内容简介：
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ADDITIONAL ACCOMPANIMENTS TO BACH'S AND HANDEL'S SCORES Der Stoff gewinnt erst seinen Werth Durch kiinstlerische Gestaltung. ?Hbinbich Heine, ScMpfungdieder. It is both fortunate and unfortunate that people in general have fallen into the habit of regarding Bach and Handel with a rather careless admiration. Those great names are too often treated with mere after-dinner-speech complacency. This is fortunate in so far as the admiration, if careless and of somewhat second-hand quality, is after all respectful, and offers no opposition to whatever serious attempts may be made toward doing real honour to the great composers' works; unfortunate, as it tends to induce a too lukewarm interest in the painstaking study of what is most to be cherished in the rich legacy bequeathed to the world by Bach and Handel, without which study our appreciation of its worth is unintelligent and undiscriminating. Although the astounding development purely instrumental music has undergone at the hands of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and others may seem to throw the instrumental works of Bach and Handel into the shade, it must be recognized that in the department of vocal composition the world has produced very little that can bear comparison with their monumental oratorios and cantatas. It seems strange at first sight that, while we can bring about an excellent performance of so huge a score as Berlioz's Danremont Requiem, with its four supplementary orchestras of brass instruments, eight pairs of kettle-drums, and all its imposing vocal and orchestral panoply, we stand comparatively impotent before so apparently simple a work as Handel's Athalia. In the former case it is a mere question of good-will, orchestral resources, and money; in the latter, a question of something far more difficu...