Most music lovers have encountered George Frederick Handel through holiday-time renditions of the Messiah's "Hallelujah" chorus. And many of them know and love that oratorio on Christ's life, death, and resurrection, as well as a few other greatest hits like the orchestral Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music, and perhaps Judas Maccabeus or one of the other English oratorios. Yet his operas, for which he was widely known in his own time, are the province mainly of specialists in Baroque music, and the events of his life, even though they reflected some of the most important musical issues of the day, have never become as familiar as the careers of Bach or Mozart. Perhaps the single word that best describes his life and music is "cosmopolitan": he was a German composer, trained in Italy, who spent most of his life in England.

"Meine Seele hört im Sehen" (HWV 207) is the sixth of a set of nine songs that Handel wrote to the German-language texts of Barthold Heinrich Brockes from his collection Irdisches Vergnuegen in Gott (Contentment on Earth through God). The tone of the text is religious in an easygoing manner. All of these songs are in ABA form with vocal declamation that is lyrical, sometimes melismatic, and never virtuosic. The instrumentation of the accompaniment is flexible, and the performers are allowed to choose whichever instruments are appropriate and available for the continuo and instrumental obbligato.

The vocal line in this song, whose title translates as "My Soul Hears through Seeing, " holds forth in a pleasant duple meter over a "walking" bass line in the continuo. The text deals with the synesthesia of hearing things usually thought of as visual. The obbligato instrument sometimes answers the singer and sometimes harmonizes with him. The dotted rhythms of the obbligato instrument sometimes show up in the vocal part.

Although originally composed for Voice (Soprano) Strings & Continuo, I created this Arrangement for Flute, Oboe and Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).