Date/Time
Fri, Apr 25, 2025
3:00 pm EDT - 4:30 pm EDT
The 2024–2025 season of Encounters with Eighteenth-Century Music will close with an interdisciplinary celebration of the 30th anniversary of Ruth Smith‘s Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought. We will begin with brief comments from our panelists, Ellen T. Harris, Robert C. Ketterer, and David Armitage, followed by a response from Ruth Smith, and conclude with a discussion.
First published in 1995, Smith’s Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought has had a profound influence not only on the study of Handel’s oratorios (and eighteenth-century music more generally) but has also provided an invaluable model for a generation of scholars who sought to emulate Smith’s brilliant use of intellectual history as a means of understanding music and text. Whereas Handelians had long focused on the ingenious way in which Handel set his oratorio texts, the humanity of his characters or the intensity of the drama, Smith challenged us to take the librettos seriously on their own terms; to understand the social, political, and religious currents that gave rise to them; and to consider how Handel’s music might have responded to them. Smith’s meticulous exploration of the librettos, the librettists, their sources, and their influence on their audiences has taught musicologists how much there is be gained from a deep understanding of social and political context, while also showing scholars in other disciplines the powerful role that musical works play in intellectual history.
Registration:
Please click here to register for the event (free but required).
Bios:
Having gained a first-class BA in English at Cambridge University, RUTH SMITH proceeded, as was then customary, directly to three years of state-funded research for a PhD dissertation, with Handel’s word setting in his English theatre works as her topic. When her funding ran out and her research ran aground, she worked in publishing (Grove’s Dictionary of Music, Faber, CUP and, with three friends, her own firm) and, from 1983 to her retirement in 2011, as a Careers Adviser at Cambridge University Careers Service. Meanwhile she published two prizewinning articles – on the meanings of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast and on the life and works of Charles Jennens – and, with the help of two grants from the Leverhulme Trust, her Handel’s Oratorios, for which she was awarded a Cambridge PhD and a British Academy prize. Her other contributions to Handel scholarship include entries in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia, articles in Music & Letters, Early Music, Eighteenth-Century Music and the Händel Jahrbuch, and the first biography of Charles Jennens. Speaking engagements have taken her to the USA, Australia, South Africa, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and, most recently, Japan. The principal subject of her published work is the relation of Handel’s librettos to their intellectual contexts (the publishers of the book under discussion removed the word ‘librettos’ from its title). She has never held an academic post.
DAVID ARMITAGE is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University and an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He is the author or editor of nineteen books, among them The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2014) and Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017). He is currently working on a study of opera and international law tentatively entitled “Thinking Internationally at the Opera: From the Medici to the Met”.
ELLEN T. HARRIS is Class of 1949 Professor Emeritus at MIT and Visiting Professor at The Juilliard School. Her work includes the award-winning books George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends (Norton, 2014) and Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Harvard, 2001/2021). A 30th-anniversary, revised edition of her book Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas (OUP) was published in 2017. Her research on Handel’s finances won the Westrup Prize in 2004. She has performed with John Williams and the Boston Pops and sung the National Anthem at Fenway Park. She is currently preparing a book on performing Handel’s operas.
ROBERT KETTERER is Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Iowa. He is author of Ancient Rome in Early Opera (Illinois 2009) and of articles and chapters on ancient drama and reception of Greco Roman literature in Baroque opera. Most recently he has written on Handel’s pasticcio opera Oreste, Rossini’s Ciro in Babilonia, and the secular cantatas of J.S. Bach. His work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Newberry Library and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. He received the Outreach Award from the Society for Classical Studies for his 2011 conference at Iowa, “Re-creation: Musical Reception of Classical Antiquity.” He is a current board member and former Vice President of the American Handel Society and has served on the Encounters steering committee for the AHS.
Moderator: WENDY HELLER, Scheide Professor of Music History at Princeton University, specializes in the study of baroque music. Author of Emblems of Eloquence: Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice and Music in the Baroque, Heller is co-editor, with Beth Glixon, of the forthcoming volume Barbara Strozzi In Context (Cambridge University Press).Heller’s edition of Francesco Cavalli’s Veremonda, l’Amazzone di Aragona (Bärenreiter) will be published this spring; she is currently completing a critical edition of Handel’s Admeto for the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe and monograph entitled Animating Ovid: Opera and the Metamorphoses of Antiquity in Early Modern Italy. Heller is a member of the Board of the American Handel Society and also has served on the steering committee for Encounters with Eighteenth-Century Music.