6. BACH, HANDEL AND THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL If all music between 1685 and 1759 were annihilated except the work of Bach and Handel, the ordinary music-lover would miss nothing but a large collection of decorative and decorous violin music and a still larger collection of arias; and to most of these favourite gemme d'antichita the mid-19th century editor has con tributed much of their lusciousness. For us the age of Bach and Handel is the age of nobody else in music. But the contempo raries of Bach and Handel thought of Handel as a fashionable opera-writer who with advancing years developed choral music as a pious fad; while nobody thought of Bach except people within coaching-range of Saxony where Bach was known as a wonderful organist and an impracticably deep scholar. The poly phony of Bach and Handel stands almost alone in an age when polyphony was utterly unfashionable. It was inculcated as a staple subject in musical education; but to carry it into mature art was to discuss Latin grammar in the drawing-room. The op portunities and the difficulties of early symphonic orchestration alike arose from the neglect of polyphony after 175o. Apart from Bach and Handel, that neglect can be traced much further back; and it characterized musical connoisseurship much later; so that Burney could say of Philipp Emmanuel Bach that wher ever he got his beautiful and natural style from it was not from his father, for that eminent organist, though profoundly versed in all devices of canon and fugue, was so fond of crowding all the harmony he could into both hands that he must inevitably have lost melodic grace.
The vast and accurately-perfected aesthetic system of Bach and the improvisatorial opportunist eclecticism of Handel are dis cussed in the articles on those masters, and also under the head ings Of ARIA, CANTATA, CONCERTO, CONTRAPUNTAL FORMS, COUNTERPOINT, FUGUE, HARMONY, INSTRUMENTATION, ORA TORIO, SONATA FORMS and SUITE. But, while this information covers the aesthetic values of the period, it tells us little of its historic trend. We must not look for light from the "spirit of the age" as shown in its politics or even in its religious history. Palestrina writes, from habit and preference, a devout music which neither Luther nor the Council of Trent could blame as representing the spirit of the age ; and Bach achieves the ideal Lutheran music while Voltaire is at the court of Frederick the Great.
The music that pleased the contemporaries of Bach and Han del was that which continued, not too elaborately, the Neapolitan tradition founded by Alessandro Scarlatti. Lully (an Italian by birth) took this tradition to France, and transformed Italian opera by encouraging the French taste for the ballet. Rameau, great est of classical French composers and epoch-making theorist, car ried on the Lully tradition in opera, and joined forces with the exquisite school of clavecinistes, whose leader, Couperin, was ad mired and imitated by Bach in his suite-forms. Italian violin
music and concertos in the Neapolitan style were produced by composers who were also great players. The enormous industry of Bach and Handel was nothing unusual. Arias could be written as easily as letters, and distributed by thirties in operas. Ora torios and church music, though less fashionable, were more highly organized ; mainly because they kept choral music in being. And thus the Neapolitan tradition of choral music passes straight into the polyphony of Mozart, quite independently of Han del and wholly ignoring Sebastian Bach, of whom Mozart knew not a note until he was grown up. Meanwhile cultured Europe was unvexed by doubts as to who were the immortals. The Handel-Bononcini rivalry had been little more than a nine-days' wonder. Six years after Handel's death, the seven-year old Mozart in London dedicated his violin-sonatas to Queen Charlotte in the hope that under Her Majesty's protection "je deviendrai im mortel comme Haendel et Hasse." Graun would probably have been the third name of European repute; and Telemann, the most voluminous composer of his voluminous day, was a great figure in his own country. As for Bach—everybody in London knew Mr. J. C. Bach, of the Bach and Abel concerts, and report said that his father had been a great musical scholar.
Behind the dignified musical history, but not (like Sebastian Bach) aloof from it, vital forces were at work in comic music drama. This was admitted by way of intermezzi between the acts of serious operas. One of these intermezzi, La Serva Pa drona by Pergolesi (known in the 19th century by his' conven tional Stabat Mater for two-part female chorus) not only broke from its moorings, like many other intermezzi, but found its way to Paris where it created a furore of popular success and pre cious disputation dividing musical Paris into Buffonnistes and Anti-buffonnistes. Except for the untimely blossom of English opera in the hands of Purcell in the previous century this is the only moment at which opera after Monteverdi and before Gluck (with all respect to Rameau) becomes a genuine art-form instead of a concert on the stage.
Biographical articles dealing with the following named com posers who belong to this period : the violin writers CORELLI, GEMINIANI and TARTINI : the clavier writers COUPERIN and D. SCARLATTI (the Paganini of the harpsichord and a most unclassical son of the founder of classical tonality) ; the opera writers (which meant the all-round musicians) DURANTE (Francesco), GALUPPI (who certainly never wrote Browning's "sixths diminished, sigh on sigh"!), LEO (Leonardo), PERGOLESI and SCARLATTI (Ales sandro). RAMEAU is equally important in three capacities as a master of French opera, a livelier master of instrumental music, and an epoch-making theorist. German beginnings of serious and comic music-drama were sumptuously inaugurated at Hamburg by KEISER (q.v.) whose influence is traceable in Handel's first opera Almira.