BIOGRAPHY |
George Frideric Handel
German-English composer
German (until 1715)
Georg
Friedrich Händel, Händel also spelled Haendel
born Feb. 23, 1685, Halle, Brandenburg
[Germany]
died April 14, 1759, London, England
German-born English composer of the late
Baroque era, noted particularly for his operas, oratorios, and
instrumental compositions. He wrote the most famous of all oratorios,
Messiah (1741), and is also known for such occasional pieces as Water
Music (1717) and Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749).
Life
The son of a barber-surgeon, Handel
showed a
marked gift for music and became a pupil in Halle of the composer
Friedrich W. Zachow, learning the principles of keyboard performance
and composition from him. His father died when Handel was 11, but his
education had been provided for, and in 1702 he enrolled as a law
student at the University of Halle. He also became organist of the
Reformed (Calvinist) Cathedral in Halle, but he served for only one
year before going north to Hamburg, where greater opportunities awaited
him. In Hamburg, Handel joined the violin section of the opera
orchestra. He also took over some of the duties of harpsichordist, and
early in 1705 he presided over the premiere in Hamburg of his first
opera, Almira.
Handel spent the years 1706–10
traveling
in Italy, where he met many of the greatest Italian musicians of the
day, including Arcangelo Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti and his son
Domenico. He composed many works in Italy, including two operas,
numerous Italian solo cantatas (vocal compositions), Il trionfo del
tempo e del disinganno (1707) and another oratorio, the serenata Aci,
Galatea e Polifemo (1708), and some Latin (i.e., Roman Catholic) church
music. His opera Agrippina enjoyed a sensational success at its
premiere in Venice in 1710.
Handel’s years in Italy
greatly
influenced the development of his musical style. His fame had spread
throughout Italy, and his mastery of the Italian opera style now made
him an international figure. In 1710 he was appointed Kapellmeister to
the elector of Hanover, the future King George I of England, and later
that year Handel journeyed to England. In 1711 his opera Rinaldo was
performed in London and was greeted so enthusiastically that Handel
sensed the possibility of continuing popularity and prosperity in
England. In 1712 he went back to London for the production of his
operas Il pastor fido and Teseo (1713). In 1713 he won his way into
royal favour by his Ode for the Queen’s Birthday and the
Utrecht
Te Deum and Jubilate in celebration of the Peace of Utrecht, and he was
granted an annual allowance of £200 by Queen Anne.
Recognized by prominent members of both
the
English aristocracy and the intelligentsia, Handel was in no hurry to
return to Hanover. Soon he had no need to do so, for on the death of
Queen Anne in 1714, the elector George Louis became King George I of
England. In 1718 Handel became director of music to the duke of
Chandos, for whom he composed the 11 Chandos Anthems and the English
masque Acis and Galatea, among other works. Another masque, Haman and
Mordecai, was to be the effective starting point for the English
oratorio.
Except for a few visits to the European
continent, Handel spent the rest of his life in England. In 1726 he
became a British subject, which enabled him to be appointed a composer
of the Chapel Royal. In this capacity he wrote much music, including
the Coronation Anthems for George II in 1727 and the Funeral Anthem for
Queen Caroline 10 years later.
From 1720 until 1728 the operas at the
King’s Theatre in London were staged by the Royal Academy of
Music, and Handel composed the music for most of them. Among those of
the 1720s were Floridante (1721), Ottone (1723), Giulio Cesare (1724),
Rodelinda (1725), and Scipione (1726). From 1728, after the sensation
caused by John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (which
satirized
serious opera), the future of opera in the Italian style became
increasingly uncertain in England. It went into decline for a variety
of reasons, one of them being the impatience of the English with a form
of entertainment in an unintelligible language sung by artists of whose
morals they disapproved. But despite the vagaries of public taste,
Handel went on composing operas until 1741, by which time he had
written more than 40 such works. As the popularity of opera declined in
England, oratorio became increasingly popular. The revivals in 1732 of
Handel’s masques Acis and Galatea and Haman and Mordecai
(renamed
Esther) led to the establishment of the English oratorio—a
large
musical composition for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, without
acting or scenery, and usually dramatizing a story from the Bible in
English-language lyrics. Handel first capitalized on this genre in 1733
with Deborah and Athalia.
