George Frideric Handel

• 1. Introduction

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  Zadok the Priest has sounded at every British coronation since 1727, and George Frideric Handel wrote it. The German-born composer who supplied that anthem began life far from any throne. He was baptised Georg Friedrich Handel in 1685 in Halle, in the Duchy of Magdeburg, the same year that produced Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti. His father was a barber-surgeon, his city impoverished by war, his early path pointed toward the law. Yet by 1727 he had become a naturalised British subject, and by his death in 1759 a respected and rich man given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey. How did a salt-mining town's barber's son become a national icon in Britain? Why did a celebrated opera composer abandon Italian opera entirely after one work in 1742? And what made Beethoven say he would kneel before this man's tomb? The answers run through breakdowns, lawsuits over piracy, a sword turned by a button, and music still played on rivers and at funerals.

• 2. The Reluctant Apprentice

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  Georg Handel, the composer's father, was 63 years old when his son was born, an eminent barber-surgeon who served the court of Saxe-Weissenfels and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. He was a self-made man of "conservative, steady, thrifty, unadventurous" habit, and he steered his children toward the medical profession. According to John Mainwaring, Handel's first biographer, the father was "alarmed" at his son's early gift for music and "took every measure to oppose it", even forbidding any musical instrument in the house. Mainwaring is the source for nearly all that survives of Handel's childhood, much of it relayed through J. C. Smith Jr., Handel's copyist, and he frequently relates misinformation. The most famous tale is the secret attic spinet. Mainwaring claimed the boy had a little clavichord conveyed privately to a room at the top of the house, stealing there whenever the family slept. John Hawkins and Charles Burney believed the story; Schoelcher found it nearly "incredible", and Lang grouped it among the unproven "romantic stories" of Handel's youth. What turned the father was a journey. Sometime between the ages of seven and nine, Handel accompanied him to Weissenfels and somehow reached the court organ in the palace chapel of the Holy Trinity. His playing astonished everyone, and Duke Johann Adolf I, whose suggestions were not to be ignored, urged that the boy receive instruction. Handel always afterward regarded the Duke as his benefactor.

• 3. Zachow's Library

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  Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, organist at the Halle parish church, became the only teacher Handel ever had. An organist "of the old school", he revelled in fugues, canons, and counterpoint, yet kept abreast of music across Europe, and his own compositions "embraced the new concerted, dramatic style". Zachow opened to his pupil "a vast collection of German and Italian music", sacred and profane, vocal and instrumental, and many traits later called "Handelian" trace back to him. Handel also practised harpsichord, learned violin and organ, and, according to Burney, held a special affection for the hautbois, the oboe. Schoelcher believed that youthful devotion explains the many oboe pieces Handel composed. Zachow taught composition by requiring Handel to copy selected scores. "I used to write like the devil in those days", Handel recalled much later. Much of this copying filled a notebook he kept for the rest of his life, now lost but described well enough to reveal what he studied. Among its composers were Johann Krieger, Johann Caspar Kerll, Johann Jakob Froberger, and Georg Muffat, whose blend of French and Italian styles shaped him. Mainwaring claims that at nine Handel began composing a church service every week for three years running, though carelessness with dates leaves the period confused.

• 4. Law And Departure

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  On the 10th of February 1702 Handel matriculated at the University of Halle, perhaps to honour a promise to his father, who had died on the 11th of February 1697. The university had been founded in 1694 by the Elector of Brandenburg Frederick III, largely to give a forum to the jurist Christian Thomasius, expelled from Leipzig for liberal views. Thomasius was the first academic to lecture in German and a denouncer of witch trials. Lang believed he instilled in Handel a "respect for the dignity and freedom of man's mind and the solemn majesty of the law". There Handel also met August Hermann Francke, the theologian whose orphanage may have shaped the charity Handel later showed when he assigned the rights of Messiah to London's Foundling Hospital. On the 13th of March 1702, though Lutheran, Handel took the post of organist at the Calvinist Domkirche, a one-year probationary appointment paying 5 thalers a year plus lodgings in the run-down castle of Moritzburg. Around this time he met Telemann, four years his senior and studying law at Leipzig. Telemann recalled that the two were "constantly occupied" with fashioning melodic movements, "frequently visiting each other as well as writing letters". When the appointment expired in March 1703, Handel made a choice that set his life's direction. He turned down an offer, conveyed through the Berlin court, to subsidise his musical education in Italy, an offer that carried the expectation of becoming a court musician. By July he was in Hamburg, a free city with an established opera company.

