As the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Ellen Harris, chair for local arrangements, observed of the 2025 American Handel Society Conference, its structure resembled that of a da capo aria. The two A sections, the evening of 6 February and the days of 8–9 February, were held in the elegant surroundings of the College Club of Boston on Back Bay’s Commonwealth Avenue. The B section saw participants bussed across the frozen Charles River to MIT’s new Linde Music Building, which we were lucky enough to use before its official opening. A fine lunchtime concert by MIT students and professional singers – culminating in Handel’s first setting of ‘As pants the hart’ (1711–1712) – represented the auditorium’s inaugural performance. Evenings saw concerts elsewhere from keyboard player Francesco Corti and the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble (featuring Handel’s Organ Concertos Op. 4 Nos 1 and 2), and soprano Joélle Harvey and the Boston Handel and Haydn Society (cantatas Tra le fiamme and Il delirio amoroso and the Concerto Grosso Op. 6 No. 1).

The conference began with the Howard Serwer Memorial Lecture, delivered this year by Ayana Smith (Indiana University). The lecture offered a rich exploration of the relationship between a number of Handel’s operas, including Giulio Cesare, Silla and Orlando, and the intellectual history of sight and hearing. While librettos from the years around 1700 associated with the Roman Accademia dell’Arcadia, shaped by empiricist thought, present the visual image as the ultimate guarantor of truth, Handel’s London operas offer a more Cartesian, sceptical rejoinder. In these operas, images are not always to be trusted, while the importance of the ear is greatly increased. Wise characters (Cesare) approach the visual with care, while weak ones (Silla, Orlando) are tormented by what they see; characters are often forced to choose whether to trust their eyes or ears. Handel’s music emerges as an arbiter of truth for attentive listeners in these operas’ dramaturgy.

On 7 February, at the Linde Music Building, fortified by the coffee and doughnuts of a well-known local supplier, participants first heard Minji Kim (American Handel Society) contextualize Handel’s use of the carillon in Saul. The contemporary cultural associations of bells with civic celebration, with impudent or senseless speech, and with demonic exorcism were all set out to account for why it is bells that seem to ‘make poor Saul stark mad’, as Jennens put it. Later that day, Ruth Eldredge Thomas (Durham University) gave an insightful account of the contrasting positions of Handel and J. S. Bach in the history of the development of an aesthetics of the musical sublime in English thought. In the early nineteenth-century criticism of William Crotch (1775–1847), while Handel’s music exemplified a sublime of vastness and grandeur, that of Bach – especially in works like the Well-Tempered Clavier – was still more sublime in its combination of diminutive proportions with mind-bending complexity. This was the same sublime, Eldredge Thomas suggested, as that considered by William Blake in his ‘Auguries of Innocence’ (c1803): ‘a World in a grain of Sand / . . . Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour’.

Further papers included four on Handel in America, a topic on which contributions were specially invited this year. Kenneth Nott (University of Hartford) combined musical and cultural analysis in an exploration of the creative responses of the American ‘postmodern polystylist’ composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003) to Handel’s music. Harrison, a self-described ‘Handel man’, felt affinities to the earlier composer that were both aesthetic and biographical: they shared a commitment to an attractive, ‘open, public style’ – useful to Harrison as a rejoinder to a Schoenbergian high modernism that appealed to the authority of J. S. Bach – and, possibly, a particular sexuality. Stephen Nissenbaum (emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst) examined the background to the first performances of Handel’s operas in America earlier in the twentieth century: at Smith College Massachusetts, under the direction of the German émigré Werner Josten, in the 1920s and 30s. While Josten’s performances used resources developed for the earlier Handel opera revivals in Germany led by Oskar Hagen, as Nissenbaum’s insightful survey of both men’s lives made clear, their cultural and political motivations were quite different. Berta Joncus (Guildhall School of Music and Drama) showed how anti-slavery ballads of the late eighteenth century traded on the Handelian gravitas of their tune (hwv228⁶), and, fascinatingly, how Samuel Jennings’s abolitionist painting Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences (1792) deployed a duet from Judas Maccabaeus to express its ‘Enlightened’ values and racist assumptions. My paper (Joe Lockwood, Newcastle University) explored how performances of Zadok the Priest and the ‘Hallelujah!’ chorus intervened in the complex political history of 1770s Boston. What with hindsight appears to be an unlikely enthusiasm for a popular political culture of royalism – expressed in festivities for events such as the monarch’s birthday and the anniversaries of his accession and coronation – seemed only to be increasing in the years before the revolution. Incorporating the music into the city’s imperial-calendar celebrations served both Whigs and Tories, and the celebratory soundscape of gunfire and loyal toasts shaped the ways in which Handel’s music might be interpreted as topically political in the colonial city that was on the brink of war.

