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HIS TECHNIQUES AND WORKS
191
even in France (generally so unyielding to outside influences).[1]
It is not only of this popularity, a little banal, of which I wish to speak, which one could not ignore—for it is only a stupid pride and a small heart which denies great value to the art which pleases humble people;—what I wish to notice chiefly in the popular character of Handel's music is that it is always truly conceived for the people, and not for an élite dilettanti, as was the French Opera between Lully and Gluck. Without ever departing from his sovereign ideas of beautiful form, in which he gave no concession to the crowd, he reproduced in a language immediately "under-
- ↑ Paul Marie Masson has noticed that about the date of 1716, in a volume of Recueil d'airs serieux et à boire (Bibl. Nat. Vm. 549), an Aria del Signor Inden (sic), "air ajouté au ballet de l'Europe Galante." The Meslanges de musique latine, françoise et italienne of Ballard (in 1728), contains amongst the Italian airs Arie de Signor Endel (p. 61). All the airs of the Chasse du cerf by Sere de Rieux (1734) are Handel airs adapted to French words. An article by Michel Brenet, La librairie musicale en France de 1653 à 1790, d'après les registres de priviléges (Sammelbände I.M.G., 1907) gives a series of French Editions of Handel from 1736, 1739, 1749, 1751, 1765. In 1736 and in 1743 in Concerts Spirituels some of his airs and his Concerti Grossi were given (Brenet: Les Concerts en France sous l'ancien régime, 1900). A number of his airs were arranged for the flute by Blavet in his three Receuils de pièces, petits airs, brunettes, minuets, etc., accommodés pour les flutes traversières, violins, etc., which appeared between 1740 and 1750. Handel was so well known in Paris that they sold his portrait there in 1739. (See a tradesman's advertisement in the Mercure de France, June, 1739, Vol. II, page 1384.)
