[223] Handel composed for the marriage of the Princess Anne The Wedding Anthem (March 14, 1734), which is a pasticcio of old works, especially Athaliah. He gave also for the marriage fêtes the serenata, Parnasso in festa, and a revised form of Pastor Fido, with choruses.
[224] It was John Rich who had produced here the Beggar’s Opera of Gay and Pepusch in 1728—that parody of Handel’s operas.
[225] She was the pupil of Mlle Prévost, and made her début in 1725 with Rich. See the study of M. Emile Dacier: Une danseuse française a Londres, au début du XVIII siècle (French number of the S.I.M. May and July, 1907).
[226] It is interesting to notice that it was with the same subjects of Pygmalion and of Ariadne that J. J. Rousseau and Georg Benda inaugurated in 1770-1775 the Melodrama or “opera without singing.”
[227] He has been accused of knowing it too well. The Abbé Prévost wrote exactly at this same period in Le Pour et le Contre (1733): “...Certain critics accuse him of having taken for his basis an infinite number of beautiful things from Lully, and especially from our French cantatas, and of having the effrontery of disguising them in the Italian manner....”
[228] “La Salle” returned to Paris, where she made her reappearance at the Académie de Musique in August, 1735, in les Indes galantes of Rameau. It is quite remarkable that some pages of this work, such as the superb chaconne at the end, have a character quite Handelian.
[229] Atalanta (May 12, 1736), Arminio (January 12, 1737), Giustino (February 16, 1737), Berenice (May 18, 1737), Faramondo (January 7, 1738), Serse (April 15, 1738), Imeneo (November 22, 1740), Deidamia (January 10, 1741).
[230] Especially in Serse and Deidamia.
[231] Dryden the poet wrote this brilliant poem in 1697 in a night of inspiration. Clayton had set it to music in 1711; and again about 1720 Benedetto Marcello wrote a cantata in the ancient manner on an Italian adaptation of the English ode by the Abbé Conti. A friend of Handel, Newburgh Hamilton, arranged Dryden’s poem with great discretion for Handel’s oratorio.
Handel had already written several times in honour of St. Cecilia. Some fragments of four cantatas to St. Cecilia are to be found in Vol. LII of the great Breitkopf edition (Cantate italiane con stromenti). They were all written in London, the first about 1713.