George Frideric Handel

Anyone asking who was George Frideric Handel usually begins in Halle, a market town on the Saale river in the Duchy of Magdeburg, then under Brandenburg-Prussia. He was born there on February 23, 1685, the son of Georg Händel, a barber-surgeon in his early sixties, and his second wife Dorothea Taust, a pastor's daughter ^[1]. The elder Händel intended his son for the law and, by long-repeated account, resisted the boy's obvious pull toward music. A frequently told story has the young Handel practicing secretly on a clavichord hidden in the attic, though the tale rests on early biography rather than documentary proof ^[2].

The turning point came through a nobleman's ear. During a visit to the court at Weissenfels, where a relative served, the child's organ playing reportedly impressed Duke Johann Adolf I, who urged the father to allow formal training ^[1]. Handel was placed with Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, organist of the Marktkirche in Halle, who gave him a thorough grounding in keyboard playing, counterpoint, and composition, and exposed him to German and Italian styles by having him copy scores ^[2].

Handel honored his father's wishes to a point. In 1702 he enrolled at the University of Halle to study law, and in the same year he accepted a one-year post as organist at the city's Calvinist cathedral, despite his own Lutheran upbringing ^[1]. The law lasted barely a year. In 1703 the eighteen-year-old left Halle for Hamburg, home of the only regular public opera house in the German-speaking lands.

Hamburg gave Handel his first taste of the theater. He joined the orchestra of the Oper am Gänsemarkt as a violinist and harpsichordist and befriended the composer and writer Johann Mattheson, later his first important biographer ^[2]. The friendship nearly ended in blood: during a performance of Mattheson's opera Cleopatra in December 1704 the two quarreled and fought a duel, in which, by Mattheson's own telling, his sword blade broke on a button of Handel's coat ^[2]. They reconciled, and in January 1705 Handel's first opera, Almira, reached the Hamburg stage with success ^[1].

Italy came next, and it made him. Invited by a member of the Medici family, Handel traveled south in 1706 and spent roughly four years moving among Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice ^[1]. In Rome, where opera was banned by papal decree, he wrote Latin church music and Italian cantatas for cardinal patrons, including the vivid oratorio La resurrezione in 1708. His opera Agrippina, staged in Venice during the 1709 carnival season, ran for an exceptional 27 nights and confirmed his reputation across the peninsula ^[3]. Italians nicknamed him il caro Sassone, the dear Saxon.

In 1710 Handel accepted the post of Kapellmeister to Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, on generous terms that permitted immediate leave to visit London ^[1]. The visit proved decisive. His opera Rinaldo, composed at speed and premiered at the Queen's Theatre in February 1711, was the first Italian opera written specifically for London, and its success anchored his future there ^[3]. After a brief return to Hanover he came back to England in 1712 and simply stayed. Any awkwardness over the abandoned Hanover post dissolved in 1714 when his neglected employer ascended the British throne as King George I.

Among George Frideric Handel achievements, the sheer range is the striking thing: opera, oratorio, ceremonial music, concertos, and keyboard suites, all at the top of the market. For the royal family he produced some of the most durable occasional music ever written. The Water Music suites accompanied George I's barge party on the Thames in July 1717, and contemporary newspaper accounts record that the king liked the music enough to have it repeated during the evening ^[4]. Three decades later the Music for the Royal Fireworks marked the 1748 Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; the public rehearsal at Vauxhall Gardens in April 1749 drew an enormous crowd ^[4]. His four coronation anthems for George II in 1727 include Zadok the Priest, performed at every British coronation since ^[5].

Opera occupied the center of his working life for over three decades. As a director of the Royal Academy of Music, the opera company founded in 1719, he recruited star singers from the continent and composed a string of works now counted among the finest of the Baroque stage, including Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724), Tamerlano (1724), and Rodelinda (1725) ^[1]. He wrote more than forty operas in all. When the Academy collapsed and rival companies, changing taste, and expensive singers made Italian opera a losing business in the 1730s, Handel gradually shifted his energies elsewhere ^[3].

