The Conception of Georg Friedrich Handel’s Worldview in the Context of his Oratorios
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Abstract
The article is devoted to revealing and presenting Handel’s worldview. The incompatible opinions, varied at times,
become comprehensible. While analyzing scholarly ideas formulated in the academic works of the last two decades,
written mostly by musicologists outside of Russia, the author, nonetheless, does not always concur with them.
Stemming from statements of Handel, who aspired to “make his listeners better,” to disclose the “most exalted
feelings” and to solve ethical-aesthetical goals of the “fundamental and solemn genre” of the oratorio most appropriate
for it, the researcher brings out his own conception of the composer’s worldview, which he arguments by the ethical
essence of his music.
Handel’s musical legacy is examined in the context of the ideas of thinkers contemporary to the composer and
preceding him, both religious (Martin Luther, John Calvin) and secular (John Locke, Lord Anthony Shaftesbury,
Jean de La Bruyere, Blaise Pascal, Cornelius Jansen). The essentially significant ideas of these moralists interpreted
in Handel’s oratorios became a source of tragic images characterized by ethical conflict, on the basis of which the
composer manifested the issue of ethical choice experienced in the pangs of consciousness. For this reason it is not
perchance that over half of Handel’s oratorios turned out to be the greatest tragic masterpieces, including “Alexander
Balus,” “Athalia,” “Acis and Galatea,” “Belshazzar,” “Hercules,” “Jephtha,” “Joseph and his Brethren,” “Messiah,”
“Samson,” “Saul,” “Semele,” “Susanna,” “Theodora,” as well as the “Brockes Passion.”
By disclosing the worldview principles of Handel, who based himself on a strict social-behavioral regulation of
man in society, the author of the article demonstrates that it was what particularly corresponded with the goals of the
instructive genre of the oratorio and, most importantly, met the composer’s aspirations to make his listeners better.
Keywords: Georg Friedrich Handel’s worldview, the composer’s personality, the genre of the oratorio, the tragic,
religious-philosophical ideas, the music of Great Britain, the music of Germany.
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