[363] The indications: ad libitum, or cembalo, found time after time in his scores, marked the places reserved for the improvisation.
Despite Handel’s great physical power, his touch was extraordinarily smooth and equal. Burney tells us that when he played, his fingers were “so curved and compact, that no motion, and scarcely the fingers themselves, could be discovered” (Commemoration of Handel, p. 35). M. Seiffert believes that “his technique, which realised all Rameau’s principles, certainly necessitated the use of the thumb in the modern style,” and that “one can trace a relationship between Handel’s arrival in England and the adoption of the Italian fingering which soon became fully established there.”
[364] A fourth was published by Arnold in 1797; but part of the works which it contains are not original. Handel had nothing to do with the publication of the Second Set.
Vol. XXVIII of the Complete Edition contains the Six Concertos of the First Set, Op. 4 (1738) and the Six of the Third Set, Op. 7 (1760). Vol. XLVIII comprises the concertos of the Second Set (1740), an experiment at a Concerto for two organs and orchestra, and two Concertos from the Fourth Set (1797).
Many of the Concertos are dated. Most of them were written between 1735 and 1751; and several for special occasions; the sixth of the First Set for an entr’acte to Alexander’s Feast; the fourth of the First Set, a little before Alcina; the third of the Third Set for the Foundling Hospital. The Concerto in B minor (No. 3) was always associated in the mind of the English public with Esther; for the minuet was called the “Minuet from Esther.”
[365] May 8, 1735. It was the year when Handel wrote and performed his first Concertos of the First Set.
[366] Hawkins wrote further: “Music was less fashionable than it is now, many of both sexes were ingenuous enough to confess that they wanted this sense, by saying, ‘I have no ear for music.’ Persons such as these, who, had they been left to themselves, would have interrupted the hearing of others by their talking, were by the performance of Handel not only charmed into silence, but were generally the loudest in their acclamations. This, though it could not be said to be genuine applause, was a much stronger proof of the power of harmony, than the like effect on an audience composed only of judges and rational admirers of his art” (General History of Music, p. 912).
[367] In the Tenth Concerto there are two violoncellos and two bassoons. The same in the Concerto for two Organs. In the long Concerto in F major (Vol. XLVIII) we find two horns.
[368] Sometimes the name is found marked there. See the Eighth Concerto in Vol. XXVIII and the Concerto in F major in Vol. XLVIII.
[369] Vol. XLVIII, page 51.