That shift produced his most original contribution: the English oratorio, a dramatic concert work on sacred or classical subjects, sung in English with a prominent chorus. Esther (1732) established the form; Saul and Israel in Egypt followed in 1739 ^[1]. Then came Messiah, composed in the late summer of 1741 in a little over three weeks and first performed in Dublin on April 13, 1742, at a charity concert benefiting prisoners' debt relief and two hospitals ^[6]. Later oratorios such as Samson, Judas Maccabaeus, Solomon, and Jephtha kept London audiences coming through Lent seasons for the rest of his life. Alongside the vocal works he published instrumental sets that circulated widely, including the Opus 6 concerti grossi of 1739 and organ concertos he played himself between oratorio acts ^[5].

Handel never married, and no documented romantic attachment survives; his private life remains one of the quieter corners of the biographical record ^[2]. He lived from 1723 until his death at 25 Brook Street in Mayfair, a terraced house that now operates as the Handel House museum. There he composed Messiah and most of his later works, kept a substantial art collection that included paintings attributed to Rembrandt, and entertained a small circle of friends ^[7].

Contemporaries described a large, imposing man with a heavy Saxon accent, a quick temper, and an equally quick wit. Stories of his appetite were repeated with relish in eighteenth-century London, as were anecdotes of rehearsal explosions, including the often-cited threat to hold the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni out of a window during a dispute over an aria ^[2]. Against the temper stood real generosity. He became a governor of the Foundling Hospital, London's home for abandoned children, and from 1750 gave annual benefit performances of Messiah in its chapel, concerts that raised thousands of pounds for the charity and helped fix the oratorio in public affection ^[6].

He took British nationality formally in February 1727, when an Act of Parliament naturalized him, shortly before he wrote the coronation anthems for George II ^[1]. Though born a Lutheran and employed for a season by Calvinists, in England he worshipped comfortably within the established church, and his parish church of St George's, Hanover Square, stood a short walk from his door ^[7].

The final decade tested him. In August 1750 Handel was injured when his carriage overturned during a journey in the Netherlands, and the following year his eyesight began to fail while he worked on the oratorio Jephtha; a note in the autograph score records that he had to break off because of the weakening of his left eye ^[1]. He underwent eye operations, reportedly including treatment by the itinerant oculist John Taylor, without lasting benefit, and by 1753 he was almost entirely blind ^[2].

Blindness slowed him but did not remove him from public life. He continued to attend and direct oratorio performances, playing organ concertos partly from memory and improvising, with the younger musician John Christopher Smith assisting him in managing the seasons ^[1]. He revised earlier works with help from amanuenses and remained a fixture of London's Lenten concert calendar.

Handel attended a performance of Messiah at Covent Garden on April 6, 1759, fell ill shortly afterward, and died at his Brook Street home on April 14, 1759, aged 74 ^[1]. His will distributed a considerable fortune among relatives, servants, friends, and charities, with a bequest to the Foundling Hospital of a fair copy of the Messiah score and parts ^[6]. He was buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, on April 20 before a crowd reported in the thousands, and a monument by the sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac was raised above the grave in 1762 ^[5].

Few composers have enjoyed so little posthumous eclipse. Within a generation of his death, English audiences were treating Handel as a classic, an unusual fate in an age that mostly wanted new music. The Handel Commemoration of 1784 in Westminster Abbey assembled hundreds of performers for festival concerts of his works, an event on a scale no dead composer had previously received ^[5]. Messiah settled into annual performance traditions in Britain, Ireland, and North America that continue today, and the Hallelujah chorus became one of the most widely known pieces of Western sacred music ^[6].

His influence on other musicians was direct and acknowledged. Haydn heard massed Handel performances in London and was moved to write his own oratorio The Creation; Mozart reorchestrated Messiah and other works for Viennese audiences; Beethoven praised him in the strongest terms recorded of any predecessor ^[3]. In the twentieth century the revival of Baroque performance practice returned his operas to the stage after nearly two hundred years of neglect, and works such as Giulio Cesare and Rinaldo are now repertory pieces in major houses ^[3].

Any George Frideric Handel biography ends with an unusual double identity: Halle celebrates him with an annual festival at his birthplace, while Britain claims him as a founding figure of its musical life, honored in the Abbey and remembered by the charity he served. Standard collections of George Frideric Handel facts note the tidy symmetries of his era: born in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti, and treated ever since as one of the defining voices of the late Baroque ^[1].