(FEBRUARY 23, 1685- APRIL 14, 1759)
Although known as an English composer, Handel was born Georg Friederich Händel in Halle Germany, the son of a barber-surgeon who desired him to study law. At first, he was forced to practice music in secret, but eventually, his father was encouraged to allow him to study, and he became a pupil of the principal organist in Halle. When he was 17, he was appointed as an organist of the Calvinist Cathedral, but a year later he left for Hamburg. There he played the violin and harpsichord in the opera house, where his Almira was given at the beginning of 1705, soon followed by his Nero. The next year, he accepted an invitation to Italy, where he spent more than three years in Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice. He had operas or other dramatic works given in all these cities, in addition to writing many Italian cantatas. During this time, he also perfected his technique in setting Italian words for the human voice. In Rome, he also composed some Latin church music.
He left Italy early in 1710 and went to Hanover, where he was appointed Kapellmeister to the elector. Soon, he took his leave to accept an invitation to London, where his opera Rinaldo was produced early in 1711. Back in Hanover, he applied for a second leave and returned to London in autumn 1712. Four more operas followed in 1712-15, with mixed success. He also wrote music for the church and for court and was awarded a royal pension. In 1717, he entered the service of the Earl of Carnarvon (soon to be Duke of Chandos) at Edgware, near London, where he wrote 11 anthems and two dramatic works, the evergreen Acis and Galatea and Esther, for the modest band of singers and players retained there.
In 1718-19 a group of noblemen tried to put Italian opera in London on a firmer footing, and launched a company with royal patronage, the Royal Academy of Music; Handel, appointed musical director, went to Germany, visiting Dresden and recruiting several singers for the Academy, which opened in April 1720. Handel’s Radamisto was the second opera and it inaugurated a noble series over the ensuing years including Ottone, Giulio Cesare, Rodelinda, Tamerlano and Admeto. Unfortunately, public support was variable and the financial basis insecure, and in 1728 the venture collapsed. In the midst of the Royal Academy of Music’s run, Handel had taken British naturalization in 1724.
Opera remained his central interest, and with the Academy impresario, Heidegger, he hired the King’s Theatre and embarked on a five-year series of seasons starting in late 1729. Success was mixed. In 1732 Esther was given at a London musical society by friends of Handel’s, then by a rival group in public; Handel prepared to put it on at the King’s Theatre, but the Bishop of London banned a stage version of a biblical work. He then put on Acis, also in response to a rival venture. The next summer he was invited to Oxford and wrote an oratorio, Athalia, for performance at the Sheldonian Theatre. Meanwhile, a second opera company (‘Opera of the Nobility’, including Senesino) had been set up in competition with Handel’s and the two competed for audiences over the next four seasons before both failed. This period drew from Handel, however, such operas as Orlando and two with ballet, Ariodante and Alcina, among his finest scores.
During the rest of the 1730s, Handel moved between Italian opera and the English forms, unsure of his future commercially and artistically. After a journey to Dublin in 1741-2, where Messiah had its première in aid of charities, he put opera behind him and for most of the remainder of his life gave oratorio performances, mostly at the new Covent Garden theatre, usually at or close to the Lent season. The Old Testament provided the basis for most of them (Samson, Belshazzar, Joseph, Joshua, Solomon, for example), but he sometimes experimented, turning to classical mythology (Semele, Hercules) or Christian history (Theodora), with little public success. All these works, along with such earlier ones as Acis and his two Cecilian odes (to Dryden words), were performed in concert form in English. At these performances he usually played in the interval a concerto on the organ (a newly invented musical genre) or directed a concerto grosso (his op.6, a set of 12, published in 1740, represents his finest achievement in the form).
During his last decade he gave regular performances of Messiah, usually with about 16 singers and an orchestra of about 40, in aid of the Foundling Hospital. In 1749 he wrote a suite for wind instruments with optional strings for performance in Green Park to accompany the Royal Fireworks celebrating the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. His last oratorio, composed as he grew blind, was Jephtha (1752); The Triumph of Time and Truth (1757) is largely composed of earlier material.
Handel was very economical in the re-use of his ideas; at many times in his life he also drew heavily on the music of others (though generally avoiding detection) – such ‘borrowings’ may be of anything from a brief motif to entire movements, sometimes as they stood but more often accommodated to his own style.
Handel died in 1759 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, recognized in England and by many in Germany as the greatest composer of his day. The wide range of expression at his command is shown not only in the operas, with their rich and varied arias, but also in the form he created, the English oratorio, where it is applied to the fates of nations as well as individuals. He had a vivid sense of drama. But above all he had a resource and originality of invention, to be seen in the extraordinary variety of music in the op.6 concertos, for example, in which melodic beauty, boldness and humour all play a part, that place him and J.S. Bach as the supreme masters of the Baroque era in music.