George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) was born in the German city of Halle, the son of a physician, and received a good education which included a thorough grounding in church music. At eighteen he moved to Hamburg, a thriving center of musical activity, where he played the violin in the opera orchestra and was sometimes asked to conduct. This exposure to the theater, augmenting his earlier experience with sacred music, surely planted seeds which would bear magnificent fruit, as Handel became one of the greatest opera composers of all time.

In 1706 Handel went to Italy where we visited Venice, Florence, Naples and most importantly Rome; he absorbed the forms as well as the passion of Italian opera, while also producing sacred and instrumental music. Handel seems to have dazzled the Italians just as much as Italian virtuosi had always dazzled the Germans; his patrons included the most powerful statesmen and cardinals in Italy, and he was widely known as il caro sassone, or “the beloved Saxon.” In 1710 Handel cam to London in the employ of the elector of Hanover, who would become England’s King George I. Soon engaged by an Italian opera company which had been established at a new theater in the Haymarket, Handel would devote a large part of his career to the composition of Italian opera for London audiences. In spite of bouts of poor health (he suffered from recurring palsy and, for the last thirteen years of his life, blindness), Handel remained astonishingly prolific throughout his life, contributing tremendously to the canon of western music.

This program includes two concerti grossi from Handel’s opus VI. This collection of twelve works was an homage to the famous earlier opus VI, the Concerti Grossi of Arcangelo Corelli. As a young man in Rome, Handel had known Corelli, and like so many other composers, was influenced by him profoundly. However, Handel’s works are larger in scale, some almost twice as long as Corelli’s, and they exhibit a somewhat freer formal structure. These pieces were met with great excitement when they appeared in 1740; subscription sales, which began before Handel had finished the eleventh concerto, brought in one hundred orders which helped to cover the publisher’s costs. The Concerto I in G major begins with a declamatory statement which is mirrored (upside-down and in minor) by the opening of no. VI. The latter is the only one of these concertos to contain a Musette; this beautiful movement is a pastoral reference to a shepherd’s drone. Its mood of serenity and effortlessness belies the obsessive re-working evidenced by the manuscript (Handel wrote his concerti grossi with monumental speed, but not without extensive revisions).

Giuseppe Sammartini (1695-1750) was the son of a French oboist, and the older brother of the somewhat better-known composer Giovanni Sammartini. He grew up in Milan, where he played in professional orchestras as a youth before moving briefly to Brussels and then to London, where he would spend the rest of his life. Sammartini played the oboe in Handel’s orchestra, performing in numerous productions of his operas—many of which are known for their ravishing (and difficult) oboe parts. In 1736 Sammartini became the music teacher for the family of Frederick, the Prince of Wales; he held this post until his death, dedicating many of his works from this period to the prince and members of his family. Sammartini produced a vast output of instrumental music, including scores of sonatas, trio sonatas and concerti grossi as well as solo concertos for the flute, recorder, oboe, and violin as well as harpsichord. The slow movement of the F major harpsichord concerto was surely influenced by the Handel operas Sammartini knew so well, in both its lyricism and its da capo  (ABA) form.

We turn back the clock for the next set of pieces, written by a composer whose lifetime spanned the transition from the late renaissance to the early baroque. John Dowland (1563-1626) was an English lutenist, singer and composer who is best known for the song “Flow my Tears.” This doleful tune became the basis for his instrumental Lachrimae, works for viol consort whose great popularity during Dowland’s lifetime demonstrates the passion of the English at that time for all things melancholy. (Incidentally, Dowland’s music still casts a powerful spell: contemporary pop singers Elvis Costello and Sting have both performed Dowland, and sci-fi writer Philip Dick wrote a novel called “Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said” in which a fictional version of Linda Ronstadt sings covers of Dowland songs.) Most of Dowland’s music, however, is for solo lute. The two pieces heard on this program, a pavan and a galliard, represent well-known renaissance dance forms which were commonly paired. Both of these pieces are based on songs: the Pavan refers to “Farewell unkind farewell,” while the Galliard is an instrumental setting of “Can she Excuse.”

Henry Purcell (1659-1695) is widely regarded as one of the most important musicians Britain has produced. The son of a musician at the royal court, Purcell was born into the renewed musical flowering brought about by the Restoration of the Monarchy. While he lived to be only 36, he was breath-takingly prolific, writing chamber music, keyboard works, odes and other sacred vocal music, and incidental music for more than forty plays, all while fulfilling his duties as a court musician as well as serving as organist at Westminster Abbey. The pieces on this program are taken from his operas King Arthur, the Fairey Queen, Dioclesian, and the play the Virtuous Wife. All demonstrate the unmistakable style of Purcell’s instrumental music: it is rhythmically charged, highly tuneful and pungent with dissonance. This music demonstrates as well the fact that dance was a fundamental element of any theatrical work. In his volume A Collection of Ayres Compos’d for the Theatre, and Upon Other Occaisions, Purcell wrote music for every imaginable kind of dance, and dance rhythms permeate his chamber and keyboard music as well. La Furstemburg (included here) is one of a very few pieces which have surviving seventeenth-century choreography specifically associated with them.

The operatic form had matured greatly by the time Handel was writing his Alcina, Terpsichore and Il Pastor Fido, but the ballet was no less integral to the theatrical experience than it had been in Purcell’s day. Just as famous divas were often the inspiration for particular arias, Handel wrote much of his ballet music for a dancer named Marie Salle’ and her troupe. Salle’ was known for her intelligence and sensitivity, and demonstrated the increasing emphasis of dance style during the eighteenth century on human expression, beyond mere decorativeness. Handel’s music, like Purcell’s, is eminently danceable, and the line between what is “dance music” and what is not is blurry at best. In fact many dance movements which appear in the operas are also used in instrumental works—notably the second minuet from Alcina and the gigue from Terpsichore. The musette from Alcina is rare in that it is in duple time, not triple. Verdi prati, also from Alcina, is an aria which became wildly popular, and was frequently heard (as here) in instrumental versions. As is the case with Purcell’s music, there is very little surviving choreography associated with Handel’s ballet music;  Anna Mansbridge, a Marie Salle’ for our time, has choreographed these works for Seattle Early Dance drawing on her extensive knowledge of  dance history and performance practice.