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Ellen T. Harris. Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii, 430 pp. ISBN 0-674-00617-8 (hardcover). The London Daily Post of 15 April 173 8 reported that an "Effigie of Mr. Handel the famous composer of Musick, is going to be put in Vaux-Hall-Gardens, at the Expence of Mr. Jonathan Tyers [the owner of Vauxhall]."1 The statue, which was commissioned from the then unknown Louis-Franhois Roubiliac, shows the composer in casual dress strumming on a lyre and looking, to my eyes, more than a little uncomfortable-try the pose for yourself. For those whose classical learning was shaky, John Lockman made the symbolism clear in the London Magazine of May 1738: Drawn by the fame of these imbower'd retreats, Orpheus is come from the Elysian seats; Lost to th' admiring world three thousand years, Beneath lov'd Handel's form he re-appears.2 An engraving of Roubiliac's statue by Francesco Bartolozzi appears on the dust jacket of Ellen Harris's important new study. The comparison of famous composers with the mythological Orpheus is not unusual, and until fairly recently most of us would have accepted that it was their musical powers that were being compared. That still holds true, but Harris also draws our attention to another element of the Orpheus legend. She quotes the Hellenistic poet Phanocles who "specifically relates that Orpheus was killed because after Eurydice' s death he was 'the first in Thrace to desire men and to disapprove the love of women'" (p. 32). It is this leitmotif that runs throughout her detailed study of Handel's Chamber Cantatas, still the least known of this composer's works. So is this another "outing" of Handel? Well, yes and no. Harris supplies a carefully-balanced and admirably-researched account of the cantatas. These works are multi-faceted and her readings of both compositions and context are sympathetic to this fact. In good postmodern fashion she eschews a single point of view and instead invites the reader to participate in the interpretation. Do you need Handel to be gay? Then, you will find evidence to support this. Is it essential to your enjoyment of his music that Handel be heterosexual? In that case you will be comfortable with what is presented here. Are you opposed to all this hermeneutic musing and only interested in "the facts"? Well there is plenty for you, too, in Harris's discussion of chronology based on archival documents and on paper types and watermarks and rastra rulings. In the end, the author believes, all these interpretations can coexist. The different readings, at one level representing present day battles for political and professional territory, are at another level simply derived from "a deep-seated desire to identify personally with what one loves." Paraphrasing that indomitable eighteenth-century Handelian, Mrs. Delany, Harris states: "I do not write to spread tattle, but so 'that you may not be ignorant of the ways of the world'" (p. 24). One thing that all biographers of Handel have stressed is his independence. Apart from a short stint as an organist in Halle and his time in the opera orchestra in Hamburg he never had what an eighteenth-century musician would call a regular job, except, that is, for his appointment in Hanover, and he was absent from that most of the time. Until he moved into his own London house in 1723, he managed to ingratiate himself with various aristocratic patrons who provided him with food and accommodation and paid him for his work without it suggesting the kind of servitude that was Bach's lot. This was true for his stay with the Marquis Ruspoli in Italy and also for the time he spent in the Burlington coterie in London and at Cannons, the Edgware home of the Duke of Chandos. During this period, 1706-23, Handel wrote well over 100 Italian cantatas for these aristocratic circles: Harris presents clear evidence that there was a substantial same-sex culture within this environment. …

canadian university music review

Ellen T. Harris. Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii, 430 pp. ISBN 0-674-00617-8 (hardcover)