Review

Reviewed Work(s): Bach, Handel, Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays by Peter Williams

Review by: George J. Buelow
Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Jul., 1986), pp. 290-292
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/735892
Accessed: 06-09-2016 01:34 UTC

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Bach, Handel, Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays. Ed. by Peter Williams. pp. xiv + 363. (Cambridge
University Press, 1985, ?27.50.)

A volume of essays honouring the three great composers whose 300th birthdays were
celebrated in 1985 seems a valuable idea. Such a collection-what the Germans would call
a Gedenkschrift-has the potential not only to bring together new insights into the composers
and their music but also to reveal interrelationships between their achievements and the
state of music in the first half of the eighteenth century. For though the works of Bach,
Handel and Domenico Scarlatti are not really comparable in their specific stylistic features,
these remarkable geniuses are inextricably connected by their very prominence in late
Baroque music.
A few of the nineteen essays are major contributions, but, disappointingly, the
remainder are largely a pot-pourri of carefully prepared discussions that touch on only the
fringes of the lives and music of the three composers. Curiously, there is no major essay by a
German musicologist, even though German scholarship has been at the heart of Bach
research for at least a hundred years. The only essay from a German, 'The B Minor
Mass-Perpetual Touchstone for Bach Research' by the distinguished Leipzig Bach
scholar Hans Joachim Schulze, merely summarizes the history of the work and adds
nothing to our understanding of the score.
Apart from two by Italians and one by a Dutch writer, the remaining essays are almost
evenly divided between British and American authors. On the whole, the best of these
involve the music and life of Handel-indeed, it is only for the libraries of Handelians that
this book will be a necessity. They cannot afford to be without Donald Burrows's
clarification of Handel's professional relationship to, and musical achievements in,
Hanover; his essay is filled with illuminating and to date largely unknown documentation
and is enlivened by his unique knowledge of Handel autographs. If his conclusion
discourages-he finds that Handel wrote very little music in Hanover (five or six duets,
perhaps a similar number of Italian cantatas, and three sonatas)-he nevertheless
establishes for the first time the reality of Handel's professional life in a period that has been
badly described in most of the literature.
The jewel of the collection is Winton Dean's 'Handel's Early London Copyists', in
which he makes the first major additions to identified copyists of Handel manuscripts since
Jens Peter Larsen's much acclaimed original identifications some 30 years ago and the
additions to Larsen's work by Hans Dieter Clausen in his Hdndels Direktions-Partituren
(Hamburg, 1972). Dean's incomparable knowledge of Handel's manuscripts, and his
access to private collections in England which were inaccessible to both Larsen and
Clausen, has produced a treasure-trove of new facts. He not only shows how the
well-knownJohn Christopher Smith entered Handel's life as a copyist but adds the name of
D. Linike as a major figure in the production of Handel manuscripts during the period
1712-21. With a fund of new information, Dean refines the early datings of copyists
established by Larsen and contributes a number of new identities, helping, as he says, to
dispel some of the 'fog of obscurity and ignorance' that has so long hampered Handel
research.
Two articles concern the Chandos Anthems. Graydon Beeks in 'Handel and Music for
the Earl of Carnarvon' (drawn largely from his excellent unpublished dissertation on the
subject (University of California, Berkeley, 1981)) gives a solid if still not totally confirmed
chronology for the composition of the anthems. Gerald Hendrie's 'Handel's "Chandos"
and Associated Anthems: an Introductory Survey' offers little that has not already been
stated by others, including Beeks in his dissertation. Hendrie seems to have the singular
and ironic purpose of stating publicly that his edition of the Chandos Anthems, completed
in 1972, is only now about to be published by the Hallische Handel-Ausgabe, a fact of obvious
discomfort and even displeasure to the author.
Among the other essays the more important include Paul Brainard's 'Aria and
Ritornello: New Aspects of the Comparison Bach/Handel', with new and stimulating views
on the differences between the parody techniques found in the music of the two composers;
Robert Marshall's most helpful, if still incomplete survey 'Tempo and Dynamic
Indications in the Bach Sources: a Review of Terminology', which accumulates impressive

