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been aware of the little subtleties in the score; but what gave it its
value for them were those melodies.
I might add that this is a subject Newman wrote about many
times, and with much confusion and inaccuracy. We find him writing
in 1944 that he has never heard the .orchestral phrase preceding
Donna Anna's words
"Calma il tuo tormento"
in the aria
"Non
mi
dir"
"given its proper expressiveness, for the reason that neither conductors
nor players have realized what it meant to Mozart and his con–
temporaries" (I can't believe the little orchestral phrase meant any–
thing to them beyond its meaning in the perf.ormances I have heard).
But two paragraphs earlier he has said : "We have to recognize frank–
ly that it is impossible for us to play or sing in public much of the
.older music as its contemporaries played or sang it, because the world
can never hear it with the ears and the minds of those contemporaries.
The "Messiah' sung as it was in Handel's day W.ould sound comic to
us." And he has spelled this out in 1935, printing a measure from
The Messiah
as it appears in the score and is sung today and then
this measure as it was sung in Handel's time, when "the soloists
[indulged] in all kinds of shakes and appogiature and other coloratura
embellishments," and commenting that "the feeling of the eighteenth
century for the expressive power of coloratura has vanished from the
earth, never t.o return. Are we to restore the externals .of this old
manner for pure antiquarianism's sake, and so drive people away from
the Handel oratorios, or ignore them and let people have a Handel
they can understand and admire?" Thus the man who on the one
hand has argued that one must listen to old music with the ears of
its contemporaries argues .on the other hand that one should not listen
to the actual sounds of the music that contemporary ears heard. And
as against Newman's contentions the facts are that "I know that my
redeemer liveth" as it appears in the printed score and is usually sung
today is not the piece of music Handel had in mind, but is an in–
complete notation of that piece which he expected the singer to
complete by filling the wide intervals with scale passages and ap–
pogiaturas before long notes in the style of the period (as Joan Suther–
land has done, without comic effect, in a recent recorded performance
of
The Messiah);
that the excesses indulged in by exhibitionistic
singers-which are what Newman is talking about-were a perversion
of this normal operati.on that other singers performed with taste (as
Sutherland did recently) ; and that the coloratura in Handel's, Mozart's,
Bellini's and Verdi's music does have dramatic expressiveness for
listeners today.
