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This Epilogue briefly summarizes the complex, contradictory attitudes toward Jews, Judaism, and the Hebrew Bible, which was a tool of both the powerful and the powerless and whose narratives proved foundational to English Protestant Christianity. ‘Israel’ could mean many different things, and the claim to be the true Israel, God's chosen, was contested. The preoccupation with the connection between England (and later America) and Israel—and with redefining who or what is ‘Israel’—continued long after the seventeenth century. It can be seen in Handel's music, the later phenomenon of British Israelism, the settlement of New England, the American Revolution, and even Emma Lazarus's poem on the Statue of Liberty.

This chapter considers the nationalist underpinnings of late-century musicology by examining the diverse and even contradictory cultural associations that Adler forged through the medium of his work. In his publications on the medieval origins of harmony, Adler distanced himself from attempts to claim exclusively Germanic origins for polyphonic phenomena. But in essays on Bach, Handel, and Mozart, penned in the mid-1880s, he indulged a brand of cultural chauvinism associated with Wagner and his followers. In his work on the Monuments of Music in Austria series of editions, Adler embraced a supranational vision of Austrian cultural identity endorsed by Habsburg officialdom, yet in his 1904 monograph on Wagner he declined to engage the composer's most inflammatory statements on race and identity. Each of these cases illuminates Adler's response to a specific crisis that shook his society, and together they testify to the difficulties of defining the German in the late-century musicological discourse.

This chapter focuses on Mendelssohn's employment of the organ in performing Handel's oratorios. In Germany, Mendelssohn was the first to introduce the organ into performances of Handel's oratorios, and in doing so, particularly when those performances took place in a church, the ecclesiastical aura of the venue was inescapable. Moreover, it should be stressed that all performances of Handel's oratorios that Mendelssohn conducted after 1838 took place in churches, and it would have been pointless, as well as historically incorrect, for him not to utilize the organ. Once Mendelssohn began to incorporate the organ into the orchestral accompaniment of Handel's oratorios, the public rapidly came to expect the organ to play a major role in their production.

This chapter places Monteverdi, the dramatist, within the context of the history of opera, as initiator of and participant in the grand tradition that links him with such figures as Handel and Mozart, and especially his co-nazionale—and near namesake—at the other end of that tradition, Giuseppe Verdi. Although the modern Monteverdi revival came long after his death, Verdi, by the example of his last operas, may have prepared the way for that new appreciation, reaffirming the dramatic power of music which his Venetian predecessor had first demonstrated over three centuries earlier.

This chapter discusses the great Händel Commemoration and how it exemplified the consolidation of a national culture of great power and durability. This posthumous apotheosis reveals a good deal about the development of British culture in the 18th century. In addition, it explains that the Protestant Reformation greatly intensified nationalism. Religious independence was then underpinned by a surge of cultural nationalism. Under Queen Elizabeth, resolutely Protestant and impeccably English, cultural achievement was married to political success to form a powerful source of legitimation. This chapter examines the sources of England’s wealth, particularly the advance of commerce which made the strongest and most widespread impression. Next, it discusses the country’s fourth national asset — liberty. It then explores the life of King George III.

This chapter examines the elements of magic and witchcraft in the career of English composer George Frideric Handel. It looks at the theme of enchantment discussions about Handel and in Handel's works themselves and investigates how Handel as a public figure and as composer fitted into the Whig project. It suggests that beyond its marginal existence at the fringes of intellectual life, the language of witchcraft cropped up in new areas of social existence and became increasingly a metaphor, but retained some elements of literal force.

Due to their grandness of scale and the importance they have in the sight of the English and their ancient origin, the Birmingham Music Festivals deserve to be noticed. There, as on the banks of the Rhine, a festival consists of a series of concerts lasting several days. The Birmingham Festival is a philanthropic institution. Its purpose is to support the city's general hospital, which was founded in 1765. The city found it was unable to meet the growing costs of the hospital and so, in 1768, it had the idea of putting on a festival in St Paul's Chapel, which raised 800 pounds. The concert included the Handel oratorios L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, Alexander's Feast and Messiah. The Birmingham Town Hall is one of the best large halls in existence. The Festival orchestra is made up of 28 first violins, 26 seconds, 20 violas, 17 cellos and 17 double basses.

