Mortier de Fontaine, Handel, and the Dynamics of Historical Representation in the Age of the Virtuoso

Jonathan Kregor

doi:10.18290/rh257312.4

Published : 2026-01-14

Vol. 73 No. 12 (2025)

Mortier de Fontaine, Handel, and the Dynamics of Historical Representation in the Age of the Virtuoso

Jonathan Kregor

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0063-798X

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh257312.4

Abstract

Examples by Fétis, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Wieck-Schumann reveal the Vormärz to be an era of sporadic, uncoordinated engagement with the musical past. This article adds Mortier de Fontaine to this list, whose arrangement of Handel’s Organ Concerto in F major achieved a short-lived success on concerts stages in the 1840s. While forgotten today, Mortier de Fontaine and his arrangement challenged critics to consider period-appropriate performance practice, generic hierarchies and interdependencies, and historical schools of composition, thus suggesting that the two halves of the nineteenth century were oppositional primarily in their hermeneutics, rather than their modes of performative and (re-)creative historicism.

Keywords:

musical historicism, Mortier de Fontaine, George Frideric Handel, arrangement, concerto, hermeneutics, criticism, 19th century

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