J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

HANDEL AND HIS FOLLOWERS
For many years England’s geographical and cultural isolation tended to keep it
out of step with wider European trends in musical history. On one hand, this resulted
in the development of genres (the oratorio, the ballad-opera, the glee, Anglican chant,
eighteenth-century and Victorian hymn-tunes) with no very close parallel elsewhere.
On the other it caused a tendency to follow stylistic trends at a certain distance,
retaining particular stylistic means beyond their use in other places. This situation is
not as historically inevitable as it appears. In Handel, in Haydn, in Weber, and in
Mendelssohn, the English public were able to make the acquaintance of—indeed to
lionise—some of the leading composers of the day. There was a strong public for the
music of Beethoven, Berlioz, and Brahms almost as soon as it appeared. Nevertheless,
an awareness of the latest stylistic developments is not quite the same as the
willingness or ability to participate in those developments. During much of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the English were much more active as consumers
than as producers of music.
Traditionally, much of this relative stagnation has been attributed to the
overwhelming influence of Handel upon English musical life: ‘one of the greatest of
German composers, who finally planted his heavy heel on our island music-making’. 3
It seems rather harsh to blame Handel for simply being a very good composer who was
able to develop a style that defined English musical taste for generations to come. Erik
Routley’s diagnosis—that the superficies of Handel’s style were all too easy to imitate,
his ability to create large coherent structures almost impossible—may not be too wide
3 R. Vaughan Williams, National music and other essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1963),
pp.166-67; the same idea was expressed by Ernest Walker in A history of music in England (Oxford,
1907), pp.235-6, 261. See N. Temperley, ‘Xenophilia in British musical history’, Nineteenthcentury
British music studies, ed. B. Zon and J. Sampson, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp.9-10: ‘I
did my best to squash it [this idea] as long ago as 1960, but it is still alive and kicking.’ The 1960
reference concerns his article ‘Handel’s influence on English music’, Monthly Musical Record, 90
(1960), 163-74.
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