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, the Händel-Haus Stiftung and the Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft (all institutions based in Halle on the Saale) to give papers on the topic ‘Handel and Dresden: Italian Music as a European Cultural Phenomenon’. The conference mirrored the overall focus of the 2011 Halle Handel Festival, and increased our knowledge of the composer and his Dresden connections. It also heightened our understanding of the ways in which Italian music and musicians were received in Europe during the eighteenth century.
The keynote address was not delivered on the first day of the conference, but rather two days earlier, on 4 June. Michael Walter (Universität Graz) focused on the 1719 Fürstenhochzeit (princely wedding) of the Saxon electoral prince Friedrich August and the emperor's daughter Maria Josepha in Dresden. The conference proper opened with a paper by Juliane Riepe (Händel-Haus Halle), who posed a multitude of questions regarding Italians who held Kapellmeister positions at German courts in an attempt to understand why they were preferred over Germans. Graydon Beeks (Pomona College) introduced a neglected volume of six cantatas by Attilio Ariosti held at the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles, which he proposed were composed as Ariosti's swansong. That twelve operas by Handel were given between 1723 and 1743 at the opera house in Braunschweig, which was used for both public and court events, was pointed out by Sabine Ehrmann-Herfort (Università di Pavia Cremona). Ruggiero Fedeli's setting of Almira for Braunschweig was the focus of the paper by Hansjörg Drauschke (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg). Manuel Bärwald (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) examined reports by Dresden Legationsrat Peter Ambrosius Lehmann between 1708 and 1729 that solved the riddle of who had been ridiculed in Die Baßgeige, a satire later included in Der critische Musikus. That French and Italian musicians, and their works, could coexist peacefully at a German court, specifically that of the Wittelsbachs in Bavaria, was shown by Sebastian Biesold (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg). Arnold Jacobshagen (Hochschule für Musik und Tanz, Köln) then discussed Handel's connections with the Düsseldorf Hofkapelle and the fact that Handel would later engage three of their castratos – Benedetto Baldassari, Valeriano Pellegrini and Gaetano Berenstadt – for performances in England. The final paper of the day was presented by Hans-Georg Hofmann (Basel). By analysing compilations of Handel's instrumental music that form part of the famous ‘Schrank II’ holdings of the Dresden Hofkapelle and using comparative music examples, he illustrated that concertmaster J. G. Pisendel created seemingly new works by drawing from or adapting older opera overtures by Handel, as well as instrumental music by Telemann and Fasch.
The next morning focused on issues surrounding Handel's vocal music and singers. Handel's task at the Dresden court in 1719 as an agent of the Royal Academy of Music was ‘… to procure Singers for the English Stage’ – the title of the talk by Thomas Seedorf (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg). He outlined the varying capabilities of these singers and what London audiences expected from them. Michael Walter went on to emphasize that Handel not only saved money by recruiting vocalists from Dresden rather than Venice, but also took advantage of the fact that Italian singers who had attached themselves to a German court opera establishment were no longer on the recruiting lists of Italian impresarios. Philip Kreisig (Philips-Universität Marburg) compared the London opera, with its individual superstars, to the Dresden court opera and its emphasis on the entire ensemble. This prompted Handel to rewrite music for singers whom he recruited from Dresden, specifically Senesino (Francesco Bernardi), Faustina Bordoni and Domenico Annibali. The latter was the focus of the paper given by Alina Żórawska-Witkowska (Uniwersytet Warszawski). Annibali had spent eight months in London in 1736–1737 upon Handel's invitation and was much appreciated by local opera audiences.
Janice B. Stockigt (Melbourne Conservatorium of Music) introduced an unknown primary source that identified Dresden cantor, organist and composer Theodor Christlieb Reinhold (1682–1755) as the father of Henry Theodore Reinhold (died 1751), the London-based singer who created several operatic and oratorio roles by Handel. Donald Burrows (The Open University) then followed the trail of a ‘European’ music copyist who was active in London during the 1730s and 1740s. This person provided English translations of German lyrics to manuscript copies of Handel's Italian operas and added German texts to Handel's English oratorios and to Latin church music by Italian composers, including Antonio Lotti. The latter's time in Dresden (1717–1719) and his influence on Handel's music and performances were examined by Ben Byram-Wigfield (London). Handel's debt to Lotti led John Roberts (University of California, Berkeley) to identify borrowings from Lotti's Dresden operas Giove in Argo (1717), Ascanio (1717) and Teofane (1719). The majority of these appear in the famous ‘Nightingale Chorus’ from Handel's English oratorio Solomon (1748), in which Roberts also pinpointed music by Georg Philipp Telemann, William Croft and Francesco Gasparini. Finally, Panja Mücke (Universität Bremen) considered intertextual references for Handel's parodies and identified selection criteria for their potential transmission within the context of early modern communication systems.
