Tag: Sosarme

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Handel Fernando 6th April 2022 at The London Handel Festival

By Miranda Houghton

The Hallische Händel Ausgabe is a collection of Handel editions held in Halle, the city of Handel’s birth. A new edition of Fernando, re di Castiglia, the product of extensive scholarly research by Michael Pacholke and subsequently published by Bärenreiter will be performed by Opera Settecento at both the London and Halle Festivals in 2022. This edition is based on a comprehensive study of all the surviving sources. It represents both published research and functions as a performing edition. At the request of the Director of the Halle Händel Festival, Clemens Birnbaum, Opera Settecento under the baton of Leo Duarte, oboist and musicologist were preparing to perform the premiere of Fernando in 2020 before the pandemic struck. We live in hope that both the London and Halle Festivals will return with their usual magnificence in 2022.

Anyone was able to attend the Alan Curtis-devised staged production in 2005 or has acquired a copy of the CD might well ask on what grounds the Halle Handel edition can claim the April performance as a premiere. The critical edition editor explains that the Curtis version of Fernando is in fact a significantly-shortened version of the 1732 (First) version of Sosarme, but with the Iberian setting and the character names derived from the libretto of Fernando. In terms of the proportion of music which appears only in Fernando and not in Sosarme, the recording includes only 2 bars. Not one of the over 130 bars of recitative which were deleted when Fernando became Sosarme was reinstated by Curtis.

In December 1731 after Ezio was completed, Handel began to compose his second new opera for the 1731/32 season. He chose as his text Dionisio, Re di Portogallo by Antonio Salvi (1664-1724,) first set to music by Giacomo Antonio Perti in Florence in 1707. The following appeared in the original published version of the libretto:

“Most honoured reader, Dionision, King of Portugal, had with Queen Isabella of Aragon his first-born son who succeeded him on the throne. He also had a daughter who was married to Fernando, King of Castile. He had in addition several illegitimate children, amongst whom was Alfonso Sancio who, because he was loved above all others by his father, aroused such jealousy in Prince Alfonso that, fearing that the succession to the crown might fall to Sancio, after many manifestations of ill will and anger towards his father, eventually declared against him with a shameless rebellion. Dionisio was compelled to gather together the forces of the kingdom and attack Colimbra (ancient spelling) in order to restore his son and the rebels to their duty and to punish them. The resistance was so obstinate, as was the siege, and the anger of the father and the son went so far that, among historians there are those who assert that they finally challenged each other to end their conflict with a duel; but because of the great danger of parricide, Queen Isabella hastened there, settled their differences and reconciled the minds of her husband and son.

All this is true, taken from the History of Portugal written in French by Monsieur Lequien de la Neufville. The rest is a poetic fiction, based upon probability.”

In his creation of a new opera, Handel as usual changed the title to reflect one of the other key characters, calling his new work Fernando, re di Castiglia. At the end of the 13th century, King Dionysius I of Portugal signed the peace treaty of Alcañices between Portugal and Castile. Ferdinand IV of Castile was at the time twelve years old. The treaty was sealed with two marriages, the more important of which was that of Ferdinand IV of Castile and Constança de Portugal, (called Elvida in Fernando,) King Dionysius’ daughter. They were betrothed in 1291 when Ferdinand was six and Constança not even two years old and married when they were respectively 17 and 12. King Dionysius did indeed face a rebellion from his eldest son, Alfonso who feared he would lose his right to the succession in favour to Alfonso Sanchez, his father’s favourite. In fact Ferdinand and Constança had died about a decade before the rebellion occurred, so Ferdinand’s embodied involvement in the plot is poetic licence. What is document is the fact that Elizabeth or Isabel de Aragão did stand between the rival armies of her husband and her son, preventing battle on that occasion and contributing to her canonisation after death.

Scholars are not sure who reworked Salvi’s text into the “book” Handel set. However some anomalies which have been described as “poetic awkwardness” and a poor command of grammar have led to the suggestion the librettist was Giacomo Rossi. We know he prepared the libretti of Rinaldo and Il pastor fido and he is also credited as librettist of Silla which was later recycled as Amadigi di Gaula. Rossi’s limitations with the Italian language were apparently well-known amongst the Italian chattering classes in London who already objected to the way Handel stripped fine Italian poetry down to a bare minimum to appease his inadequately polyglot London audience. In 1729 Paulo Antonio Rolli mockingly wrote to Giuseppe Riva, “Now I must inform you that Signor Rossi, that famous Italian poet (not ed.), is Handel’s librettist.

