Handel’s important works have all been mentioned above with their dates, and a separate detailed list does not seem necessary. He was an extremely rapid worker, and his later works are dated almost day by day as they proceed. From this we learn that the Messiah was sketched and scored within twenty-one days, and that even Jephtha, with an interruption of nearly four months besides several other delays caused by Handel’s failing sight, was begun and finished within seven months, representing hardly five weeks’ actual writing. Handel’s extant works may be roughly summarized from the edition of the Händelgesellschaft as 41 Italian operas, 2 Italian oratorios, 2 German Passions, 18 English oratorios, 4 English secular oratorios, 4 English secular cantatas, and a few other small works, English and Italian, of the type of oratorio or incidental dramatic music; 3 Latin settings of the Te Deum; the (English) Dettingen Te Deum and Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate; 4 coronation anthems; 3 volumes of English anthems (Chandos Anthems); 1 volume of Latin church music; 3 volumes of Italian vocal chamber-music; 1 volume of clavier works; 37 instrumental duets and trios (sonatas), and 4 volumes of orchestral music and organ concertos (about 40 works). Precise figures are impossible as there is no means of drawing the line between pasticcios and original works. The instrumental pieces especially are used again and again as overtures to operas and oratorios and anthems.
The complete edition of the German Händelgesellschaft suffers from being the work of one man who would not recognize that his task was beyond any single man’s power. The best arrangements of the vocal scores are undoubtedly those published by Novello that are not based on “additional accompaniments.” None is absolutely trustworthy, and those of the editor of the German Händelgesellschaft are sad proofs of the uselessness of expert library-scholarship without a sound musical training. Yet Chrysander’s services in the restoration of Handel are beyond praise. We need only mention his discovery of authentic trombone parts in Israel in Egypt as one among many of his priceless contributions to musical history and aesthetics.
(D. F. T.)
[1] Chrysander says Mattei instead of Ariosti.
[2] By a dramatic coincidence Handel’s blindness interrupted him during the writing of the chorus, “How dark, oh Lord, are Thy decrees, ... all our joys to sorrow turning ... as the night succeeds the day.”
[3] The “moral” question has been raised afresh in reviews of Mr Sedley Taylor’s admirable volume of analysed illustrations (The Indebtedness of Handel to works of other Composers, Cambridge, 1906). The latest argument is that Handel shows moral obliquity in borrowing “regrettably” from sources no one could know at the time. This reasoning makes it mysterious that a man of such moral obliquity should ever have written a note of his own music in England when he could have stolen the complete choral works of Bach and most of the hundred operas of Alessandro Scarlatti with the certainty that the sources would not be printed for a century after his death, even if his own name did not then check curiosity among antiquarians. Of course Handel’s plagiarisms would have damaged his reputation if contemporaries had known of them. His polyphonic scholarship was more “antiquated” in the 18th century than it is in the 20th.
[4] Much light would be thrown on the subject if some one sufficiently ignorant of architecture were to make researches into Sir Christopher Wren’s indebtedness to Italian architects!
HANDFASTING (A.S. handfæstnung, pledging one’s hand), primarily the O. Eng. synonym for betrothal (q.v.), and later a peculiar form of temporary marriage at one time common in Scotland, the only necessary ceremony being the verbal pledge of the couple while holding hands. The pair thus handfasted were, in accordance with Scotch law, entitled to live together for a year and a day. If then they so wished, the temporary marriage could be made permanent: if not, they could go their several ways without reproach, the child, if any, being supported by the party who objected to further cohabitation.