Handel also continued to comanage an
Italian
opera company in London despite many difficulties. Throughout his
London career he had suffered competition not only from rival composers
but also from rival opera houses in a London that could barely support
even one Italian opera in addition to its English theatres. Finally, in
1737, his company went bankrupt and he himself suffered what appears to
have been a mild stroke. After a course of treatment at Aachen
(Germany), he was restored to health and went on to compose the Funeral
Anthem for Queen Caroline (1737) and two of his most celebrated
oratorios, Saul and Israel in Egypt, both of which were performed in
1739. He also wrote the Twelve Grand Concertos, Opus 6, and helped
establish the Fund for the Support of Decayed Musicians (now the Royal
Society of Musicians).
Handel
was by this time at the height of his powers, and the year 1741 saw the
composition of his greatest oratorio, Messiah, and its inspired
successor, Samson. Messiah was given its first performance in Dublin on
April 13, 1742, and created a deep impression. Handel’s works
of
the next three years included the oratorios Joseph and His Brethren
(first performed 1744) and Belshazzar (1745), the secular oratorios
Semele (1744) and Hercules (1745), and the Dettingen Te Deum (1743),
celebrating the English victory over the French at the Battle of
Dettingen. Handel had by this time made oratorio and large-scale choral
works the most popular musical forms in England. He had created for
himself a new public among the rising middle classes, who would have
turned away in moral indignation from the Italian opera but who were
quite ready to be edified by a moral tale from the Bible, set to
suitably dignified and, by now, rather old-fashioned music. Even during
his lifetime Handel’s music was recognized as a reflection of
the
English national character, and his capacity for realizing the common
mood was nowhere better shown than in the Music for the Royal Fireworks
(1749), with which he celebrated the peace of the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle. Handel now began to experience trouble with his sight.
He managed with great difficulty to finish the last of his oratorios,
Jephtha, which was performed at Covent Garden Theatre, London, in 1752.
He kept his interest in musical activities alive until the end. After
his death on April 14, 1759, he was buried in Poets’ Corner
in
Westminster Abbey.
Music
The first basis of Handel’s
style was
the north German music of his childhood, but it was soon completely
overlaid by the Italian style that he acquired in early adulthood
during his travels in Italy. The influences of Arcangelo Corelli and
Alessandro Scarlatti can be detected in his work to the end of his long
life, and the French style of Jean-Baptiste Lully and, later, that of
the English composer Henry Purcell are also evident. There is a
robustness in Handel’s later music that gives it a very
English
quality. Above all, his music is eminently vocal. Handel’s
directness of manner makes him one of the great masters of choral
music. His choruses have a power and effectiveness that have never been
surpassed, and his writing for them is remarkable for the manner in
which he interweaves massive but simple harmonic passages with
contrapuntal sections of great ingenuity, the whole most effectively
illustrating the text. His writing for the solo voice is outstanding in
its suitability for the medium and its unerring melodic line. Handel
had a striking ability to depict human character musically in a single
scene or aria, a gift used with great dramatic power in his operas and
oratorios.
Though the bulk of his music was vocal,
Handel
was nevertheless one of the great instrumental composers of the late
Baroque era. His long series of overtures (mostly in the French style),
his orchestral concertos (Opus 3 and Opus 6), his large-scale concert
music for strings and winds (such as the Water Music and the Fireworks
Music), and the massive double concertos and organ concertos all show
him to have been a complete master of the orchestral means at his
command.
Handel had a lifelong attachment to the
theatre—even his oratorios were usually performed on the
stage
rather than in church. Until almost the end of his life he loved
Italian opera, and only after it involved him in ever-increasing
financial losses did he abandon it for English oratorio. Like other
composers of his time, he accepted the conventions of Italian opera,
with its employment of male sopranos and contraltos and the formalized
sequences of stylized recitatives and arias upon which opera seria was
constructed. Using these conventions, he produced many masterpieces.
Among the Italian operas, such works as Giulio Cesare (1724), Sosarme
(1732), and Alcina (1735) still make impressive stage spectacles, with
some scenes of great dramatic power bursting through the formal Baroque
grandeur. Many of his Italian operas have been revived in the 20th
century.