The action of Fernando takes place in Coimbra, currently Portugal’s 4th largest city. The city is under siege which dates the plot to between 1280-1320. This makes Fernando the second most “modern” of Handel’s operas, after Tamerlano. There are no documents explaining why Handel changed the locus of the drama two thirds of the way through its composition. It could be because the setting was within living memory rather than set in Ancient Rome or a mythical middle-Eastern country. From 1727-1729 there had been war between England and Spain, so the portrayal of the eponymous magnanimous hero as a Spanish king might have offended some at a time when Spaniards were demonised as the enemy. By contrast Portugal had for centuries been a traditional ally of England.

Perhaps, instead it was the focus on a conflict between father and son which was felt to be insensitive. George II, one of Handel’s staunchest supporters and his son, Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales were estranged at the time of Fernando’s composition. When Queen Anne died, Frederick’s parents left Hanover for England. Their eldest son was 7 and was not reunited with his parents until he was 14. When his father ascended the throne in 1727, Frederick was called upon to give up his role as Head of the House of Hanover and take his place at his parents’ side as Prince of Wales. Sadly the separation irreparably damaged his relationship with his parents. In England he surrounded himself with dissenting politicians and supported The Opera of the Nobility, the rival opera company to Handel’s because his father attended and financially supported the latter. Frederick Lewis also played the cello and was a discerning collector of paintings as well as composers. His country seat was at Cliveden where the masque, Alfred (including Rule Britannia,) written by Arne was premiered by a cast including Kitty Clive. Would a depiction of a warlike rebellion in the 13th century of a son against his father be viewed as too resonant with England in 1732 and therefore disloyal to Handel’s greatest moral and financial supporter? Frederick, Prince of Wales married Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. The wedding was celebrated by a production of Atalanta at the King’s Haymarket and Porpora’s serenata, La festa d’Imeneo at The Opera of Nobility. As far as we know, the conflict was not resolved; Frederick Lewis predeceased his father at the age of 44.

Whatever the reason for realising the plot’s insensitivity, its locus was shifted to Lydia in a mythical period. The names of 6 out of 7 characters were changed. The editor of this edition posits that the only remaining connection to the Iberian peninsula is the use of a Sarabande in the opening movement of the overture – something unique amongst Handel’s operas. The reworking of Fernando (which Handel dropped within sight of the end of Act Two) involved significant cuts in the first accompagnato and in about half of the recitatives. Much has been written about the London audience struggling with long stretches of Italian recitative, even though for the most part a published translation was made available for premieres. It could be in part due to the fact that the preceding opera, Ezio which contained extensive recitative was not successful.

So Fernando became Sosarme and was premiered to great acclaim on 15th February 1732. At least two members of the Royal Family attended each of the initial 11 performances. The first cast featured Senesino, Anna Maria Strada del Po, Francesca Bertolli and the great bass, Montagnana. It also included an Italian tenor called Pinacci. When viewing Baroque opera from a 21st century perspective, we must suspend notions of copyright in the sense of droit d’auteur (rather than publishing copyright which was already in its infancy.) Operas at this time were events, the best possible combination of libretto, stage machinery, star singers, fine players and of course the music. Because of the success of Sosarme, Handel recycled five arias from the opera in the pasticcio, Oreste which he put together himself. He also reused a duet from Sosarme in Imeneo. Sosarme was reviewed by Handel in 1734. He made yet more cuts in recitative, reducing 505 lines of text to 365.

The differences between Sosarme 1732 and Sosarme 1734 largely came about because 6 of the 7 vocal parts were allocated to new singers. In taking over from Senesino, Giovanni Carestini retained none of Sosarme’s arias without alteration from the 1732 version of the opera. Two of the arias he sang were rearranged from Riccardo Primo. Two further arias were transposed upwards to reflect the higher fach of Carestini’s voice. The two duets were rearranged so that the lower part didn’t go too low for Carestini (who we think was a dramatic soprano rather than a contralto.) Otto Erich Deutsch, the 20th century Austrian musicologist, presumed Durastanti performed Haliate (which had been sung by a tenor in 1732) as trouser role. There are marks in the score which suggest the role was largely transposed up an octave, but then the second and third arias were subsequently removed. The performance materials have not survived from the 1734 performances so we cannot verify if this role was allocated to Durastanti. Two of Erenice’s arias were excised from the 1734 version and it appears the remaining arias were raised in pitch by a tone. The role of Argone was given to Scalzi, a soprano castrato. He was allocated two more rearranged arias from Riccardo Primo and a rearranged aria sung by Sosarme in the 1732 version. Whoever sang Melo’s role in 1734 lost one aria and the remaining arias were reworked for a singer with a more restricted range than Bertolli in 1732. With the loss of Montagnana, the first of Altomaro’s 1732 arias was cut (music which was lifted by the composer from Aci, Galatea e Polifemo) and also the second so that the baddie was left with only one aria to sing.

