The politics of opera. Handel's opera academies 1719-1737

27 to 31 May 2023

The 2023 Handel Festival in Halle an der Saale will be held under the motto "The Opera: Dispute over Dideldum and Dideldi". The quote from a poem in a London journal from 1725, which refers to the competition between the opera composers Giovanni Bononcini and George Frideric Handel, is intended to emphasise that opera has always been the subject of disputes in which cultural-political and artistic interests have been linked. This is certainly true of the two opera academies for which Handel was director between 1719 and 1734, and which were followed by the competition between the "Opera of the Nobility" and Handel's work at the Covent Garden Theatre until 1737. Links to overarching political, cultural and social negotiation processes can be seen at almost all levels of opera production: be it in the organisation, patronage and financing of the academies, be it in the audience, be it in public criticism, be it in the choice of repertoire and libretti, be it in the singers, be it in the scenarios and stage sets, be it in the compositions themselves.

The International Academic Conference on the Handel Festival 2023 aims to explore the aforementioned political dimensions of Handel's academies, as well as their preconditions and consequences, and to invite comparisons with earlier and later forms of institutionalisation of opera as an art form. Last but not least, the aim is also to critically update the historical findings against the background of the current situation of opera houses.

The conference is sponsored by the International Office of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

Further information can also be found on the website of the Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft: www.haendel.de

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The programme is now available as a PDF via the following links. The abstracts for the individual lecture topics can be downloaded and viewed in advance as PDFs on this page.

Programme International Academic Conference 2023

 

Flyer International Academic Conference 2023

International Handel Research Prize

On 30 May 2023, the Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft e. V., International Association, awarded the 6th International Handel Research Prize to the Berlin musicologist Christoph Schaller for his master's thesis "Listening to Handel 1785-1900: The Messiah in the cycle of canonisation, work constitution and musical perception". Based on Handel's Messiah, the topic of the thesis is the question of the development of a canon of masterpieces in music history. "The study shows in an exemplary manner how the supposedly stable canon of musical masterpieces is thoroughly historically conditioned, fluid and differently motivated depending on the historical context," said Prof. Dr Wolfgang Hirschmann, President of the Handel Society and chairman of the jury, in his laudatory speech for the award winner.

Further information can be found on the homepage of the Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft.