Handel and the Birth of Democracy

 

As in so many of his compositions, in his Courante – Suite in G Major, George Frideric Handel captured something unspeakably joyful and optimistic, something Bach, Scarlatti, and others of the period also touched upon, but that no one captured so consistently as or expressed more powerfully than Handel. And not just in his Messiah, but in dozens of lesser known compositions like Passacaglia, Larghetto, Allemande, the Air and Hornpipe from the Water Music, and others too numerous to mention.

Handel’s music acted upon the thought of his age like sunlight upon a flower, drawing out the budding idealism, the dormant hope and vision of those who were troubled by the political excesses of their monarchs, and by colonial policies that in their times had become more brutal than any the world had ever known.

As it was played throughout the capitals of Europe, his music and the music of the many composers it inspired became rallying points for a growing body of open-minded thinkers whose writings began to explore the ideals of freedom, liberty, and for the first time in Western history, basic human rights. Coupled with the printing press, this set in motion the tide of populist thinking that later in that pivotal eighteenth century would produce the American and French revolutions.

In the end, Handel’s music became a principal catalyst in the birth of the democratic movement. The same movement that even now continues to shape our world. And of all his music, nowhere did this man whom Bach considered “the greatest composer of the age” convey that sense of hope and possibility, that impetus to shake off the shackles of the past and forge ahead into a new and higher order, nowhere did he convey the raw power of that irrepressible democratic spirit more compellingly than in this courante.

by Ken Carey in Flat Rock Journal on pp. 191-192