In conclusion, there is no such thing as a definitive Baroque opera in the sense that each busy composer would reuse/recycle/reinvent existing arias or adapt popular arias favoured by a new cast member to fit the context. The dramma, or section of epic poetry if you will, was at the heart of each opera and the arias had emotional themes which made them eminently adaptable to being recycled in a similar context. Two thirds of Sosarme started life as Fernando. It could be argued that there is a greater overlap between Fernando and Sosarme 1732 than there is between the two versions of what we now consider to be Handel’s opera, Sosarme.

Fernando, re di Castiglia: A Handel Premiere, Wednesday 06 April 2022, 19:00 at St George’s, Hanover Square – Opera Settecento conducted by Leo Duarte.

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Handel, Maestro al Cembalo

Peter Holman

In the last issue of Handel News (No.71) Brian Robins took us in imagination into the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket to experience the staging of one of Handel’s operas. As he rightly pointed out, it was quite different from most modern performances. Indeed, he suggested that that the modern norm – ‘an austere, darkly-lit stage’ unvaried throughout the opera, modern dress, ‘soap-opera’ acting and that indispensable standby, the AK 47 – is ‘aesthetically diametrically opposed to the way Handel’s operas were staged in London in his own day’. Quite.

In this article I will take the reader again into the King’s Theatre, but this time to focus on the pit when Handel was in command. I use ‘pit’ as shorthand: as 18th-century pictures show, such as the well-known painting of an opera performance in the Teatro Regio in Turin c.1750 , opera houses were laid out so that all the musicians could see the stage while seated. Sunken pits were popularised by Wagner at Bayreuth and were designed so that the audience could not see the musicians and only the conductor could see the stage. I would prefer to use the historically appropriate word ‘orchestra’ rather than ‘pit’, but a potential confusion lurks in it: now it means a group of instrumentalists but in Handel’s time it meant the place where they played. The change to a sunken pit had profound implications for the way operas were directed, and it is now an obstacle to achieving truly historically informed performances of Handel’s operas, as we shall see.

We might think that modern performances of Handel’s music are by definition historically informed if they use period instruments, but that is far from the case. Let us start with the way the instruments are laid out. We have no pictures of operas being performed in Vanbrugh’s Haymarket Theatre, built in 1705 and destroyed by fire in 1789, but we have no reason to think that Handel or anyone else using it departed from the norm for Italian opera, as shown in the Turin painting. The continuo team was not a single group but was divided into two at each end of the pit, with the bass players (including double basses and bassoons) grouped around the two harpsichords, some of them reading over the shoulders of the keyboard players. This was partly so that the double basses did not obscure the audience’s view, but mainly to ensure that the singers could hear the accompaniment anywhere on the stage. Pasquale Cafaro, maestro al cembalo at Naples, argued against the removal of the second harpsichord in 1773 by pointing out that (in translation) ‘the second cembalo, violoncello and double bass, in that position [Stage Left], are absolutely necessary to assist the singers, at those moments when they find themselves far from the first [continuo group], to ensure that the singers will not stray from the straight path of perfect intonation’ (1). The second harpsichord was not removed from the Haymarket Theatre until the start of the 1781 season (2).

