1685–1759 · Baroque
George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) was a Baroque composer born in Germany who made London his home from 1712 and later took British nationality. He wrote Italian operas, the oratorio Messiah, and orchestral suites such as Water Music and the Music for the Royal Fireworks, and his music is still traditionally heard at British coronations. Players today know him through keyboard pieces and piano arrangements of arias drawn from his operas.
George Frideric Handel was born on 23 February (5 March, New Style) 1685 in the town of Halle. His father, Georg Händel, was a court barber-surgeon who served at the courts of Saxony and Brandenburg and was already an older man by the time his son was born; his mother, Dorothea, came from a pastor's family. Handel's parents were deeply religious, and his father wanted him to become a lawyer and did not approve of his interest in music.
According to legend, Handel's father forbade any musical instrument in the house, and young Handel secretly taught himself to play an instrument hidden in the attic at night, while the household slept.
During a visit with his father to Weissenfels, the local ruler, Duke Johann Adolf I, heard him play the organ and advised his father not to stand in the way of his musical education. His father took the advice and apprenticed Handel to the organist and composer Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow in Halle, who remained his only teacher throughout his life. Under Zachow the boy studied composition and figured bass and played the organ, harpsichord, violin and oboe.
In his youth Handel visited Berlin, where he performed as a harpsichordist at the court of the Elector of Brandenburg. In February 1697 Handel's father died, and the young man stayed on in Halle, attending the gymnasium. During these years he met the composer Georg Philipp Telemann, four years his senior, who was studying law in Leipzig — the two became friends, visiting each other often and exchanging letters.
In February 1702 Handel enrolled at the University of Halle and attended lectures on theology and law, including a course by the jurist Christian Thomasius, though the law itself did not appeal to him. That March he took up a one-year post as organist of Halle's Calvinist cathedral, succeeding the organist J. C. Leporin; at the same time Handel taught music theory and singing at a Protestant grammar school and directed music at the cathedral.
Once his probation ended, in 1703 Handel moved to Hamburg, then home to Germany's only opera house. He joined the theatre orchestra as a violinist and harpsichordist; the orchestra was directed by the composer Reinhard Keiser, and, like Keiser, Handel freely mixed German text with Italian in his first operas.
In Hamburg Handel became close with the composer Johann Mattheson. In the summer of 1703 the two travelled together to Lübeck to hear the organist Dieterich Buxtehude, who offered them his post on condition that whoever took it married his daughter; both declined. A year later, during a performance of one of Mattheson's operas, a quarrel broke out between the friends, and Mattheson nearly ran Handel through with a sword — a large button deflected the blade and saved him; the two later reconciled and stayed in correspondence for the rest of their lives.
In 1705 Handel's first operas were staged, Almira (premiered 8 January) and Nero (25 February), and in 1708 the same Hamburg theatre put on his earlier diptych Florindo and Daphne.
In 1706 Handel set out for Italy. In Florence he was a guest of Ferdinando de' Medici, who took an interest in music, played the harpsichord himself and supported opera productions; in Florence he was at first received coolly, his style striking the Italians as foreign. In Florence Handel wrote several cantatas.
In 1707 Handel visited Rome and Venice, where he met Domenico Scarlatti and competed with him at the harpsichord and organ. With opera banned in Rome by papal decree, he wrote cantatas and oratorios, among them The Triumph of Time and Truth, to a libretto by Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili. Back in Florence, Handel staged his first entirely Italian opera, Rodrigo, with success, and the following year in Rome he met Alessandro Scarlatti and Arcangelo Corelli and composed the oratorio La Resurrezione.
Handel's second Italian opera, Agrippina, was staged in Venice in 1709 to enormous success — it is considered the best of his Italian operas; the libretto was by Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani, and the opera ran for twenty-seven nights in succession.
In 1710, on the advice of Baron Kielmansegg, whom he had met in Italy, Handel travelled to Hanover. There the composer Agostino Steffani helped him secure the post of Kapellmeister at the court of the Elector George, who was due, under English law, eventually to become King of Great Britain. Having obtained leave, that autumn Handel set off for London by way of Düsseldorf and Holland; opera had not yet developed as a genre there. That winter he was presented to Queen Anne and won her favour at once.
For the London stage Handel wrote the opera Rinaldo, drawing on Tasso's poem; its premiere in 1711 made his name as a first-rate composer in the eyes of the public. The libretto was by Giacomo Rossi, from a scenario by Aaron Hill, the theatre's director. The writers Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, opponents of Italian opera, attacked it sharply. That summer Handel returned to Hanover, but by the following autumn he was back in London, having obtained leave on condition that he would later return.
Once settled in London, Handel staged the opera Il pastor fido (1712), followed by Teseo (January 1713) — both to librettos by Giacomo Rossi, but neither matched the success of Rinaldo. In January 1713 he wrote the Utrecht Te Deum to mark the peace that ended the War of the Spanish Succession, but since foreigners were not allowed to write music for official ceremonies, he first composed a birthday ode for Queen Anne, and the Te Deum was performed anyway, in July at St Paul's Cathedral. Queen Anne granted Handel a lifetime pension of £200.
