Georg Friedrich Händel

Cantatas for solo voice and basso continuo

Handel's cantatas for solo voice and basso continuo are a treasure waiting to be discovered. There are more than 80 compositions and probably the least known group of works by Handel. Their neglect is surprising in view of the extraordinary technical skills and ingenuity with which a composer at the age of only about 20 presents himself when he began to write cantatas. Not only the musical quality of the works, but also their diversity are all the more astonishing when one considers that Handel's most frequent starting point was a poem that dealt with the – mostly unrequited – love between nymphs and shepherds.

From December 1706 Handel spent most of his time in Rome, and his most important patron was the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli (1672–1731; from 1709 Prince of Cerveteri). Ruspoli was a member of the "Accademia degli Arcadi" (or "Accademia dell'Arcadia"), a society that provided an important framework for the composition of secular cantatas. Founded in Rome in 1690, this society promoted the reform of Italian poetry and was inspired by the shepherd's romance "Arcadia" by Jacopo Sannazaro, as well as by the eclogues of Virgil and the idylls of Theocritus. The members of the Academy took on pastoral names; Ruspoli's name was Olinto, one of the characters in Handel's corresponding cantata "Olinto pastore, Tebro fiume, Gloria" (HWV 143), for which Ruspoli may have supplied the poem. In the autumn of 1705, Ruspoli settled in the Palazzo Bonelli. From 1707 onwards, Handel's cantatas were performed there at Ruspoli's weekly "conversazioni" on Sunday evenings.

The large number of surviving manuscripts with copies of Handel's cantatas clearly shows that they were extremely popular in the 18th century, and their number was further increased by the practice of transposition: singers who found that the tessiture of a cantata was outside their range, could ask the composer or (more often) a copyist to create a version with a more pleasant tessiture. If the composer himself was responsible for such a transposition, he produced a version that testified to creative rethinking; if a copyist was responsible, the transposition was usually substantially congruent, and deviations from the original were probably careless errors. Most of Handel's cantatas consist of two arias, each preceded by a recitative, resulting in an overall structure of recitative – aria – recitative – aria. In a few cantatas (e.g. HWV 104), the number of arias is increased to three. The position for which Handel composed most of his cantatas was soprano; in addition, there are about sixteen cantatas for alto and two for bass.