Handel's Cantatas

Extract

Many besides myself, who have counted ourselves lovers of Handel, must have had twinges of conscience when their eyes fell upon the four volumes (in the G.H.S. great edition of Handel's works) which contain his cantatas. I may remind you that the Italian cantata of the late seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries is a form of music which differs from that of the German cantata, of which Bach has given us so many examples; that it supplanted the madrigal as the popular musical diversion of cultivated society in Italy; that it held the place as vocal chamber music, which instrumental quartets and trios were later to occupy; that all the best Italian composers from Carrissimi to Scarlatti produced them in large quantities; and lastly that Italy, when Handel went there in 1706, was the acknowledged centre of European music. What Handel composed there—whatever its value may be—was composed for the most important and the most cultivated audiences he was ever likely to find.