I will return to the way the continuo groups operated later, but Cafaro tells us that the maestro al cembalo was seated at the first instrument, Stage Right (on the left from the audience’s perspective), thought to be the more ‘noble’ side of the theatre, where the heroes and heroines tended to stand. This position tells us that the maestro – Handel in our case – did not try to exert control over his orchestra in performance. This began to change after Handel’s time, as is shown by Rousseau’s diagram of the pit at Dresden in 1754, published in his Dictionnaire de Musique, where Johann Adolf Hasse’s harpsichord is now in the middle of the pit. But the maestro in eighteenth-century Italian opera never stood and conducted with a baton, as routinely happens in supposedly ‘historically informed’ performances today. Rossini was still directing from the keyboard in the 1820s, as is shown by Stendahl’s well-known description of him taking ‘his seat at the piano’ for the first performance of new operas, and rising ‘from his seat at the piano’ to acknowledge the applause at the end of arias (3). The Frenchman Charles de Brosses, visiting Italy in 1739-40, wrote that the Italians ‘never beat time at the opera, whatever the size of the orchestra, however many parts the aria being played is in’ (4). Time-beating was the norm in French opera, and France was to be the cradle of modern-style baton conducting at the end of the 18th century.

Returning to the painting of the Teatro Regio in Turin, placing the bass instruments at each end of the pit meant that there was room of two rows of violinists and other higher-pitched instruments between them. It was standard practice for the first violins to be in a line facing the stage, with the leader sitting next to the maestro, sometimes on a raised seat. Again, this suggests a situation in which the members of the orchestra had much more individual autonomy than in modern orchestras, even those using period instruments. Since they spent much of the time in operas of the period doubling the voice, it made sense for the first violins to be able to watch the singers. The second violins, oboes and (presumably) violas were placed against the stage facing the first violins so that they would easily maintain good ensemble with them. There was no need for the maestro to wave his arms around.

Brass instruments, which tend to be used only occasionally in the operas of Handel’s time, were placed at the side – as can be seen in the Turin picture, which includes two horns standing behind the maestro and playing with raised bells. In that position they could easily slip away when not needed. Handel’s opera orchestra was large by English standards and was thought to be one of the best in Europe, as J.J. Quantz recognised when he visited London from Dresden in 1727. He wrote after going to Ottone that ‘The orchestra consisted mostly of Germans, with some Italians and a couple of Englishmen. [Pietro] Castrucci, an Italian violinist, was the leader. The full ensemble, under Handel’s direction, created an excellent effect’ – ‘eine überaus gute Wirkung’ (5).

There is a crucial role for the continuo group in Handel’s operas. Not only did it accompany most of the recitatives, but he often scored arias for continuo alone or with a large number of passages where the rest of the orchestra is silent. For this reason, Handel and his contemporaries thought it essential to direct by playing the first harpsichord as part of the continuo group, and so I will devote the rest of this article to discussing the way it functioned.

First, we know from documents relating to the first years of the Haymarket Theatre, just before Handel arrived in London, that it included double basses as well as violoncellos. In 1708 ‘Seggione’ (i.e. Saggione, the Venetian double-bass player and composer Giuseppe Fedeli) was paid more than the rest of the orchestra along with his fellow continuo players, the harpsichordists Charles Dieupart and J.C. Pepusch, and the cellist Nicola Haym; this included ‘5 shillings per Practice’ – that is, for taking part in rehearsals, presumably without the rest of the orchestra (6).

A group of this sort can be seen in action in Marco Ricci’s series of paintings apparently depicting opera rehearsals ; they are traditionally said to depict rehearsals for the pasticcio Pyrrhus and Demetrius, arranged by Haym from Alessandro Scarlatti and put on at the Haymarket Theatre on 14 December 1708. One type (they fall into three basic types) shows a cellist, a double bass player and a lutenist all reading from a small oblong music book on the harpsichord’s music desk. There is only one keyboard and the rehearsal is in a grand room rather than in the theatre, so it apparently depicts a preliminary rehearsal, before the production was transferred to the stage and the second continuo group was added. Indications in Handel’s scores show that he continued to use a lute-family instrument – mostly a theorbo early on, an archlute later – until his last opera, Deidamia (1741); I have argued that his regular player was the Genoese musician John Francis Weber, active in London from at least 1721 to until his death in 1751 (7).

The practice of continuo players reading over the shoulder of harpsichordists was widespread and long-lived, which is not surprising since it had several advantages. Close proximity made for good ensemble. Decisions about continuo scoring could easily be worked out informally in rehearsal or even adjusted in the middle of a performance with a nudge or a nod. Most important, it meant that continuo players could read from the score (they need to see the vocal line in recitatives) without having to worry about page-turning – the harpsichordist could do it for them; all they had to have was good eyesight! A list of the opera orchestra at the Haymarket Theatre dated 22 November 1710 gives ‘Heyam’ (Haym) and ‘Pilotti’ (the Venetian Giovanni Schiavonetti, husband of the soprano Elisabetta Pilotti) as the cellists who are ‘to play every night and to take their places att ye [?first] Harpiscord [sic] by Turns’ (8). This document comes at a crucial moment in the history of the Haymarket opera company. Handel was already in London (he apparently arrived in September or October 1710 rather than November or December as used to be thought), and Rinaldo, his first London opera, was produced on 24 February 1711. Haym was to be Handel’s close colleague as librettist and cellist until his death in 1729.

