study here what superficial readers have called his plagiarisms, particularly taking, for example, Israel in Egypt, where the most barefaced of these cases occur, one would see with what genius and insight Handel has evoked from the very depths of these musical phrases, their secret soul, of which the first creators had not even a presentiment. It needed his eye, or his ear, to discover in the serenade of Stradella its Biblical cataclysms. Each read and heard a work of art as it is, and yet not as it is; and one may conclude that it is not always the creator himself who has the most fertile idea of it. The example of Handel well proves this. Not only did he create music, but very often he created that of others for them. Stradella and Erba were only for him (however humiliating the comparison) the flames of fire, and the cracks in the wall, through which Leonardo saw the living figures. Handel heard great storms passing through the gentle quivering of Stradella's guitar.[1]
This evocatory character of Handel's genius should never be forgotten. He who is satisfied with listening to this music without seeing what it expresses—who judges this art as a purely formal art, who does not feel his expressive and suggestive power, occasionally so far as hallucination, will never understand it. It is a music which paints
- ↑ One can examine here in detail the two very characteristic instrumental interludes from Stradella's Serenata a 3 con stromenti which had the fortune of blossoming out into the formidable choruses of the Hailstones and the Plague of Flies in Israel. I have made a study of this in an article for the S.I.M. review (May and July, 1910), under the title of Les plagiats de Handel.