Some of the many fantastic musical treasures held at the Sächsische Landes-, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden were introduced in the afternoon session of day two. Steffen Voss (Hamburg/Dresden) examined the English instrumental music in the repertoire of the Dresden Hofkapelle that survives as part of the ‘Schrank II’ holdings. In particular, he drew attention to works by composers who were active in England at the same time as Handel, including Matthew Dubourg, Charles Dieupart and Johann Christoph Pepusch, as well as theatre musicians Richard Charke and John Frederick Lampe. Some of these compositions must have been brought to Dresden by Johann Joachim Quantz, who spent some time in London in 1727. Moreover, genres such as the hornpipe and the angloise, which occur in orchestral suites by Telemann and Fasch, clearly indicate that English music was welcome in Germany. One of the the remaining riddles surrounding Vivaldi's music occupied Michael Talbot (University of Liverpool). He compared sources for altered bass parts in three violin sonatas by the Venetian master (rv6, rv22 and rv19) and proposed that Vivaldi parted with his sole copies in 1716–1717, passing them on to his student Pisendel, who then took them back to Dresden. Having apparently retained only a separate violin part, Vivaldi, when reissuing the work later on (perhaps for a new customer?), was forced to recompose the bass part from scratch, relying partly on his memory and partly on the violin part, at times coming up with entirely new solutions. Ortrun Landmann (Dresden) then corrected several errors in the biography of oboe virtuoso and composer Johann Christian Fischer, the son-in-law of painter Thomas Gainsborough. Fischer ‘worked the system’ by successfully drawing a salary from his Dresden employers for over six years in the 1770s while working in London.
The development of the standard operatic repertoire and changes in taste and genre in central European opera between 1740 and 1780 were investigated by Reinhard Strohm (University of Oxford). Specifically, he addressed the important question of why Handel's operas were no longer played in Germany during these decades and shone light on the role Wandertruppen played in that country. Taking a more detailed approach, Raffaele Mellace (Milan) focused on Apostolo Zeno's libretto Cajo Fabricio, which, in the hands of Johann Adolf Hasse, travelled from Rome to Dresden and, later on via Handel, to London. Undine Wagner (Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar) was able to produce impressive lists of sacred contrafacta drawn from Italian operas by Hasse as well as by Handel that survive in Bohemian archives and libraries. Field Marshall Jakob Heinrich Count von Flemming's importance as a patron of the arts in Saxony and Poland was illustrated by Szymon Paczkowski (Uniwersytet Warszawski). He introduced several unknown primary sources, most importantly a music inventory that indicates that Flemming owned several works by Handel, whom he desperately wished to meet but never did.
Gerhard Poppe (Universität Koblenz-Landau) challenged the audience with a listening quiz: which of the five selections in question – all of which were part of the overhauled Dresden church music repertoire from the 1750s and 1760s – had been composed by ‘real’ Italians as opposed to Germans writing in the Italian style? Music by Baldassarre Galuppi, Antonio Lotti, Johann Adolf Hasse and Johann Georg Schürer is much more similar than one would anticipate. Angela Romagnoli (Facoltà di Musicologia di Cremona, Università di Pavia) then suggested reasons why Handel's London works tended to be performed in Italy rather than the works he composed while in Italy itself, despite the fact that he had spent considerable time there prior to moving to London. Finally, Peter Schmitz (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster) focused everyone's attention on the music collector Fortunato Santini and how he shaped musical life in Rome with Handel's music during the first half of the nineteenth century.
In closing, conference organizer Wolfgang Hirschmann (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) thanked all participants, guests and sponsors (which included the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and announced an upcoming change in editors for the Händel-Jahrbuch 2012: Annette Landgraf will be taking over from Konstanze Musketa, who was thanked for her many years of service and dedication. Mention must also be made of the special exhibition at the Händel-Haus Museum to which conference guests were treated. The title ‘Händel sucht den Superstar’, a clever variation of ‘Deutschland sucht den Superstar’, the German version of the British Pop Idol franchise, brought to mind the ‘Handelian idol’ of 2011. The recipient of this year's Handel prize is Wolfgang Ruf, professor emeritus and former chair of the Institut für Musik at the Universität Halle-Wittenberg and past president of the Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft Halle.
