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Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas | 
 enlarge | Author: Ellen T. Harris
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $23.50
Buy New: $23.26
You Save: $0.24 (1%)
New (14) Used (6) from $17.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 866875
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0674015983
Dewey Decimal Number: 781
EAN: 9780674015982
ASIN: 0674015983
Publication Date: September 30, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: New American book. Shipped within the US in 4-7 days (expedited) or about 10-14 days (standard). Standard can occasionally be slower so we advise using expedited if quicker delivery is important!
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Product Description
"Handel wrote over 100 cantatas, compositions for voice and instruments that describe the joy and pain of love. In Handel as Orpheus, the first comprehensive study of the cantatas, Ellen Harris investigates their place in Handel's life as well as their extraordinary beauty. The cantatas were written between 1706 and 1723--from the time Handel left his home in Germany, through the years he spent in Florence and Rome, and into the early part of his London career. In this period he lived as a guest in aristocratic homes, and composed these chamber works for his patrons and hosts, primarily for private entertainments. In both Italy and England his patrons moved in circles in which same-sex desire was commonplace--a fact that is not without significance, Harris reveals, for the cantatas exhibit a clear homosexual subtext. Addressing questions about style and form, dating, the relation of music to text, rhythmic and tonal devices, and voicing, Handel as Orpheus is an invaluable resource for the study and enjoyment of the cantatas, which have too long been neglected. This innovative study brings greater understanding of Handel, especially his development as a composer, and new insight into the role of sexuality in artistic expression. "
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| Customer Reviews:
Not a Book for 'Joe the Listener' December 2, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you can't read musical notation, if you don't understand talk about chord progressions and deceptive cadences, this book will not be of interest to you. You may be tempted to try to read it by hearing that it discusses the vexed and vexing question of Handel's sexuality, but that discussion amounts to 5% of the whole contents. Even the social history portion of the text, investigating the homoerotically charged ambience of Handel's circles of patrons in Rome, Florence, and London, takes up no more than 15% of the book. "Handel as Orpheus" is an earnestly scholarly inventory of Handel's cantatas, attempting to fix their dates and provenance, providing full translations of them, spotlighting determinable personal allusions in those texts, analyzing their musical structures and the patterns of change they reveal in Handel's evolving style, fitting them into the general drift of musical styles in the early decades of the 18th Century as well as into the shifting paradigm of taste from the flamboyant Baroque to the baroque of the Age of Enlightenment.
In short, this is a book that will be of great interest to musicologists, cultural historians interested in music, and concert performers of the Handelian repertoire, and of no interest to anyone else. If you just want to find out whether Handel was "gay", the best I can do for you is to report that it's open to surmise. Oh, and to say "it really doesn't matter."
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