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Ad01801
. 334 The Publishers' Circular June I & ^
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JCjL ^ cxXM XJxB , Xsi » By Mrs . JULIAN MARSHALL , FORMING THE NEW VOLUME OF THE SERIES OF BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT MUSICIANS , Edited by FBANCIS HUBFFEE , WIXjXj IBIS ISSTTIEID IlsT . A . FEW ZD _ A . "X " S . Crown 8 vo . cloth , price 3 s . EXTRACT FROM PREFACE . STor would the record of names and dates be , in any sense , f \ life of Handel . Their music apart , there are composers , the external events of whose lives might be recorded in a page . His travels , and his public life as an opera and oratorio director and impresario—at a time when Italian Opera , new to this country , was a source of public excitement , almost a feature in national history—cause his career to be so interwoven with the political , social , and literary life of the first half of the Eighteenth Century , that a great deal of extraneous matter must be ton ched on to render the story coherent or intelligible . But , strangely enough , if the works of this stirring time could be obliterated to-morrow , they would not , with a very few exceptions , be missed in the country where Handel is best known and most appreciated . The Handel who has been well-nigh deified by the English people is the Handel of 1738-59 : yet for fifteen , at least , of these twenty-one years , there is less matter of a strictly biographical nature than at any other time ; their history is told in the Oratorios . Yet " these great works were , in the strictest sense , the outcome of Handel ' s past life , such as circumstances , not his own choice , had made it : their history , therefore , is told in the narrative of the composer ' s earlier years . It follows that , beyond their enumeration , any comment of the biographer would have to be conveyed in the form of critical analysis . But any adequate account of Handel ' s nineteen oratorios would require as many chapters ; while to sum up the characteristic merits of each in a verdict of a single sentence would require an intimate accuracy of knowledge and an amount of self-confidence not aspired to by the present writer , who lias , therefore , been content to leave their portraiture to be drawn on a larger canvas , by unfettered hands , of greater experience ; in tho hope , meanwhilethat all whose interest is enlisted in Handel's life-work will go for further knowledge and for , illustration of the subject to the original scores themselves , now accessible in the most comprehensive form , with the addition of many technical details , in the great edition of the German Handel Society . MOZART , by Dr . F . Gehring ( IN THE SAME SERIES ) , ALSO . AJLjIMIOST IR / EIAHD ^ T - I London : SAMPSON Crown LOW Buildings , MAHSTON , 188 Fleet , Street SEARLE , E . C . , & BIVINGTON , 3 iy '
