Almira afterthoughts
Post categories: Suzanne Aspden
| 19:04 UK time, Friday, 16 January 2009
There have been some interesting observations after the broadcast of Almira. 'Dr Schoen' draws a comparison to Bach, and Anne_B to Rameau and Telemann. I guess the early works of any composer are going to have a lot of echoes of others - their teachers or their peers. When we hear J.S. Bach or Telemann in Handel, though, what we're really hearing are the influences that formed all of them.
As for dance in Handel's operas, he was ever the man of the theatre: if an opportunity came his way to include dance in his operas, why not do so? The collaborations with the famous French dancer, , in the 1730s were particularly significant. Actually, later in the eighteenth century, as skirts gradually went up, the dancing between the acts became so popular, it was said to be more of an attraction than the opera itself!
Anne's question about opera in German gets us into the thorny area of genre: when we think of Mozart's German operas, we're thinking of , which was a largely comic genre that had been around since the early eighteenth century. It drew on the German tradition, as well as French light opera (comédie mêlée d'ariettes) and English ballad opera. But Handel's Almira was a serious opera, influenced by the Italian tradition of ... with some local Hamburg comedy thrown in. So, we're not comparing like with like, but it is always worth bearing in mind that a famous composer's venture into a particular field (Mozart in Singspiel) is not usually going to be the first - there'll be a whole host of long-forgotten predecessors.
Comments