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data about Bach's own employment of word and symbol indications for dynamics, tempo
and Affekt; and Sheridan Germann's 'The Mietkes, the Margrave and Bach', which
adduces some fairly convincing evidence that an unsigned white harpsichord preserved at
Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, was built by Michael Mietke, builder of the instrument
Bach purchased for his employer Prince Leopold of Anhalt-C6then. By further, somewhat
labyrinthine threads of evidence, the author sees the possibility that Bach actually played
on the Charlottenburg instrument during his visit to Berlin in 1719.
Other authors besides Brainard attempt to interrelate Bach and Handel, and
sometimes Scarlatti, in some way, for example David Fuller ('The "Dotted Style" in Bach,
Handel, and Scarlatti'), Mark Lindley ('Keyboard Technique and Articulation: Evidence
for the Performance Practices of Bach, Handel and Scarlatti') and Alfred Mann ('Bach and
Handel as Teachers of Thorough Bass'). The most important of these approaches is
Giorgio Pestelli's 'Bach, Handel, D. Scarlatti and the Toccata of the Late Baroque', a
first-rate examination of the developing style of the keyboard toccata, with fascinating
views as to how the three masters used the genre in their own inimitable ways to create
important keyboard compositions.
The essays are arranged simply by alphabetical order of the authors' names. Thus the
concluding essay is Peter Williams's 'Figurae in the Keyboard Works of Scarlatti, Handel
and Bach: an Introduction'. This is less a cogent presentation of a single topic then a series
of observations centred on two complex and not entirely interrelated ideas: the late
Renaissance and Baroque theoretical concepts of figures, musical and rhetorical in origin,
and how they influenced composers such as those honoured in this book; and how
figures-that is, typical musical motifs, in this case keyboard figurations-are to be treated
as an element of performing practices. The latter part of Williams's discussion, although no
more than a series of comments about a few typical keyboard motifs, is important. I hope
the author will follow up this introduction to his ideas with an expanded investigation,
perhaps in book form. For all too little attention has been directed to the large corpus of
motivic figurations that make up a significant aspect of Baroque musical styles and were
often shared by a number of composers from the same chronological period (a fact that, for
example, made possible Handel's talent for absorbing by parody and borrowing techniques
the musical ideas of a number of composers without any clash of styles). Williams
demonstrates convincingly how a keyboard player must be aware that figurations demand
particular study and attention to phrasing and articulation.
Where Williams is confused and confusing is in his rather idiosyncratic discussion of
figurae as they are related to the concept of Affekt. Clearly, he mistrusts music theorists,
raising the question more than once whether or not composers were influenced by what
theorists, especially German ones, said about such ideas asftgurae and Affekt. The concepts,
he suggests, originated with certain 'old theorists', but in the next breath he cites definitions
of figurae by Johann Gottfried Walther, Bach's Weimar cousin, who is surely not to be
considered an 'old theorist'. While Williams is correct in saying that the concept of the
Affektenlehre-doctrine of the affections-was invented by German scholars in the early
twentieth century, it is not 'astonishing' that this Affektenlehre asserted that a piece of music
of the period had only one Affekt through its course. Williams continues: 'No thinking
performer ever gave such an idea more than a passing smile.' Quite the contrary: any
knowledgeable performer, aware of both the aesthetic ideas of the Baroque era and the
nature of almost all Baroque music would know that this aspect of the German doctrine,
even if artificially conceived, is based on solid evidence in theory and music.
Williams's confusion may lie in his understanding of the meaning of affection as it is
clearly defined in almost all music treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For
example, in referring to one figure, Williams says: 'obviously the way the motif is scored,
the tempo in which it is played or the direction in which it goes ... can all produce variable
Affekte'. Baroque theorists, however, are not unclear in their insistence that an affection can
result only from a sum total of compositional and textual elements and that motifs orfigurae
are only decorations, one element in the expression of an affection, just as figures of speech
can only decorate the expressive content of any rhetorical passage. Figures have no
inherent primary affective character, and it is misleading to suggest that they do.
Williams's doubts about the influence of theorists on the compositional styles of those he