All the evidence, from descriptions of Handel’s operas in performance, from his performing material, as well as the wider practice of Italian opera companies at the time, suggests that his continuo team consisted of six or seven instrumentalists divided into two groups: two harpsichords, two violoncellos, one or possibly two double basses, and a theorbo or archlute. These were the only continuo instruments regularly used in Italian opera at the time; given their popularity today with period-instrument groups, it is worth emphasising that Baroque guitars, harps, organs and regals had no place in the continuo group for Handel’s operas.

How would Handel have deployed his continuo group? Or, to use Donald Burrows’s formulation, ‘who does what, when?’ (9). The composer’s options would presumably have been: (1) everyone essentially playing throughout; (2) the team divided into a concertino playing throughout and a ripieno joining in at particular moments; (3) particular continuo instruments assigned to particular characters; or (4) some combination of the above.

At first sight Option 1 is the common-sense solution, since with continuo groups at each end of the pit it ensures the accompaniment is audible anywhere on the stage (which Pasquale Cafaro thought ‘absolutely necessary’), and with six or seven instruments it reduces the disparity of sound between the recitatives and the full orchestra in the arias. In the original performing material used by Handel and his continuo players, the so-called Direktsionspartituren (sometimes misleadingly translated as ‘conducting scores) and Cembalopartituren now mostly in Hamburg, the former (used by Handel himself and his bass players) are full scores as we might expect, while the latter (used by the second continuo team) vary in format, sometimes just giving the vocal line and bass or even just the bass line. But the Cembalopartituren do include the recitatives, which would have meant that the second group could take part in them – which of course is not evidence that it necessarily did so. However, the main disadvantage with this option is that an unvaried massed continuo sound would be tedious for players and listeners alike in an opera lasting three hours or more.

Option 2, the concertino-ripieno principle, is an obvious way of getting an opera into production with limited rehearsal, and is suggested by the Ricci paintings, which only show a single continuo group and one harpsichord. There is also evidence for it in the Cembalopartitur for Poro, which has four arias for the 1736-7 revival containing only the music for the orchestral passages, with rests in the solo vocal sections. There are also some early scores omitting the recitatives, such as those for Teseo (1713), Amadigi di Gaula (1715) and the 1720 version of Radamisto (10), as well as most of the harpsichord parts in the sets of performing material, now in Manchester, copied by Handel’s scriptorium for his friend and librettist Charles Jennens. However, Jennens may have had no interest in performing the operas complete, and some of the scores without recitatives are clearly just aria collections copied for domestic use. Nevertheless, the same feature can be seen in some scores of operas by Handel’s contemporaries.

Option 3, assigning continuo instruments consistently to particular characters, deployed ‘one for each speaker in a duologue’ as suggested by Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp (11), has become popular in modern productions of Handel, perhaps influenced by the indications in the score of Monteverdi’s Orfeo – in which, for instance, Caronte is allocated a regal. But Monteverdi’s continuo practice is much more subtle than that, and I know of no evidence for its use in Handel’s time. Also, using a keyboard or a lute alone ignores an important change to the role of bowed bass instruments around 1700. Before then, the sources of all sorts of concerted music show that it was the norm to accompany solo vocal sections just with continuo instruments, with the bowed basses playing only in tuttis or when the upper strings are playing. However, by Handel’s time the norm was for bowed basses to play throughout, in recitatives as well as arias, and there is a lot of evidence that double basses also played in solo sections, including in recitatives – something that is strongly suggested by the Ricci paintings.