In 1713 Handel spent some time in Surrey, at the estate of a wealthy patron and music-lover, and then for about two years at the house of the Earl of Burlington near London; there he wrote the "magic" opera Amadigi di Gaula, based on a tragedy by Antoine Houdar de la Motte, staged in 1715. At the time Queen Anne was on poor terms with the Hanoverian branch of the family, to which Handel's earlier patron belonged, but the composer himself, already holding the title of court composer in England, was in no hurry to return to Hanover.
In August 1714 Queen Anne died, and the throne passed to the Elector George of Hanover — the very patron Handel had promised to return to. At first the composer's position was awkward, but the kind-hearted, music-loving George welcomed Handel to court.
From the summer of 1717 to the spring of 1719 Handel, at the invitation of the Duke of Chandos, lived at his Cannons estate near London, where he composed anthems for the duke's chapel, the oratorio Esther and the cantata Acis and Galatea — in Handel's lifetime, his most performed work. For the oratorio Esther the duke paid Handel a thousand pounds; in 1718 the composer also directed his patron's household orchestra.
From 1720 to 1728 Handel served as director of the Royal Academy of Music; for it he travelled across Germany seeking singers, visiting Hanover, Halle, Dresden and Düsseldorf. In 1720 the premiere of his opera Radamisto, dedicated to the king, was a success at the Haymarket, but later that year Giovanni Bononcini arrived in London, and his opera Astarto overshadowed Handel's success — a rivalry began between the two composers, encouraged by aristocrats hostile to Handel. Among the operas of that period, Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano and Rodelinda were successes.
Handel obtained British nationality; in June 1727 King George I died and George II took the throne, and for his coronation Handel wrote the anthem Zadok the Priest. A heavy blow to the Academy came from John Gay and Johann Pepusch's satirical Beggar's Opera (1728), which mocked Handel's style among others; the composer found support from John James Heidegger and went to Italy to look for new singers to replace those who had left, also visiting Leonardo Vinci's school to refresh his operatic style; during this trip, on learning that his mother's health had worsened, Handel hurried back to Halle and spent two weeks with her. The most successful opera of these years is considered to be Orlando (1733).
Handel wrote the oratorios Deborah and Athalia, after which he turned back to Italian opera. The Prince of Wales, at odds with his father George II, founded a rival Opera of the Nobility, which the Italian composer Nicola Porpora joined; Johann Hasse later joined him too, and a rivalry developed between the two companies. Handel assembled a new company of Italian singers and made a deal with John Rich for productions at Covent Garden, where, among other things, he staged the operas Ariodante and Alcina and the opera-ballet Terpsicore, written for the French dancer Marie Sallé. Through the 1720s and 1730s Handel wrote mainly operas, but from the 1740s oratorios came to dominate his output — the best known, Messiah, to a text by Charles Jennens, was first performed in Dublin.
In the late 1740s Handel's eyesight began to fail, and in May 1752 the eye surgeon John Taylor operated on him without success. The condition kept worsening, and in 1753 Handel went completely blind. A few days before his death, on 6 April 1759, he conducted Messiah; his strength gave out during the performance, and on the eve of Easter, 14 April 1759, Handel died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in Poets' Corner.
Handel worked in many genres: over his life he produced roughly forty operas (Giulio Cesare and Rinaldo among them), upwards of thirty oratorios, a good deal of church and organ music, and chamber pieces for voice and instruments besides. Among his ceremonial suites is Water Music, and later the Music for the Royal Fireworks. Handel brought Italian opera to its highest point of development and established the English oratorio and the organ concerto as new genres; his music is still traditionally played at British coronations and state occasions. After the success of Messiah in 1742, he never wrote another Italian opera, turning to English oratorios instead. All of Handel's works are catalogued under the Händel-Werke-Verzeichnis (HWV), compiled by the musicologist Bernd Baselt between 1978 and 1986.
By the mid-eighteenth century Handel was the most famous composer of his day and was regarded as a living classic; he is seen as Britain's national composer. His operas fell out of view for a long time — only a handful of arias, such as Ombra mai fu and Lascia ch'io pianga, stayed familiar — but from the second half of the twentieth century, as interest grew in period-style performance of Baroque music, leading opera houses began staging his works again; German theatres were the first to bring them back, already in the 1920s.
The site collects Handel's instrumental pieces — a fugue, minuets, a gavotte, a toccata, a prelude, an overture, a passepied, an allemande, a sonatina, an entrée and others, mostly for solo piano. Alongside them are an arrangement of "La Réjouissance" from Music for the Royal Fireworks for trumpet and piano, two pieces for percussion, the hymn tune "Antioch" for mixed choir, and close to twenty arias in their original language from operas including Rinaldo, Atalanta, Deidamia, Rodelinda and Faramondo. All of these editions are at the "Intermediate" or "Intermediate+" level; the easiest way into Handel on the site is through the fugue, the minuets, the gavotte and the toccata.