• 5. Hamburg And Italy

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  In 1703 Handel joined the orchestra of the Hamburg Oper am Gänsemarkt as violinist and harpsichordist, meeting Johann Mattheson, Christoph Graupner, and Reinhard Keiser. His first two operas, Almira and Nero, were produced in 1705, followed by Daphne and Florindo in 1708. Mattheson was a close friend who nearly killed him in 1704, during a sudden quarrel at a performance of Mattheson's opera about Cleopatra. A sword thrust was turned aside by a large button on Handel's coat. The two reconciled and corresponded for life, and after Handel died Mattheson translated Mainwaring's biography into German at his own expense in 1761. By Mainwaring's account, Ferdinando de' Medici invited Handel to Italy in 1706, hoping to make Florence the country's musical capital. With opera temporarily banned in the Papal States, Handel turned to sacred music for the Roman clergy, producing his Dixit Dominus in 1707. He wrote cantatas for the duchess Aurora Sanseverino and for cardinals Pietro Ottoboni, Benedetto Pamphili, and Carlo Colonna. Rodrigo, his first all-Italian opera, appeared in Florence in 1707, and Agrippina, with a libretto by Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani, opened in Venice in 1709 and ran for 27 nights in succession. The audience, struck by his style, applauded for Il caro Sassone, the dear Saxon, a nod to his origins.

• 6. Settling In London

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  In June 1710 Handel became Kapellmeister to George, the Elector of Hanover, but left by year's end, likely drawn to England by an invitation from Charles Montagu, the former ambassador in Venice. His opera Rinaldo, based on Torquato Tasso's La Gerusalemme Liberata, was a great success though composed quickly with many borrowings from older Italian works, and it contains the famous Lascia ch'io pianga. He returned to Halle twice for family occasions but settled permanently in England in 1712. Queen Anne granted him £200 a year after he composed the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate, first performed in 1713. One of his most important patrons was the 3rd Earl of Burlington, in whose mansion Handel wrote Amadigi di Gaula. In July 1717 his Water Music was performed more than three times on the River Thames for King George I, and it is said the music helped reconcile composer and king, who had been annoyed by Handel's abandonment of his Hanover post. By 1723 Handel had moved into a Georgian house at 25 Brook Street, which he rented for the rest of his life and which is now the Handel House Museum. There he rehearsed, copied music, and sold tickets. Between 1711 and 1739, more than 25 of his operas premiered at the Queen's Theatre at the Haymarket.

• 7. Opera Companies And Rivals

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  Handel started three commercial opera companies to supply the English nobility with Italian opera. The first, the Royal Academy of Music, was founded in 1719 by a group of aristocrats seeking a steady supply of opera seria, and Handel travelled to Dresden to engage singers after seeing Antonio Lotti's Teofane. As the music historian David Hunter noted, 32 per cent of the Academy's subscribers, or their close family, also held investments in the slave-trading Royal African Company. Handel himself invested in that company in 1720, and earlier had bought into the South Sea Company when prices were low, selling before the bubble burst in 1720. During twelve months between 1724 and 1725 he wrote three successful operas, Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano, and Rodelinda. Competition was fierce. In 1728 John Gay's The Beggar's Opera mocked the very Italian opera Handel had popularised, running for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run in theatre history to that point. After the Academy ceased, Handel became joint manager of the Haymarket theatre with John James Heidegger in 1729. He then faced the Opera of the Nobility, which engaged Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicola Porpora, and the castrato Farinelli, while Frederick, Prince of Wales, backed the rivals and stirred conflict in the royal family. A 1733 letter to the Earl of Essex caught the mood: "Handel became so arbitrary a prince, that the Town murmurs." In 1734 Handel started his third company at Covent Garden with John Rich, who introduced the dancing of Marie Sallé, for whom Handel composed Terpsicore.