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calls 'top-rank composers' would be less severe, perhaps, if he realized that Baroque
theorists are not in general prescribing to composers but rather describing practices as they
understood them and as they thought other students of composition should understand
them. And while Williams might demur, because they were not 'top-rank', nevertheless
almost every important Baroque theorist was a composer, most of them of considerable
accomplishment.
This volume has some of the weaknesses found in many Festschriften published in
recent years: though an admirable attempt on the part of its editor to produce a
distinguished set of essays to honour the great Baroque triumvirate, it is ultimately
disappointing because the interest of the various topics and the quality of the scholarship
are uneven. There are no essays on Bach or Scarlatti of comparable weight and importance
to those by Burrows and Dean. Some of the articles are of only marginal interest, some will
be found stimulating only by certain specialists. This is not a book for the general,
musically educated reader, and that is a pity. As far as I am aware, 1985 produced no single
study of significance for the untold millions of informed, if amateur, students of Bach,
Handel and Scarlatti. The fact that musicology has not seized such a golden opportunity
perhaps says something critical about the state of the discipline in 1985.
GEORGE J. BUELOW

The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Ed. by Stanley Sadie. 3 vols. pp. xxxvi +
xiii + 982, xiii + 921. (Macmillan, London, 1984, ?250.00.)

This is an enormously valuable work. A three-volume dictionary of instruments cou

hardly fail to have some value; but the great thing about this one, which will be consulted
by many for years to come, is that it can be trusted. In the same format as The New Grov
(NG), each volume averages 900 pages, while, as to illustrations, Vol. I (A-F) alone h
over 500. Almost every entry has a full bibliograpy; and mercifully, middle C is still c', no
c4 as physicists have been trying to force on us.
The Preface explains how material from NG, 'the parent work', is re-used along with a
vast amount of entirely fresh writing and a great multiplication of entries. As soon as the
project was envisaged, editor and publisher must have appreciated that far more than a
scissors-and-paste job would be required and that big decisions needed to be made. Nearly
40 authors and part-authors not in NG have been co-opted for NGI (the present work). One
decision has been to include entries on individual instrument-makers (and none on
players). More weighty is the decision for wholesale abolition of the 'nation' headings
which in NG ('Afghanistan'-'Zimbabwe') covered folk and non-Western instruments-
mostly very well-in favour of an individual article for every instrument ('A(i)'-'Zye-zye');
this is most of all where those who own NG must now have NGI as well. One does not forget
the great service that Sibyl Marcuse's single-volume dictionary (1964) has performed; but
the NGI articles, not only much longer and more detailed, carry the further authority of
men and women who combine their high scholarship with familiarity with the instruments
and the players on their home ground.
Entries on traditional Western instruments are largely taken over from NG, though
seldom wholly. The already strong 'Harpsichord' team is now further strengthened by
Waight (Italian instruments) and Dowd (the Blanchet school). Some changes are worth
mentioning here. NG (Ripin): 'almost all 16th-century Italian harpsichords ... .usually have
two sets of strings tuned in unison, although some survivors . . .'; NGI: 'it seems that the
I x 8', 1 x 4' instruments were more numerous that the 1 x 8' ones. The two types
together (i.e. 1 X 8' and 1 X 8', 1 X 4') were clearly in the majority in the 16th century'-a
departure from the previous view (and those of Russell and Hubbard) founded on the
minutest examination of the subsequently altered originals. The disputed question of two
pitches a fourth apart, summarized in NG within the space appropriate to that work, is now
expanded, the arguments on the two sides being recounted at great length, though still
leaving the question unsettled. This is good. In contrast to past historians, who have
generally felt bound at all costs to state a conclusion, one can detect here-and again

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