Howard Serwer Memorial Lecture. 'Posterity vs Celebrity: Handel Studies and the 21st Century'

"The conference opened on Thursday March 11 with the Howard Serwer Memorial Lecture, given this year by Dr. Berta Joncus, senior lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Wendy Heller (Princeton University) introduced the guest speaker, highlighting Joncus’s accomplishments including the publication of her recent book Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster (2019). Along the lines of the book’s exploration of performance history and star production in eighteenth-century Britain, Joncus, in her lecture, looked into the career and stardom of Handel. With the title, “Posterity vs Celebrity: Handel Studies and the 21st Century,” she examined Handel’s rise to and management of his celebrity status: first by contrasting his approach and outcome to J. S. Bach’s; and second by delineating the “celebrity war” between Handel and the famous castrato Senesino. Joncus drew attention to a couple of Handel’s career moves that may have been strategic to the building of his status, such as his “reinventing” of himself as a composer/inventor of English oratorios and his possible contribution to the erection of his own statue. "