George Frideric Handel (1685–1759)

If you walk down Brook Street, central London, you will see a blue commemorative plaque on a handsome, early eighteenth-century house. This was the home of George Frideric Handel. Next door, another blue plaque tells us that 200 years later his neighbor was Jimi Hendrix. They may seem a strange pair, but the two musicians have a lot in common. Both traveled from overseas to fulfill their musical destinies in London, they both achieved immense fame in their lifetimes; both men took existing musical forms and turned them into something new and astonishing.

George Frideric Handel was born in Halle, Saxony (Germany) in 1685. His father, a barber-surgeon, did nothing to encourage his son’s precocious musical talent, so Handel taught himself the harpsichord in the attic of the family home. When he was seven years old, the family visited Saxe-Weissenfels, where a relative was in service with the Duke. When the Duke heard the boy improvising on the chapel organ, he insisted that he have a musical education. At Halle Cathedral Handel became a keyboard virtuoso, and began to compose sonatas before he was ten. Handel’s father, however, was determined that the boy should become a lawyer. Handel’s father died in 1697, but Handel followed his wishes. He graduated in law from Halle University in 1703. He then moved to Hamburg to join the orchestra of the Hamburg Opera House. There he wrote two operas, as well as a Passion that gave a foretaste of his later religious oratorios.

In 1706 Handel traveled to Italy and spent three years mastering the art of setting the Italian language to music. In 1707 he wrote his first Italian opera, Rodrigo. In 1709 he returned to Germany to become Kapellmeister to the Elector of Hanover, and in 1710 visited London, where his opera Rinaldo was performed to great success. Handel went back briefly to Hanover, but returned to London in 1712, gained favor in the court of Queen Anne, and decided to settle there. His neglect of his Hanover post backfired on him when Queen Anne died suddenly in 1714 and the Elector of Hanover succeeded her as George I of England. However, the Water Music, composed for a royal procession up the River Thames in 1717, restored Handel to royal favor.

Handel’s first two decades in London were largely spent satisfying the English taste for Italian opera. In 1720 he was appointed director of the new Royal Academy of Music—which was created chiefly for the production of Italian opera. Every season he offered new operas to London society, and in 1727 became a naturalized citizen. When the taste for Italian opera began to dwindle in the late 1730s, he began to concentrate on the great oratorios for which he is chiefly celebrated. Handel created the oratorio as we know it: a cross between opera and chorale, the oratorio was the perfect vehicle for his dramatic gifts. Between 1740 and his death in death in 1759, Handel created over 20 oratorios, including the Messiah (1741), Samson (1743), Semele (1743), Belshazzar (1743), Judas Maccabaeus (1746), Solomon (1748), Alceste (1749), Jephtha (1751), and The Triumph of Time and Truth (1757).

Handel was an intensely prolific composer. As well as opera and oratorio, he wrote for the harpsichord, composed church music, and created a considerable body of chamber and orchestral music. His Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749) are favorites of the modern orchestral repertoire, and the great anthem from Zadok the Priest has been sung at every royal coronation since George II came to the throne in 1727. Though large parts of Handel’s vast body of work—his operas particularly, of which there are over 50—were neglected until the later twentieth-century revival of interest in the Baroque, Handel’s influence has been profound. Beethoven’s opera Fidelio (1805) acknowledges a debt to Handel in its dynamic and at times anthemic scoring for chorus. Beethoven himself was generous in his praise of his illustrious predecessor: “Handel is the greatest composer who ever lived,” he said. “I would bare my head and kneel at his grave.”