This brings us to Option 4, combining these various approaches: in my opinion this is what Handel is likely to have done, and is the best solution for us today. We can presume that he started with a rough idea of the continuo scoring he wanted, ranging from the whole team playing together at climaxes to perhaps just two instruments in the most intimate moments, and then worked out a detailed scheme as rehearsals proceeded. There are some indications in the sources of Handel’s operas to help us understand his practice, though they are rather neglected by performers because they tend to be hidden away in the critical commentaries of editions. Interesting cases are the senza cembalo indications that occur in passages with continuo figures, as in ‘Spietati, io vi giurai’ from Rodelinda (1725) (HWV 19/16), implying the deployment of a lute or perhaps a continuo cellist playing in chords. Equally significant are some ‘Senza Lute’ indications, as in the arias ‘Scherza infida!’ and ‘Io ti bacio’ from Ariodante (1735) (HWV 33/23, 37). What is striking about these arias is that they are soft, slow and thinly scored, the sort of movements that conductors today tend to give to lutenists, silencing the harpsichords. Incidentally, these indications appear in the Cembalopartituren, which suggests that Handel’s lutenist played in the second continuo group, not the first.

A fascinating case of sophisticated continuo scoring is the duet ‘Tu caro sei il dolce mio tesoro’ from Sosarme (1732) (HWV 30/30). The orchestra is divided in places into two, with Elmira accompanied by pianissimo unison violins and a bass line marked ‘Cembalo 1mo con i suoi Bassi’, Sosarme by four unison violas and a second bass marked ‘Cembalo 2do Colla Teorba e i suoi Bassi’. These indications, which appear in the Cembalopartitur as well as the Direktsionspartitur, are significant because bassi is in the plural in both parts, suggesting a double bass as well as a violoncello in each group, and because it provides more evidence of the lutenist being assigned to the second group. It is unclear whether this divided continuo scoring is a special, unusual effect or just a notated example of a widespread semi-improvised practice, though there are other notated examples, including the duet ‘I’ll proclaim the wondrous way’ in the 1732 version of Esther (HWV 50b/32) and an aria by Pergolesi, used in Adriano in Siria, Act I, Scene 8, and L’Olimpiade, Act III, Scene 5 (see facsimiles of the scores).

Does all this matter? Yes, I think it does, because it suggests a mode of performance startlingly different even from most ‘historically informed’ performances. Handel as maestro al cembalo, seated at the first harpsichord and playing rather than conducting, did not impose his will on his singers and instrumentalists in performance as conductors do today. The way his orchestra would have been laid out, with the continuo team divided into two groups at either end of the pit and most of the other instruments in rows between them, was designed so that everyone could relate to the singers without his direct intervention, effectively working as a large chamber ensemble – which of course depends on not having a sunken pit. And with two harpsichords, two violoncellos, one or two double basses and a theorbo or archlute at his disposal, he would have been able to make the accompaniment of the recitatives almost as varied and expressive as the arias. It all reinforces the truth of L.P. Hartley’s dictum: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’.

Notes
(1) Gossett, P. (2006, reprinted 2008). Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, p.439.
(2) Petty, F.C. (1980). Italian Opera in London 1760-1800, p.183. Quoting Public Advertiser, 23 November 1781.
(3) Stendahl [Beyle, M.-H.], Life of Rossini, translated by R.N. Coe (New York, 1957), pp.112-113.
(4) President de Brosses en Italie: lettres familières écrites d’Italie en 1739 et 1740, 2 vols. (2/1858), Vol.II, p.378: ‘On bat la mesure … jamais à l’Opéra, quelque nombreux que soit l’orchestre, quelque chargé de parties que soit l’air que l’on exécute’.
(5) Burrows, D., Coffey, H., Greenacombe, J. & Hicks, A. (eds.) (2015). George Frideric Handel: Collected Documents, Volume 2, 1725-1734, pp.107-110.
(6) Milhous, J. & Hume, R.D. (eds.) (1982). Vice Chamberlain Coke’s Theatrical Papers 1706-1715, pp.67-71.
(7) Holman, P. (2015). Handel’s lutenist, the mandolino in England, and John Francis Weber. Händel-Jahrbuch, 61, pp.241-257, at pp.241-244.
(8) Milhous & Hume (1982). Op. cit., pp.159-161.
(9) Burrows, D. (2009). Who does what, when? On the instrumentation of the basso continuo and the use of the organ in Handel’s English oratorios. In Handel Studies: A Gedenkschrift for Howard Serwer (ed. R.G. King), pp.107-126.
(10) Dean, W. & Knapp, J.M. (1987). Handel’s Operas 1704-1726, pp.257, 291, 293, 359-360.
(11) Dean & Knapp (1987). Op. cit., p.32.