| Summary: | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University === PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. === The sublime represented the height of musical achievement in mid-eighteenth-century England. It stretched the imagination and overwhelmed the mind with astonishing depictions, shocking imagery, and evocations of the infinite. Yet sweeping applications of the term sublime thwarted attempts at a logical and consistent definition in the eighteenth century and continue to discourage modern scholarly inquiries into this marker of musical excellence.
This dissertation redresses the matter by examining the sublime in four oratorios composed by George Frideric Handel and premiered in the mid-1740s: Samson (1743), Semele (1744), Belshazzar (1745), and Judas Maccaboeus (1747). I correlate musical examples regarded as sublime with the contemporary usage of the term drawn from a survey of poems, novels, treatises, periodicals, literary and musical criticism, correspondence, and other primary sources. The image that emerges reveals that Handel, his librettists, and his audiences frequently agreed on what constituted the sublime, and even distinguished among classes of sublimity. I identify four sublime types--rhetorical, religious, choral, and ineffable--and dedicate a chapter to each.
Handel and his librettists employed a range of literary and musical devices to elicit praise for the sublime quality of the oratorios. Librettists altered literary models through spotlighting astonishing and shocking passages, excising irrelevant descriptions, and modifying stage directions and scene descriptions. They also added content when source texts lacked sufficient sublimity, interpolating selections from other works and introducing original material. Autograph scores and revisions reveal that Handel responded to their adaptations. His repertoire of sublime gestures comprises frenetic passagework, choral outbursts, martial themes, and an array of melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, textural, and timbral devices.
In sum, this dissertation illuminates the art of adapting literary content for oratorio setting. It provides a fuller perspective of Handel's compositional style, recasting the composer as a figure attuned to the sublime potential of both music and literature, and reveals the composer's coherent (albeit wide-ranging) conception of the musical sublime. More broadly, the project elucidates the sublime in its formative age, when it assumed a central place within musical aesthetics and fortified an oratorio performance tradition that continues today. === 2031-01-01
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