George FridericHandel

Handel was eighteen when he left Halle for Hamburg in 1703 and took a place in the opera orchestra. His father had been a barber-surgeon; his teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow had taught him the organ, counterpoint and the habit of copying other people’s scores. He had enrolled at Halle’s university and worked as a church organist. Hamburg had a public theatre, singers to accompany and an audience that had bought tickets. His first opera, Almira, opened there in 1705, with German words and Italian arias.

1706–⁠10An education in Italy

In Italy he found patrons in Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice. Roman cardinals commissioned music from the young Protestant, and Prince Ruspoli provided him with singers and instrumentalists to write for. In the Dixit Dominus of 1707, a setting of a Latin psalm, five choral parts move at speed, then some voices hold dissonant notes while the others move underneath. He wrote chamber cantatas for a single singer. In Corelli’s Rome he learned to write for violin alongside the voice.

Agrippina, staged in Venice at the end of 1709, is a comedy about people manoeuvring for power. Handel reused a great deal of earlier music in it, fitting it to new lies and seductions. He reused music in this way throughout his career.

LondonWater Music and the Royal Academy

He accepted a court appointment in Hanover in 1710, then promptly obtained leave for London. Rinaldo opened in 1711 and put Tasso’s crusaders and enchantresses on the stage with Italian star singers and elaborate scenery. By 1712 Handel had settled in England. In 1714 his Hanoverian employer became George I. On 17 July 1717 the king travelled up the Thames towards Chelsea while a separate barge carried about fifty musicians playing Handel’s Water Music. The king had it played three times during the outward and return trips.

In 1723 he leased 25 Brook Street, the London house where he lived for the rest of his life. He became a British citizen in 1727, the year he wrote coronation anthems for George II. Zadok the Priest opens with a long orchestral introduction before the choir enters. The opera company’s finances were less secure. Imported singers were expensive, subscribers fell away, and in 1733 the rival Opera of the Nobility began competing for both. Its singers came to include the castrato Farinelli.

He went on composing. Ariodante and Alcina appeared in 1735, and in the same years English works were being performed beside the Italian operas. A public revival of Esther in 1732 had shown that an English biblical drama could succeed in concert, with a chorus and soloists, and with words sung in the audience’s own language.

The oratoriosMessiah and Dublin

Saul and Israel in Egypt both reached the stage in 1739, without acted scenery or costumes. They use the chorus very differently. In Saul, individual people destroy one another; the orchestra includes trombones and a carillon. In Israel in Egypt, the chorus tells much of the story itself. Handel appeared as an organ soloist between portions of his oratorios, so that the audience heard a concerto as well as the drama.

Handel was delighted with Dublin. Subscriptions to his six-concert series filled a room of six hundred, he told Jennens on 29 December 1741, “so that I needed not sell one single Ticket at the Door”. The orchestra was excellent, the room sounded well, and his organ playing had gone better than usual. Messiah received its first performance in Fishamble Street on 13 April 1742, for charity. Jennens took the words from the Bible and the Prayer Book Psalter. The texts dealt with prophecy, Christ’s suffering and the promise of resurrection, and he assembled them without a continuous cast of characters.

Handel drew on his experience of the stage. In He was despised the alto repeats a few words at length. In All we like sheep the voices move apart from one another in quick runs; then the tempo slows and the chorus sings of the cost of that wandering. The trumpet is held back for its solo in The trumpet shall sound.

1749–⁠59The Foundling Hospital and late works

The late music ranges from the outdoor splendour of the Music for the Royal Fireworks in 1749 to the threatened Christians of Theodora and the terrible paternal vow in Jephtha. While composing the latter, Handel stopped at the chorus How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees. On 13 February 1751 he wrote in German on the score: “Reached this point; prevented from continuing by the weakening sight of my left eye.” He resumed work and finished the oratorio, which opened at Covent Garden in 1752.

Blindness ended his regular composition, though assistants helped him keep performances going. He died at Brook Street on 14 April 1759 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His will allowed up to £600 for his monument. Later generations assembled very large choirs for his oratorios, whose scores require the singers to run through semiquavers together.