Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas

by Ellen T. Harris

Handel wrote over 100 cantatas, compositions for voice and instruments that describe the joy and pain of love. In Handel as Orpheus, the first comprehensive study of the cantatas, Ellen Harris investigates their place in Handel's life as well as their extraordinary beauty.

The cantatas were written between 1706 and 1723--from the time Handel left his home in Germany, through the years he spent in Florence and Rome, and into the early part of his London career. In this period he lived as a guest in aristocratic homes, and composed these chamber works for his patrons and hosts, primarily for private entertainments. In both Italy and England his patrons moved in circles in which same-sex desire was commonplace--a fact that is not without significance, Harris reveals, for the cantatas exhibit a clear homosexual subtext.

Addressing questions about style and form, dating, the relation of music to text, rhythmic and tonal devices, and voicing, Handel as Orpheus is an invaluable resource for the study and enjoyment of the cantatas, which have too long been neglected. This innovative study brings greater understanding of Handel, especially his development as a composer, and new insight into the role of sexuality in artistic expression.

Genres: Music, 18th Century

442 pages, Paperback

First published January 30, 2002

About the author

Ellen T. Harris (eharris@mit.edu) B.A. ’67 Brown University; M.A. ’70, Ph.D. ’76 University of Chicago, Class of 1949 Professor Emeritus at MIT is a musicologist whose work focuses on Handel, Baroque opera, and vocal performance practice. She is a regular Visiting Professor at The Juilliard School. She is an internationally recognized scholar in Baroque opera, specializing in the music of Handel and Purcell. She is also a performing soprano.

She has received several awards for her work.
Articles and reviews by Professor Harris have appeared in numerous publications including Journal of the American Musicological Society, Händel Jahrbuch, Notes, and The New York Times.

She has enjoyed residencies at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College at Harvard University (1995-96) and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (2004). She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998) and named an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society (2011). For the 2013-14 academic year, she was chosen as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar and in 2005 won the Gyorgy Kepes Prize for her contributions to the arts at MIT. Professor Harris also has performed as a soprano soloist; she sang the National Anthem at Fenway Park in 1991 and in 1997 appeared as a soloist with the Boston Pops, John Williams conducting.

Reviews

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a personal reminder to me not to judge a book by its press, because this book got a rather rough news treatment because everyone loves to read in the newspapers about “Is/was so-and-so REALLY GAY?” and I am not a big fan of posthumously outing people, so I had a rather low opinion of the book going in (uh, 12 years after it was published, I suck). But this book was, hands down, just a very, very fine piece of scholarship. I think took like 6 pages of notes while reading for things to look into. The author set out to write just a dry book about his cantatas, which are not very well covered in the existing literature, and while she was writing it she began to explore the environment he wrote them in and discovered all this rather marvelous subtext and homoeroticism to his patrons and the librettos he used. So the book is about 60% cantatas, 40% gay stuff, but they double-helix around each other in a very pleasing way and you get a very nice insight into a very quiet and unexplored aspect of Handel’s life -- young sexy Handel. The crux of her argument doesn’t go so far as to say “Handel was gay, end of story” but the basic argument could be boiled down to the fact that Handel sure hung out with a lot of known same-sex romantics and when he recycled his cantatas in later life he edited them in interesting ways to maybe hide their gay elements… And he certainly never was one for the ladies.

If you’re interested in LGBT history I highly recommend this book, you’ll want to skim the cantatas parts though if you’re not into musicology, so it wouldn’t take you long to read most of her main sections on the gay arguments, but the author has a nice synthesis between the sodomy laws and oppression etc going on in England at the time and the rather casual same-sex-love-friendly environment in Italy, and where Handel and his work might have fit between all that.

[Shaun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harris provides some interesting context and background to Handel's work, however, her arguments for a secret sexuality is not revealed strongly enough. Am I convinced that Handel expressed a secret same-sex desire in his work? The short answer— No. With that being said, it was fun to imagine and I have a deeper understanding of the complexities of chamber operas and cantatas.

[Michal Lipták · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does Harris put forward convincing argument that Händel was gay? Not really, he may have been, he may not have been, there’s a lot of intriguing conjecture but it’s just suggestive, not convincing. That doesn’t really matter, because “was Händel gay” is just marketing ploy which should hook you in, but as a matter of fact you get something much better: a thorough attentive interpretation of Händel’s Italian cantatas which he composed mostly in Italy and partially in London between 1706 and 1723, and plastic portrait of period culture, morals, politics and methods of art production.

For me, until now I perceived Händel as “truly getting going” only since 1720s, with founding of Royal Academy of Music, becoming the first true capitalist entrepreneur of music and first embodying the struggle between commerce and art that was about to follow from then on. I loved cantatas, but had them written down as mostly static repertoire of tunes and ideas, worked out in a happy youth, and used and re-used later in operas and oratorios. I perceived them as intimate, as Georg F. Just being himself, before he went out to confront hostile public opinion.

What Harris does, and what I’m immensely thankful for, is she presents this period of Händel’s life as maybe the most dynamic one, and moreover, she shows how this was translated to rapid development of Händel’s style already during his Italian stay since 1706 to 1710. Early three cantatas depicting “mad women” – Lucrezia, Armida abbandonata, Agrippina condotta a morire – are rather free-form, with recitative/aria distinction collapsing towards the end; but they were also considered, surprisingly, “archaic” at the time, which has seen Zenonian reforms towards calmer “classical” style. The irregularities are later smoothed, the structure becomes more regular, but there are weird moments which remain in Händel, and they remain apparently rooted in this apprenticeship. The much later mad scene in Orlando is subversive re-casting of something learned in earliest cantatas.

Similarly, it’s nice to find out that the economical approach to opera – where, for example, Händel moves much more swiftly through recitatives than e.g. Hasse or Vivaldi – is not necessarily result of seeking success on the market, but rather a result of artistic struggle for the most complete expression that was already fought in the youth, under the patronage system of Italian aristocrats.

I could go on, but in short: seen from the distance of hundreds of years, the “old masters” really seem old and static, not as people who evolved rapidly, struggled constantly, tried on different solutions. The best books on classical music set those old masters into motion. This is such a book. It vividly presents you Händel as young – and for someone who already was fascinated by Händel, it makes me now completely fall in love with him.