George Frideric Handel

George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel ( HAN-dəl; baptised Georg Fried[e]rich Händel, German: [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈhɛndl̩] ⓘ; 5 March 1685 [O.S. 23 February 1684] – 14 April 1759) was a German-British Baroque composer well-known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concerti.

Born in Halle, Handel spent his early life in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel's music forms one of the peaks of the "high baroque" style, bringing Italian opera to its highest development, creating the genres of English oratorio and organ concerto, and introducing a new style into English church music. He is consistently recognised as one of the greatest composers of his age.

Handel started three commercial opera companies to supply the English nobility with Italian opera. In 1737 he had a physical breakdown, changed direction creatively, addressed the middle class and made a transition to English choral works. After his success with Messiah (1742), he never composed an Italian opera again. His orchestral Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks remain steadfastly popular. One of his four coronation anthems, Zadok the Priest, has been performed at every British coronation since 1727. He died a respected and rich man in 1759, aged 74, and was given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey.

Interest in Handel's music has grown since the mid-20th century. The musicologist Winton Dean wrote that "Handel was not only a great composer; he was a dramatic genius of the first order." His music was admired by Classical-era composers, especially Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Early years

Family

Handel was born in 1685 (the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti) in Halle, in the Duchy of Magdeburg, then part of Brandenburg–Prussia. His parents were Georg Händel, aged 63, and Dorothea Taust, daughter of Georg Taust, a pastor, and Dorothea Cuno, the niece of Johann Olearius. His father was an eminent barber-surgeon who served the court of Saxe-Weissenfels and the Margraviate of Brandenburg.

Halle was a relatively prosperous city, home of a salt-mining industry, a centre of trade, and a member of the Hanseatic League. The Margrave of Brandenburg became the administrator of the archepiscopal territories of Mainz, including Magdeburg when they converted, and by the early 17th century held his court in Halle, which attracted renowned musicians. Even the smaller churches all had "able organists and fair choirs", and humanities and the letters thrived (Shakespeare was performed in the theatres early in the 17th century). The Thirty Years' War brought extensive destruction to Halle, and by the 1680s it was impoverished. However, since the middle of the war the city had been under the administration of the Duke of Saxony, and soon after the end of the war he would bring musicians trained in Dresden to his court in Weissenfels.

The arts and music, however, flourished only among the higher strata, of which Handel's family was not a part. Georg Händel (senior) was born at the beginning of the war and was apprenticed to a barber in Halle at the age of 14 after his father died. When he was 20, he married the widow of the official barber-surgeon of a suburb of Halle, inheriting his practice. With this, Georg determinedly began the process of becoming self-made; by dint of his "conservative, steady, thrifty, unadventurous" lifestyle, he guided the five children he had with Anna who reached adulthood into the medical profession (except his youngest daughter, who married a government official). Anna died in 1682. Within a year Georg married again, this time to the daughter of a Lutheran minister, Pastor Georg Taust of the Church of St Bartholomew in Giebichenstein, who himself came from a long line of Lutheran pastors. George Frideric was the second child of this marriage; the first son was stillborn. Two younger sisters arrived afterwards: Dorothea Sophia, born on 6 October 1687, and Johanna Christiana, born on 10 January 1690.

Early education

Early in his life, Handel is reported to have attended the gymnasium in Halle, where the headmaster, Johann Praetorius, was reputed to be an ardent musician. Whether Handel remained there, and if he did for how long, is unknown, but many biographers suggest that he was withdrawn from school by his father, based on the characterisation of him by Handel's first biographer, John Mainwaring. Mainwaring is the source for almost all information (little as it is) of Handel's childhood, and much of that information came from J. C. Smith Jr., Handel's confidant and copyist. Whether it came from Smith or elsewhere, Mainwaring frequently relates misinformation. It is from Mainwaring that the portrait comes of Handel's father as implacably opposed to any musical education. Mainwaring writes that Georg Händel was "alarmed" at Handel's very early propensity for music, "took every measure to oppose it", including forbidding any musical instrument in the house and preventing Handel from going to any house where they might be found. This did nothing to dampen young Handel's inclination; in fact, it did the reverse. Mainwaring tells the story of Handel's secret attic spinet: Handel "found means to get a little clavichord privately convey'd to a room at the top of the house. To this room he constantly stole when the family was asleep". Although both John Hawkins and Charles Burney credited this tale, Schoelcher found it nearly "incredible" and a feat of "poetic imagination" and Lang considers it one of the unproven "romantic stories" that surrounded Handel's childhood. But Handel had to have had some experience with the keyboard to have made the impression in Weissenfels that resulted in his receiving formal musical training.

Musical education

Sometime between the ages of seven and nine, Handel accompanied his father to Weissenfels, where he came under the notice of one whom Handel thereafter always regarded throughout life as his benefactor, Duke Johann Adolf I. Somehow Handel made his way to the court organ in the palace chapel of the Holy Trinity, where he surprised everyone with his playing. Overhearing this performance and noting the youth of the performer caused the Duke, whose suggestions were not to be disregarded, to recommend to Georg Händel that Handel be given musical instruction. Handel's father engaged the organist at the Halle parish church, the young Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, to instruct Handel. Zachow would be the only teacher that Handel ever had. Because of his church employment, Zachow was an organist "of the old school", revelling in fugues, canons, and counterpoint. But he was also familiar with developments in music across Europe and his own compositions "embraced the new concerted, dramatic style".

