them today is through such surviving examples of the old _opera seria_ as Mozart’s “Idomeneo” or Gluck’s “Alceste”. And even those do not supply genuine parallels. To the average person reared on the lyric drama as known to two or three generations preceding ours the long-established description of a Handelian opera as a “concert in costume” may suffice at a pinch. But in a larger sense it begs the question, for Handel’s forty odd operas are both more than this and less. We should find their librettos so cut to a pattern that the most old-fashioned “books” of the 19th Century would possibly strike us, by comparison, dramatically bold, even involved. Handelian operas have no trace of psychological subtlety or elementary “conflict”. What theatrical “action” there is passes before us with something like lightning speed. Incidents which need to be communicated to the spectator are, in the main, recounted in recitative. What we understand as “incident” is subordinate to phases of emotional expression; and in ensemble pieces. Joy, rage, sadness, a broad scale of elemental feelings, are recognizably embodied in musical moods and tempos unmistakable in their lyrical or dramatic communications of “affetti” (“emotions”). There is little, if indeed any, of what a later esthetic was to call “the art of transition” and it was nothing in any manner unusual for a fiery or combative _presto_ to precede (or follow) a tender _largo_ or _andante_, and other formalistic clichés. The accompaniment, the orchestra, indeed the “action” and the stage picture is not much more than incidental background and frame. The true center of gravity of a Handel opera lies in the performance of the singers and their command of declamation, florid utterance, sustained song and artifices at that epoch accepted as supremely expressive. Only in grasping these facts can we put ourselves in the frame of mind needed to understand the essential principles of these baroque masterpieces and to appreciate what—apart from their sheer melodic beauties—lifts them to a higher level than curios lacking any further validity, difficult as it may be for many of us to force our imagination and our feelings into such a mold. * * *