Among the contributions on 8 February were papers from Annette Landgraf (Hallische Händel-Ausgabe) and Donald Burrows (Open University), both setting out the challenges facing them as editors of new Hallische Handel-Ausgabe volumes. Landgraf demonstrated the complex and voluminous textual history of Judas Maccabaeus, while Burrows wondered how we might understand Handel’s treatment of the ‘bassi’ line in Messiah, which in contrapuntal passages often contains a ‘short score’ of the upper parts: what should an edition print in its separate parts for different bass instruments here? Earlier in the day participants heard a paper from Alexander McCargar (Universität Wien) on Johann Oswald Harms’s set designs for the Hamburg opera and McCargar’s own reconstruction of the original design for Handel’s Nero from a pair of surviving sources. Graydon Beeks (Pomona College) spoke about the music library of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn (1749–1789), much of which survives, shedding light on the contemporary taste for ‘ancient music’ and patterns of Handel reception. Mark Risinger (St Bernard’s School, New York) offered a rhetorical analysis of Handel’s oratorio choruses which, while drawing on the codified figures and tropes of the classical oratorical tradition, remained sceptical about the overuse of this paradigm in music analysis. Epistrophe and anaphora (repetition of the endings and beginnings of phrases respectively) were among the rhetorical effects produced by Handel’s word setting in the chorus ‘O Terror and Astonishment’ from Semele: one of a number of moments in Handel where the chorus offers what Risinger called a ‘meditation or reflection on an abstraction related to the storyline’ in the manner of classical tragedy.

Also on 8 February Ruth Smith (Handel Institute) gave a version of a fascinating paper previously delivered at the Handel Institute Conference in London in November 2023 on contemporary contexts for the representation of the Jerusalem temple in Solomon. The prominence the oratorio allots to the temple among Solomon’s achievements was accounted for by expounding the significance of the building to Handel’s contemporaries: a significance indexed by the model of the structure on display in Halle in Handel’s youth, and another model exhibited close to Handel’s places of work at the Hamburg opera house and the King’s Theatre in London. The construction of the temple and its filling-up with God’s shekinah (1 Kings 8), as Handel’s audiences would have recognized, was an incontrovertible sign of divine approval for Solomon’s kingship. This narrative therefore took on special typological meaning for supporters of the Hanoverian dynasty (since George II was also, like Solomon, held by his supporters to have assumed the throne through divine will rather than conventional principles of succession): a theme, Smith suggested, we can see developed in Handel’s oratorio.

On the final day three papers considered Handel’s singers, and one operatic dramaturgy. Francesca Greppi (Università di Bologna) showed how Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni’s collaboration as paired prime donne in a series of operas performed in Venice from 1718 to 1721 anticipated their better-known work for Handel in London, and further deconstructed the notion of the singers as ‘rival queens’. David Vickers (Royal Northern College of Music) presented a meticulously detailed survey of the Italian-texted music performed in London by Giulia Frasi – a singer better known to Handelians as a performer of English-language oratorio – broadening our sense of her qualities as a performer and of the often-stark differences between this music’s progressive style and the relative conservatism of Handel’s music of the same years. Matthew Gardner (Universität Tübingen) also explored the relationship between English and Italian repertories in a discussion of the changing roster of theatrical singers who worked for Handel between 1737 and 1741, an uncertain period during which competition was provided by the Middlesex company and Handel’s efforts were divided between opera and oratorio as the availability of singers fluctuated. The generic, narrative and dramaturgical significance of Handel’s cross-dressing heroines was considered by Yseult Martinez (Sorbonne Université) in a paper focusing on Rosmira (Partenope) and Bradamante (Alcina). These characters assume male dress to rescue and redeem male characters, embodying the heroically masculine ideals Arsace and Ruggiero cannot. The risks to which Rosmira and Bradamante expose themselves via this course of action are serious, but the conclusions of their operas’ plots reward them for their courage and agency.

The warm and collegial fashion in which speakers from the United States, Britain, continental Europe and beyond, and at all career stages, heard and discussed one another’s work was auspicious for the future of scholarship on Handel and his contemporaries.