What's the difference between Thomas Beecham and Roger Norrington?

[Paul]

I was browsing through LPs in a charity shop this morning and I came across Nigel Kennedy's Four Seasons. One interesting point he made in the notes was that he felt that HIP had wrongly disregarded the wisdom that had built up over the last one hundred years or so. (I'm paraphrasing rather loosely here.)

But looked at from the other side it might be pointed out that in the above the word wrongly should have instead been "rightly", and that the word wisdom should have been placed in quotes. After all, the whole point of HIP is (as with the restoration of an 18th-c. portrait) to clean away all the grime and muck that has built up in the meantime, and to restore the product back to its original beauty. This, therefore, explicitly means 'rightly discarding the "wisdom" that had built up over the last one hundred years'.

It also means however replacing such "wisdom" with a true understanding and wisdom of the kind that existed at the time such music was conceived originally.

[Paul]

On the other hand, is it not almost an axiom of music history that it took a very long time for Bach's superior style and achievement to be preferred to Handel's, except among a very few cognoscenti?

Indeed so most assuredly.  And furthermore neither Handel nor Bach was accounted the "top rank" of their profession in their own lifetime. Greatly as subsequent musicologists have tried to rewrite history, the "front rank" of German composers in the first half of the C18th would have been Hasse, Graun, Telemann, and Graupner (and honourable mention to Zelenka as a foreigner working in Germany)... these were the men who were most highly-sought for Kapellmeister or Opera-theatre appointments.  In the field of Italian opera, it's an awkard truth that the operas written for the Royal Academy in London by Bononcini, Lotti, and Porpora consistently outsold Handel's operas for the same theatre (both in terms of numbers of seats sold, and number of performances which took place).  Even the argument that the public had gone "for the singers" will not cut the mustard, because the self-same singers & orchestra were performing in Handels' operas as his Academy colleagues - providing a perfect "test case" like-for-like comparison.  The only single operas which are exceptions to this case are GIULIO CESARE and RODELINDA - the period of Handel's creativity when he was working with the sensational librettos of Nicola Haym.

Whilst some here will - perhaps fairly - shout that "bums on seats" are not an objective criteria of musical quality....  if we proceed from the basis (which others will disagree with) that there aren't objective criteria of musical worth in any case,  then we can at least see what audiences of the time found to be most attractive and worthy of their time?   (Bear in mind that with the specific case of the Royal Academy opera seasons, financial success is excised from the argument, since the patrons had bought Subscriptions anyhow...  if they failed to show up for Handel's operas, it was because they couldn't be bothered to exercise the right to hear something they'd already paid for).

Might it be that there was an aesthetic of the time which we fail to comprehend?  Frankly you would be lucky to summon an audience of six people and a cat for a Porpora opera these days - yet his music is composed with a technical assurance, maturity of style, and a winning bravura that I find at least as appealing as Handel's.

I have taken up some of this material in a reply to be found at:

http://artmusic.smfforfree.com/index.php/topic,48.msg232.html#new