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Handel's Operas 1726-1741.

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Handel's Operas 1726-1741. By Winton Dean. Rochester: Boydell Press, 2006. [xx, 565 p. ISBN-10 1843832682; ISBN-13 9781843832683. $85.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, indexes.

This volume concludes a project begun collaboratively by Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp (Handel's Operas 1704-1726 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987]). (Dean and Knapp had parted ways even before the publication of their work, and Knapp's attempt at a second volume was left incomplete at his death in 1993; his unfinished typescript, however, has been made available to selected research libraries by the American Handel Society.) With the publication of his own second volume, Dean has completed what must surely rank among the most ambitious undertakings in modern musicology: the systematic documentation and assessment of all of Handel's thirty-nine surviving operas.

When the first volume appeared, the tradition of treating Handel's operas as flawed products of the "defective" opera seria tradition had only begun to be seriously challenged. Unsurprisingly, the authors' famous contention that Handel "ranks with Monteverdi, Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner among the supreme masters of opera" was received with skepticism in many quarters. But the situation has changed radically in the intervening twenty-one years. Handel's operas are now produced with great (and ever-increasing) frequency throughout the Western world at opera houses large and small, their productions in many cases rivaling in number the works of the traditional operatic canon. The Hallische Handel-Ausgabe's complete edition is well underway, having yielded sixteen critical editions of Handel's operas. New recordings of complete operas appear at an unprecedented rate, and with each new production or recording, a growing chorus of critics and scholars heap praise approaching reverence upon...

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