Founded in 1920, the International Handel Festival in Göttingen is one of the world's longest-standing early music festivals. Each year Göttingen hosts a twelve-day festival dedicated to the composer and his music. One of the festival's traditions is the biennial musicological conference day, the results of which are published in the Göttinger Handel Beiträge. In this special anniversary year the organization invited four speakers to discuss Handel's reception in the nineteenth century, inspired by the fascinating concert project at the festival: the world premiere of Handel's Dettinger Te Deum in the adaptation by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

The main focus of the day was the question of Handel's importance for music history, theory and performance practice in nineteenth-century Germany. While the composer attained his lofty reputation during his lifetime in Great Britain, German interest in his music increased significantly after his death in 1759: about sixty performances of Messiah are documented in German-speaking lands between 1772 and 1800, for example, by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in Hamburg and in Mozart's reorchestration in Vienna.

The motivation for this enthusiastic reception of Handel's music must have been the idea of ‘repatriation’, as demonstrated not only by the long and fervent tradition of Handel performances in Germany but also by the responses to Handel's music evident in the work of such major German-speaking composers as Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms – as well as Meyerbeer, Schumann and Liszt. One might add to this emerging pattern of reception the literary and scholarly attention given to Handel's life and work by music theorists, from Johann Adolf Scheibe's writings to Friedrich Chrysander's monumental biography and complete edition of Handel's works, which began to appear in the 1850s.

In his introductory remarks the conference organizer and renowned Handel scholar Hans Joachim Marx (Universität Hamburg) drew general attention to these main themes and recalled early representatives of German Handel reception, such as Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Justus Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariae. As he explained to the audience in the assembly hall of Universität Göttingen, the approach of the conference was to focus, after the keynote introduction, on individual composers (Mendelssohn, Schumann and Liszt) and their view of Handel.

The keynote paper, presented by Laurenz Lütteken (Universität Zürich), gave a general introduction to the topic: ‘Von der “Emanzipation der deutschen Musik”. Grundzüge des Umgangs mit Händel im 19. Jahrhundert’ (On the ‘Emancipation of German Music’: Aspects of Handel Reception in the Nineteenth Century). Lütteken explored the nature of Handel's place in German musical and social history in three steps: Vereinnahmung (appropriation), Wirkung (effect) and Distanz (distance). He underlined the fundamental change that occurred from the perception of Handel as a ‘true German’ composer in the late eighteenth century to the ‘distanced’ view and later blank rejection of this perception by Richard Wagner. Lütteken pointed out that the German nationalism of the late eighteenth century differed significantly from that of the late nineteenth century. The view of music and music history that Wagner successfully propagated had no place for Handel's effective and lastingly impressive music, which mostly treated religious subjects.

After Lütteken's introduction Wolfgang Sandberger (Musikhochschule Lübeck) gave an insightful account of Mendelssohn's view of Handel: ‘Händels “Israel in Ägypten” zwischen Werktreue und kulturpolitischem Manifest: die Aufführungen unter Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in Düsseldorf 1833’ (Between Authenticity and Cultural Manifesto: Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's Performance of Handel's Israel in Egypt in Düsseldorf in 1833). Encompassing both historical and philological facts, Sandberger described the different views of Handel's oratorio prompted by Mendelssohn's Düsseldorf performance in May 1833 in the presence of the Prussian crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Performed as a prelude to the Lower Rhine Music Festival, Handel's Israel in Egypt had ‘pole position’ in the cultural project of the music festival – the oratorio's theme of the ‘chosen people’ was consistent with common social and political trends. In its new context, the design of the work had to be discussed by the organization; so, for example, Mendelssohn – who was known for his very careful historical-critical editions of old music – composed a new instrumental introduction (Trompeten-Ouvertüre, Op. 101), and combined the oratorio with tableaux vivants, an old court theatre tradition.

The paper presented by Ulrich Tadday (Universität Bremen) focused for the first time on Robert Schumann's wide and diverse interest in Handel. Most people believe that, as an editor, composer and columnist, Schumann had no particular interest in Handel's music. With this in mind, Tadday checked numerous biographical sources: letters, diaries, the collected writings and of course the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the influential periodical founded and edited by Schumann in the 1830s and 40s. Tadday grouped the large amount of material that he encountered in these sources into four categories: biography, music history, nationalism and compositions. Schumann not only had several early encounters with Handel's music in his youth but also performed, collected and studied several works during his lifetime. Both Bach and Handel were important for his views of music history, based on his ‘classical’ view of music rather than on contemporary ‘progressive’ ideas. In a few cases, Schumann's appreciation of Handel's works exceeded his estimation for Bach: he declared Israel in Egypt to be ‘das Ideal eines Chorwerks’ (the ideal choral work).

The last paper of the conference day raised the question of Franz Liszt's interest in Handel. I (Christiane Wiesenfeldt, Universität Münster) discussed the variations for piano that Liszt composed late in the 1870s on Handel's Almira: ‘Eine Laune des “anbetungswürdigen Fingerhelden”? Liszts Variationen über Sarabande und Chaconne aus Händels “Almira”’ (A Whim of the ‘Adored Virtuoso’? Liszt's Variations on the Sarabande and Chaconne from Handel's Almira). In fact, Liszt's interest in Handel was just superficial: of the older composers he admired only Bach. Although he performed some of Handel's oratorios several times in Weimar, and although he paid attention to the new biography and editions by Friedrich Chrysander, Liszt composed only this single, curious, Handel-related piano piece. In it he transformed the old dance forms into a wild and romantically harmonized variation cycle, leading into a furious stretta with typical Lisztian block chords at the end. Thus his picture of Handel seemed to be a ‘distant’ one.

Without question we can look back on a fruitful conference, where just a few, but new and fascinating views on Handel in nineteenth-century Germany were brought together in his anniversary year. For the well-conceived and well-organized event we must thank the members of the organizing committee. A volume of the aforementioned papers will appear in April 2010 (Göttinger Handel Beiträge: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen).