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Across the pit
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ON SOME COMPOSITIONS OF HANDEL.
To the EDITOR of the HARMONICON.
January 18, 1833.
SIR,
I read the communication of your correspondent, Honorius, in your number for December, 1832, with considerable interest, as it referred to a subject which I had long desired to see touched upon—the faults of the great Handel. There are, however, one or two points in his letter upon which I beg leave to offer a few observations. Your correspondent treats as a fallacy the first of Dr. Brown’s objections, which imputes to Handel ‘too much musical division upon single syllables, to the neglect of the true sense and meaning of the song.’ I must say, that I think there are not a few instances in Handel which directly corroborate this charge. In the song in Saul, ‘O Lord, whose mercies numberless,’ we have the word ‘fail’ in the first verse, and ‘soul’ in the second, most unnaturally tortured: the singer has, positively, two or three rests placed in the midst of his laborious enunciation of these words, in order to allow him to take breath between; in consequence whereof, the continuity of the air is broken, and the close of the song materially injured in effect. How can it possibly be said that such divisions ‘increase the meaning of the words on which they are employed?’ In the duet, ‘Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,’ there are again instances of words most unpleasingly drawled out into long uninteresting passages; one part imitating the other, almost to the entire exclusion of meaning and expression.