When Zachow discovered the talent of Handel, he introduced him "to a vast collection of German and Italian music, which he possessed, sacred and profane, vocal and instrumental compositions of different schools, different styles, and of every master". Many traits considered "Handelian" can be traced back to Zachow's music. At the same time Handel continued practice on the harpsichord, and learnt violin and organ, but according to Burney his special affection was for the hautbois (oboe). Schoelcher speculates that his youthful devotion to the instrument explains the large number of pieces he composed for the oboe.

With respect to instruction in composition, in addition to having Handel apply himself to traditional fugue and cantus firmus work, Zachow, recognising Handel's precocious talents, systematically introduced Handel to the variety of styles and masterworks contained in his extensive library. He did this 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 was entered into a notebook that Handel maintained for the rest of his life. Although it has since disappeared, the notebook has been sufficiently described to understand what pieces Zachow wished Handel to study. Among the chief composers represented in this exercise book were Johann Krieger, an "old master" in the fugue and prominent organ composer, Johann Caspar Kerll, a representative of the "southern style" after his teacher Girolamo Frescobaldi and imitated later by Handel, Johann Jakob Froberger, an "internationalist" also closely studied by Dieterich Buxtehude and Johann Sebastian Bach, and Georg Muffat, whose amalgam of French and Italian styles and synthesis of musical forms influenced Handel.

Mainwaring writes that during this time Zachow had begun to have Handel assume some of his church duties. Zachow, Mainwaring asserts, was "often" absent, "from his love of company, and a cheerful glass", and Handel, therefore, performed on organ frequently. What is more, according to Mainwaring, Handel began composing, at the age of nine, church services for voice and instruments "and from that time actually did compose a service every week for three years successively". Mainwaring ends this chapter of Handel's life by concluding that three or four years had been enough to allow Handel to surpass Zachow, and Handel had become "impatient for another situation"; "Berlin was the place agreed upon." Carelessness with dates or sequences (and possibly imaginative interpretation by Mainwaring) makes this period confused.

After the death of Handel's father

Handel's father died on 11 February 1697. It was German custom for friends and family to compose funeral odes for a substantial burgher like Georg, and young Handel discharged his duty with a poem dated 18 February and signed with his name and (in deference to his father's wishes) "dedicated to the liberal arts." At the time Handel was studying either at Halle's Lutheran Gymnasium or the Latin School.

Mainwaring has Handel travelling to Berlin the next year, 1698. The problem with Mainwaring as an authority for this date, however, is that he tells of how Handel's father communicated with the "king" during Handel's stay, declining the Court's offer to send Handel to Italy on a stipend and that his father died "after his return from Berlin." But since Georg Händel died in 1697, either the date of the trip or Mainwaring's statements about Handel's father must be in error. Early biographers solved the problem by making the year of the trip 1696, then noting that at the age of 11, Handel would need a guardian, so they have Handel's father or a friend of the family accompany him, all the while puzzling over why the elder Handel, who wanted Handel to become a lawyer, would spend the sum to lead his son further into the temptation of music as a career. Schoelcher for example has Handel travelling to Berlin at 11, meeting both Giovanni Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti in Berlin and then returning at the direction of his father. But Ariosti was not in Berlin before the death of Handel's father, and Handel could not have met Bononcini in Berlin before 1702. Modern biographers either accept the year as 1698, since most reliable older authorities agree with it, and discount what Mainwaring says about what took place during the trip or assume that Mainwaring conflated two or more visits to Berlin, as he did with Handel's later trips to Venice.

University

Perhaps to fulfil a promise to his father or simply because he saw himself as "dedicated to the liberal arts", on 10 February 1702 Handel matriculated at the University of Halle. That university had only recently been founded. In 1694 the Elector of Brandenburg Frederick III (later Prussian King Frederick I) created the school, largely to provide a lecture forum for the jurist Christian Thomasius who had been expelled from Leipzig for his liberal views. Handel did not enrol in the faculty of law, although he almost certainly attended lectures. Thomasius was an intellectual and academic crusader, who was the first academic to lecture in German and also denounced witch trials. Lang believes that Thomasius instilled in Handel a "respect for the dignity and freedom of man's mind and the solemn majesty of the law", principles that would have drawn him to and kept him in England for half a century. Handel also there encountered the theologian and professor of Oriental languages August Hermann Francke, who was particularly solicitous of children, especially orphans. The orphanage he founded became a model and undoubtedly influenced Handel's own charitable impulse when he assigned the rights of Messiah to London's Foundling Hospital.

Shortly after commencing his university education, Handel (though Lutheran) on 13 March 1702 accepted the position of organist at the Calvinist Cathedral in Halle, the Domkirche, replacing J. C. Leporin, for whom he had acted as assistant. The position, which was a one-year probationary appointment, showed the foundation he had received from Zachow, for a church organist and cantor was a highly prestigious office. From it, he received 5 thalers a year and lodgings in the run-down castle of Moritzburg.

Around this same time, Handel made the acquaintance of Telemann. Four years Handel's senior, Telemann was studying law at Leipzig and was assisting cantor Johann Kuhnau (Bach's predecessor at the Thomaskirche there). Telemann recalled forty years later in an autobiography for Mattheson's Grundlage: "The writing of the excellent Johann Kuhnau served as a model for me in fugue and counterpoint; but in fashioning melodic movements and examining them Handel and I were constantly occupied, frequently visiting each other as well as writing letters."

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