1736, has a charming sprightliness, similar to an instrumental suite for a fête, like the Firework Music, of which we shall speak later. The Overture to Saul, 1738, is a veritable Concerto for organ and orchestra, and the sonata form is adopted in the first movement.—We see then a very marked effort on the part of Handel, particularly in his youth, to vary the form of his Overture from one work to another.
Even when he uses the Lully type of Overture (and he seems to turn towards it more and more in his maturity) he transforms it by the spirit which animates it. He never allows its character to be purely decorative. He introduces therein always expressive and dramatic ideas.[1] If one cannot exactly call the splendid Overture to Agrippina, 1709, a Concert Overture of programme music, one cannot deny its dramatic power. The second movement bubbles with life. It is no longer an erudite divertissement, a movement foreign to the action, but it has a tragic character, and the response of the fugue is apparent in the severe and slightly restless subject of the first piece. For conclusion the slow movement is recalled by a solo on the oboe, which announces it out in the pathetic manner made so well known in certain recitatives of J. S. Bach.
- ↑ Scheibe, who was, with Mattheson, the greatest of German musical critics in Handel's time, states that the overture ought in its two first movements "to mark the chief character of the work"; and in the third movement "to prepare for the first scene of the piece" (Krit. Musikus, 1745). Scheibe himself composed in 1738 some Sinfonie "which expressed to some extent the contents of the works" (Polyeuctes, Mithridates).
