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Handel's Flute Parts
meet an E′′′, very rarely an F′′′, and I have only noticed a single case in which he has written a G′′′ for the flute. He uses the three lowest notes F to D much less frequently than Bach, who introduces them freely. Though he sometimes uses flutes in tutti movements along with oboes, trumpets, bassoons, and occasionally horns, as a rule, like Bach, he reserves them for special effects and to accompany vocal solos or duets.
Although Handel introduced the transverse flute in a work written in 1705, in his earlier operas he almost exclusively uses the flute-à-bec, which instrument he continued to employ throughout his whole career, including his last work, The Triumph of Truth and Time (1757). But this production was really a rechauffé of an earlier work written in 1708, and it is interesting to notice that in some numbers where the flute-à-bec was used in 1708, the transverse flute is substituted for it in the later version. One number in this version in which the flute-à-bec is retained is taken bodily from his early opera Agrippina. In Giustino, i. 4 (1737), he uses a bass flute-à-bec, and in Riccardo (iii. 2) we have the solitary instance of his use of a bass transverse flute. It tranposes from F minor to G minor, and is allotted a melody, extending from G′ to B′′♭, the accompaniment being
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