George Frideric Handel: Collected Documents, i: 1609–1725 ed. by Donald Burrows et al. (review)

For sixty years, every Handel researcher’s instinctive go-to source was the collection of primary sources in Otto Eric Deutsch’s magisterial Handel: A Documentary Biography (1955), whose brief was to provide ‘a biography in documents’. The German Handel-Handbuch, IV (1985) was only a marginal advance in content or commentary on Deutsch. We now have the first volume of a projected and long-awaited five-volume Handel: Collected Documents (HCD), which essentially redoes Deutsch from scratch in carrying forward his brief of collecting in one place primary sources documenting Handel’s life, career, compositions, reception, and musical environment. For the period covered by this volume, up to August 1725, the 185 pages of Deutsch have swelled to 786 pages.

The project’s expansion to five volumes should not mislead one into thinking there has been a comparable discovery of new documents relating to Handel since 1955. As the new title indicates, the aim is no longer to collect just materials for a biography. Rather, HCD provides a wider view of the musical, theatrical, and operatic context of Handel’s life, still using the document-plus-commentary method initiated by Deutsch. Importantly, all documents are now presented in their original language with translation, as well as the usual commentary. For this initial volume, much of the enlargement is due to expanded documentation of Handel’s family genealogy, which is now extended back to 1609 for the birth of his grandfather, instead of 1683 for the marriage of his parents. Whereas Deutsch summarized German archival documents or presented them in translation only, HCD now gives the original German, a translation, and a commentary.

Similarly for Handel’s period in Rome, whereas Deutsch had summarized or translated contemporary diaries or documents, HCD presents them in transcription, translation, and with commentary. Most extensive and important are the extracts from the archival documents of Handel’s patron the Marchese Francesco Maria Ruspoli located by Ursula Kirkendale. Due to the efficiency of Ruspoli’s staff, all the bills, receipts, and accounts for running his household survive, including those for music copying, printing of librettos, food and lodging for Handel, and fitting out the hall and hiring musicians for Ruspoli’s private production of Handel’s oratorio La Resurrezione on 8 April 1708. Inexplicably, some transcriptions are not translated in full, but excerpted or summarized. In total, some seventeen pages are devoted just to the workmen’s and suppliers’ charges for the production, including Corelli’s itemized bill for the musicians. Striking are the number of bills and receipts for payment for food and drink for ‘il Sassone’ or ‘Monsu Endel’. In the light of Handel’s later large girth, it is hard to know what to make of these payments, without comparable payments for Ruspoli’s other guests.

With Handel’s arrival in London in late 1710, a sea change comes over the HCD, and the depth and breadth of documentation expands greatly—in fact creating an imbalance in coverage and rendering the volume decidedly London-centric. This expansion is not due to an increase in new documents directly about Handel, but to the HCD’s goal to give a rich chronicle of the musical, operatic, and music-publishing world of Handel’s London, including management of the opera companies, season repertories, cast lists, recruitment and hiring of singers, music publications, and more—most documents not directly mentioning Handel at all. Robert Hume has reminded us that contexts are not just there, not just a given, but a matter of each scholar’s choice and selection. By trying to provide a wide and synoptic context for Handel’s London career, HCD has started down a slippery slope with no consistent principles of what to include. Paradoxically, the volume is both too thick and too thin.

For the Royal Academy of Music seasons beginning in 1719–20...