International Scholarly Conference at the Handel Festival in Halle an der Saale, 27 to 29 May 2024
Unendliche Schönheiten. Georg Friedrich Händel und die Musikkultur Frankreichs – Une infinité de belles choses. Georges Frédéric Haendel et la culture musicale française – Endless beauties. George Frideric Handel and French Music Culture
If one can trust the Mémoires d’un Musicien of 1756, then George Frideric Handel had in his library numerous volumes of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully, André Campra, Jean-Marie Leclair and Jean-Philippe Rameau. These volumes included Rameau’s works for keyboard and treatises on music. In 1733 Abbé Antoine François Prévost mentioned that Handel had “emprunté le fond d’une infinité de belles choses de Lully, et surtout des Cantates Françaises”. This is a good reason to set up an International Conference to reconsider the conditions, requirements, scope and significance of the impact of French music on Handel’s oeuvre. These influences affect nearly all genres in his oeuvre: the Italian operas based on French librettos (Teseo, Amadigi di Gaula), and the English oratorios based on French plays (Esther, Athalia, Theodora, Jephtha), the overtures and suites for orchestra, and for harpsichord. The influences are also visible in the cantatas (of which the French Sans y penser is certainly a special case), in Handel’s church music, the music for the stage drama Alceste, and in the collaboration with the French dancer Marie Sallé.
The program of the conference you can find on the German version.
Please download the Folder:
Please download the Call for Papers:
Call for papers Handel Conference 2024 [105KB/pdf]
Call for papers Händel-Konferenz 2024 [104KB/pdf]