This chapter discusses William Klein’s filmmaking in relation to his photography, and how he has used documentary forms to investigate the relations between time and movement, image and montage. The chapter also looks at how Klein negotiates his identity as an American in Paris who has, nevertheless, remained artistically and politically attached to the USA, especially New York City. Some of Klein’s most iconic street photographs were taken in 1950s, in the streets of his childhood, and – as the chapter elucidates – much of his documentary filmmaking has involved expeditions into American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. In examining the various aesthetic and cultural issues provoked by Klein’s films, it also suggests a correspondence between his work and Roland Barthes’ intellectual project.

This chapter focuses on debates in the 1760s about Methodism and the Church of England. Although Methodism was still officially part of the Church until 1795, many Anglicans felt unhappy with the religious enthusiasm and physicality associated with Methodist worship. Women became important in helping the Church define itself against Methodism, and appeared extensively in anti-Methodist satire of the period. These debates highlighted ways in which Anglican women were members of a public, established Church, and Anglican women’s duties were described as public in opposition to the privacy and melancholia of Methodist worship. The chapter looks at anti-Methodist prints by Hogarth alongside anti-Methodist plays by Samuel Foote and others; here, drawing on old anti-Roman Catholic satire, Methodist women are caricatured as nuns and prostitutes. The actual female communities established by the Countess of Huntingdon and Sarah Scott are then explored in relation to Scott’s fiction and correspondence.

This chapter discusses Aaron Hill's early life from 1685-1711. He has mastered the art of self-invention at an early age, publishing a lavish oriental travelogue at age 24 with a subscription list of 424 names vaunting his contacts with the rich and powerful. In 1708, Hill networked to establish a literary career for himself in London and collaborated with Nahum Tate on the Celebrated Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses, promoted as rhetorical guidebook for youth, and launched the British Apollo, a question-and-answer journal modelled on John Dunton's Athenian Mercury. At age 26, as director of opera at the Queen's Theatre in the Haymaker, Hill co-wrote and staged Rinaldo, Handel's first original opera for the English stage. In the published libretto, Hill presented himself as a well-travelled musical connoisseur familiar with European operatic vogues, intent on making ‘the English OPERA more splendid than her MOTHER, the Italian’.

George Frideric Handel was the first composer in history whose works never fell out of the concert repertory. But despite the reverence for him, only a little of his music was actually performed in the 19th century. Messiah was one of them, of course, sung with increasingly gargantuan choruses and orchestras, and so were Samson, Israel in Egypt, and Judas Maccabeus. But such masterpieces as Theodora, Giulio Cesare, Jephtha, Orlando, and L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato occupied few beyond the occasional scholar. The coincidence of the Handel revival with the historical-performance movement has raised a number of issues. A more basic issue is the works themselves. When certain works by a widely revered composer are almost never played, one might be forgiven for suspecting that these works are of lesser quality. Such suspicions have faded in recent decades, but doubts about the stageworthiness of the operas persist. This chapter presents an interview with Nicholas McGegan on Handel, use of countertenors for the operatic roles written by Handel for castrati, early music singing in Handel, improvisation with Baroque orchestras, ornamentation in Handel’s works, harmony, rubato, Handel’s rhythmic notation, technical perfection, period pronunciation in English-language oratorios, and overdotting.

Music, especially sacred song, was also a critical subject in Herder’s professional life as a theologian and pastor in Weimar, the center of the German Enlightenment. Chapter 6 is an epistolary essay, in which Herder circulates thoughts about the ways in which song shapes the history, character, and national traits of a people. Beginning with Classical Greek and Roman vocal and poetic traditions, Herder traces the role of sacred song through different national traditions to the modern publications of song in England and the German lands. He concludes with a set of exegetical reflections on Handel’s Messiah as the epitome of sacred music.