Musical Written Artefacts for 18th Century Opera Staging in London

George Frideric Handel’s Conducting Scores

Individual Research Project 14

George Frideric Handel’s conducting scores nearly completely cover his musical dramatic works, and so form a large corpus of performance material for 18th-century musical theatre. The conducting scores were used by Handel during rehearsals and performances of his operas and oratorios in London. However, these kind of music scores as such were not intended to preserve and retain musical works, but to serve practical purposes in the process of staging: As they contain all relevant musical parts including those of the orchestra and the singers, the composer would be able to make annotations and indicate necessary changes in the score when preparing a piece for the stage.

Music, as an acoustic phenomenon, is meant to be perceived aurally, and thus needs to be performed. Accordingly, the score, as a written artefact, has the distinct function to provide the information which is essential in order to realise a musical composition in practice. In musical theatre, in addition, the musical performance is joined together with dramatic acting in a particular staging. Therefore, a music theatre production is always a creative collaboration between several parties, and is hence dependent from many different circumstances and interests such as aesthetic, financial, political, or personal reasons requiring certain reactions and decisions which eventually would also affect the musical composition.

For example, in current music theatre practice, a particular role in a piece normally demands certain abilities from the performer whereas in early modern times, rather than the other way round, the choice of the performer would determine in which way their role would be composed, and consequently even concern the dramaturgic order of the piece as a whole. If now, there was a change in cast, Handel as a composer would have to recompose, or at least adapt and adjust certain parts of the piece to a minor or major extent, depending on the actual situation.

To sum up, conducting scores are not only to be considered as copies of the original composition for staging purposes, but as a central pivot in which multiple factors accumulate, as well as the composer’s medium to deal with those factors. As a result, conducting scores often present different layers of handwritten text from different working phases, as they were oftentimes reused for different stagings and settings.

The project acts on the assumption that, other than the bare composition of a musical piece, the scenic realisation of a music theatre piece always appears as a compromise solution. The project aims at systematically investigating Handel’s use of conducting scores in order to determine strategies of dealing with respective factors and conditions of the staging in interaction with the material, and to gain a broader insight into historical musical performance practice.