• 8. Breakdown And The Turn To Oratorio

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  In April 1737 Handel suffered a mild stroke, or rheumatic palsy, paralysing his right hand and arm; after a brief recovery he relapsed in May, with a deterioration in his mental capacities. His physicians sent him that autumn to take the cure at Royal Tunbridge Wells and Aix-la-Chapelle, and by November all the symptoms had vanished. He returned to a new direction, addressing the middle class and turning to English choral works. John Beard, who first sang for Handel in 1736 in Alexander's Feast, became his permanent tenor and a key to that shift, as English soloists steadily replaced Italian ones. The dwindling financial returns from opera were the most significant reason. In Saul, Handel collaborated with Charles Jennens and experimented with three trombones, a carillon, and extra-large military kettledrums from the Tower of London, promising the result would be "most excessive noisy". Saul and Israel in Egypt, both from 1739, head the list of his mature oratorios. The pivotal work came from Dublin. Invited by the 3rd Duke of Devonshire to give concerts for local hospitals, Handel composed Messiah in London between the 22nd of August and the 14th of September 1741, and it was first performed at the New Music Hall in Fishamble Street on the 13th of April 1742, with 26 boys and five men from the choirs of St Patrick's and Christ Church cathedrals. After Messiah, Handel never composed an Italian opera again. The performances of his oratorios were given without costumes or action, the singers in their own clothes.

  In 1749 Handel composed Music for the Royal Fireworks, and 12,000 people attended the first performance. The following year he arranged a performance of Messiah to benefit the Foundling Hospital, a children's home in London, and was made a governor of the Hospital the day after his initial concert. The annual concerts continued throughout his life, and he bequeathed a copy of Messiah to the institution. His later years were marked by injury and failing sight. In August 1750, returning from Germany, he was seriously hurt in a carriage accident between The Hague and Haarlem. In 1751 one of his eyes began to fail from a cataract, operated on by the medical charlatan John Taylor, which did not help and possibly worsened matters; by 1752 Handel was completely blind. He died in 1759 at home in Brook Street, aged 74, with the last performance he attended being of Messiah. More than three thousand mourners attended his funeral at Westminster Abbey, given full state honours. Handel never married and kept his personal life private. His initial will left the bulk of his estate to his niece Johanna, but four codicils spread much of it among other relations, servants, friends, and charities. His art collection was auctioned posthumously in 1760, its catalogue listing roughly seventy paintings and ten prints.

  Since 1831, when William Crotch raised the matter in his Substance of Several Lectures on Music, scholars have studied Handel's borrowing of music from other composers. In 2005 the musicologist Richard Taruskin called Handel "the champion of all parodists, adapting both his own works and those of other composers in unparalleled numbers and with unparalleled exactitude." The list of composers whose music he reused runs long, including Alessandro Stradella, Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, Giacomo Carissimi, Georg Philipp Telemann, Reinhard Keiser, Giovanni Bononcini, and many others. In an essay published in 1985, John H. Roberts showed the borrowings were unusually frequent even for the age, enough to draw criticism from contemporaries such as Mattheson. Roberts suggested several reasons, including attempts to make works sound more up-to-date and, more radically, a "basic lack of facility in inventing original ideas". He was careful to add that this should not "diminish Handel's stature", which should be judged "solely by the effects he achieves". The verdict of fellow composers was unsparing in its praise. Mozart is reputed to have said, "Handel understands affect better than any of us. When he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt." To Beethoven he was "the master of us all", and the musicologist Winton Dean wrote that Handel was "not only a great composer; he was a dramatic genius of the first order."

  After Handel's death his Italian operas fell into obscurity, surviving mainly through selections such as "Ombra mai fu" from Serse. The oratorios were thought to need modernising, and Mozart orchestrated German versions of Messiah and other works. The Lobkowicz Palace in Prague holds Mozart's copy of Messiah, complete with handwritten annotations. The centenary of Handel's death in 1859 was marked by a Messiah at The Crystal Palace involving 2,765 singers and 460 instrumentalists before an audience of about 10,000. Composers kept returning to his themes. In 1797 Beethoven published variations on "See the conqu'ring hero comes" from Judas Maccabaeus, and in 1861 Johannes Brahms wrote his Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, praised by Richard Wagner. In 1911 Percy Grainger built Handel in the Strand on the final movement of Handel's Suite No. 5 in E major. Cataloguing his enormous output took generations. The 105-volume Händel-Gesellschaft edition appeared between 1858 and 1902, largely through Friedrich Chrysander, and between 1978 and 1986 Bernd Baselt produced the Händel-Werke-Verzeichnis, the modern HWV numbering in which Messiah is HWV 56. With the rediscovery of his theatrical works, Handel is now seen as one of opera's great musical dramatists, his secular oratorios such as Hercules and Semele sometimes fully staged as operas.