This page has been validated.
HIS TECHNIQUE AND WORKS
129
editing Handel's works, found them given as alternatives, and either suppressed them (those which were false to the historic sense of the text) or else rewrote them himself. It was in this last point that he stopped short of all possible guarantees of exactness, or at least of true resemblance. But his revisions found few supporters, and a discussion on his treatment of this subject has been recently raised amongst German musical writers.[1] This debate, the examination of which cannot be entered into in this volume, authorised, it seems, the following conclusions:
- (1) The vocal ornaments were not improvised and left to the fancy of the singer, as is often asserted, but they were marked with precise indications in the singer's parts, and also in the score of the accompanying clavecinist:[2]
- (2) They were not mere caprices of empty virtuosity, but the result of a reflective virtuosity, and subject to the general style of the piece. They served to accentuate more
- ↑ See especially Hugo Goldschmidt: Treatise on Vocal Ornaments, Volume I, 1907; Max Seiffert: Die Verzierung der Sologesänge in Haendels Messias (I.M.G., July-September, 1907, and Monthly Bulletin of I.M.G., February, 1908); Rudolf Wustmann: Zwei Messias-probleme (Monthly Bulletin I.M.G., January, February, 1908).
- ↑ M. Seiffert has given a description of the whole series of copies of Handel Operas and Oratorios in the Lennard collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. There are to be found there (in pencil) the indication of the ornaments and vocalises executed by the singers. According to M. Seiffert these indications were by Christopher Smith, the friend and factotum of Handel. According to Mr. Goldschmidt they were put in at the end of the eighteenth century. In any case they show a vocal tradition which affords a good opportunity of preserving for us the physiognomy of the musical ornaments of Handel's time.