But Handel’s oratorios now
seem even
more dramatic than his operas, and they can generally be performed on
the stage with remarkably little alteration. Most of them, from early
attempts such as Esther to such consummately crafted later works as
Saul, Samson, Belshazzar, and Jephtha, treat a particular dramatic
theme taken from the Old Testament that illustrates the heroism and
suffering of a particular individual. The story line is illustrated by
solo recitatives and arias and underlined by the chorus. With Israel in
Egypt and Messiah, however, the emphasis is quite different, Israel
because of its uninterrupted chain of massive choruses, which do not
lend themselves to stage presentation, and Messiah because it is a
meditation on the life of Christ the Saviour rather than a dramatic
narration of his Passion. Handel also used the dramatic oratorio genre
for a number of secular works, chief among which are Semele and
Hercules, both based on stories from Greek mythology. But the finest of
his secular choral works is Acis and Galatea, which has a youthful
magic he never quite recovered in subsequent pieces of this type.
Handel’s most notable
contribution to
church music is his series of large-scale anthems, foremost of which
are the 11 Chandos Anthems; though written for a small group of singers
and instrumentalists, they are conceived on a grand scale. Closely
following these works are the four Coronation Anthems for George II;
the most celebrated of these, Zadok the Priest, is a striking example
of what Ludwig van Beethoven called Handel’s ability to
achieve
“great effects with simple means.”
Most of the orchestral music Handel
wrote
consists of overtures, often in the style of Lully, and totaling about
80 in number. Handel was equally adept at the concerto form, especially
the concerto grosso, in which he generally employed four or more
movements. His most important works of this type are the Six Concerti
Grossi (known as The Oboe Concertos), Opus 3, and the Twelve Grand
Concertos, which represent the peak of the Baroque concerto grosso for
stringed instruments. The Water Music and Fireworks Music suites, for
wind and string band, stand in a special class in the history of late
Baroque music by virtue of their combination of grandeur and melodic
bravura. They are still among the most popular of his works.
Handel also published harpsichord music,
of
which two sets of suites, the Suites de pièces pour le
clavecin
of 1720 and the Suites de pièces of 1733, containing 17 sets
in
all, are his finest contribution to that instrument’s
repertoire.
The ever-popular Harmonious Blacksmith variations are in No. 5 of the
Suites de pièces of 1720. Handel’s finest chamber
music
consists of trio sonatas, notably those published as Six Sonatas for
Two Violins, Oboes, or German Flutes and Continuo, Opus 2 (1733). He
also wrote various sonatas for one or more solo instruments with basso
continuo accompaniment for harpsichord. In addition, he was a notable
organist and composed more than 20 organ concertos, most of which
Handel used as intermission features during performances of his
oratorios.
Influence
In England, Handel was accorded the
status of
a classic composer even in his own lifetime, and he is perhaps unique
among musicians in never having suffered any diminution of his
reputation there since. As a young man on the European continent, he
had to some extent supplied the demands of aristocratic patronage, but
in England he adapted himself to a different climate of opinion and
taste and came to serve and express the needs of a wider public. More
than anyone else, he democratized music, and in this respect his
popular oratorios, his songs, and his best-loved instrumental works
have a social significance that complements their purely musical
importance. Handel’s music became an indispensable part of
England’s national culture. In Germany, meanwhile, interest
in
his music grew apace in the late 18th century and reestablished him as
a German composer of the first rank.
Charles Cudworth
Ed.
Additional
Reading
Comprehensive popular biographies are
Percy M.
Young, Handel, rev. ed. (1965, reissued 1979); Jonathan Keates, Handel:
The Man and His Music (1985); and Donald Burrows, Handel (1996). Paul
Henry Lang, George Frideric Handel (1966, reprinted 1996), is a
monumental study. Documentary biographies include Otto Erich Deutsch,
Handel (1955, reprinted 1974); and H.C. Robbins Landon, Handel and His
World (1984). Christopher Hogwood, Handel, rev. ed. (2007), includes a
detailed chronological table.
Books that discuss Handel’s
music
include Donald Burrows (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Handel (1997),
and Handel, Messiah (1991); Winton Dean, Handel and the Opera Seria
(1969), and Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (1990);
and
Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp, Handel’s Operas,
1704–1726 (1987). A useful work for the serious student of
Handel
is Mary Ann Parker, G.F. Handel: A Guide to Research, 2nd ed. (2005).
Citations
"George Frideric Handel." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009.
Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 06 Nov. 2009
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/254169/George-Frideric-Handel>.
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