Hot Deals G. F. Handel: Ode for St. Cecilia's Day - Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic cheap
G. F. Handel: Ode for St. Cecilia's Day - Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Overview
The practice of celebrating St. Cecilia's festival (November 22nd) with elaborate musical compositions was long established when Handel composed his first Cecilia Ode (the gorgeous Alexander's Feast) in 1736. As far back as 1683 a group of musical connoisseurs organized elaborate annual concerts in which the best poets and musicians participated. Poems in praise of the patron saint of music were written by Dryden, Shadwell, Congreve and others (in 1708 Pope turned out one of the finest of the species). These poems were set as ambitious choral-orchestral works by such composers as Purcell, Blow, Draghi, Eccles and Jeremiah Clarke. Purcell's Cecilia Odes are among his finest compositions, and yield place only to Handel's.
Handel's second Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day (1739), like Alexander's Feast, is a setting of words by John Dryden. By the third decade of the eighteenth century Dryden had become a classic. Many responsible critics considered him to be England's greatest poet--not barring Milton or Shakespeare. So it can well be imagined that Handel, in composing new music for Dryden's two odes (they had originally been set by Jeremiah Clarke and G.B. Draghi) was determined to put his best foot forward. And the two works are among the most stunning and "extravagant" he wrote--filled with inspired instrumental coloring, virtuoso word coloring, an often original approach to form. Inexplicably enough, Handel was not above lifting a tune here and there from other composers in the second Ode. The usual defense made for this is that music was considered common property in the baroque period. Nothing could be farther from the truth: plagiarism was as odious then as it is now. The simple proof is to be seen from the fact that Handel's enemies embarrassed him no end every time they found him out in a plagiarism. They might have had a field-day with the second Ode, which draws extensively on two harpsichord suites by a talented German contemporary of Handel's Gottlieb Mu...
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