The French author Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle is said to have asked disparagingly about Italian instrumental chamber music: ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’ Today we might ask the same question of the Italian chamber cantata: ‘What good are you?’ For years, little musical importance was attached to this pervasive Baroque form, even in the hands of a composer such as George Frideric Handel. As Reinhard Strohm wrote about Handel’s cantatas in 1985: ‘Although very many of these are works of extraordinary beauty, they are among the least-known of Handel’s compositions.’ Even after valuable archival work added significantly to our knowledge about their chronology and context, Handel’s cantatas continued to be lumped together by most biographers as early compositions with relatively uninteresting texts, typically depicting the trials of a lovelorn shepherd and ‘couched in a fashionable pastoral convention’. With a few familiar exceptions (such as La Lucrezia and Agrippina condotta a morire) they tended to be summarily passed over on the way to what has been considered Handel’s ‘genuine’ (and much more substantive) musical contributions of opera, oratorio, anthem, suite and concerto.

I have always felt differently. While marvelling at their musical richness, I also became increasingly convinced of their importance to Handel’s life and musical development, or, as Strohm put it, that ‘the hundred and more cantatas da camera which Handel wrote in Italy are a kind of musical diary’. Their compositional history paints a distinctive picture of private music patronage, one that is very different from the public arena that quickly absorbed Handel after his arrival in London. The texts, behind a pastoral facade, embody a deeply emotional utterance resonant of personal, political and religious issues, while the music reveals a composer who has already reached the first bloom of maturity both in the musical penetration of his texts and in the development of stylistic features that distinguish his most advanced works.