George Frideric Handel (jan 1, 1685 – jan 1, 1759)

Description:

German-British composer. Handel was widely traveled and ended up living in London, where he focused on composing operas written in ITalian and oratorios in English.

Handel's instrumental works, less often performed today than Bach's, include organ concertos and trio sonatas. His largest efforts are two orchestral suites, the Water Music and The Music for the Royal Fireworks. Handel's operas are cast largely in the same mold as earlier opera seria, but they are often more complex and theatrical, as seen in Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724). After a quarter century of producing successful Italian operas in London, the public appetit for Handel's opera seria declined in the face of increased competition. He began to concentrate on English oratorios, a genre he played a central role in developing. His most famous oratorio, Messiah, is unusual in not being dramatic but rather reflective on the idea of a Messiah and on the life of Jesus.

Born in Halle, moved to Hamburg in 1703, which had a thriving opera house. There, he played violin and harpsichord in the orchestra and composed two operas for the opera company. Having found his calling in musical theater, he naturally gravitated to Italy, the operatic capital of the world. He spent his true formative years--from 1706 to 1710--in Venice, FLorence, Rome, and Naples; he worked for noble and ecclesiastical patrons, and met Alessandro Scarlatti, Arcangelo Corelli, and other luminaries of the day. In 1710 he became the music director at the court of George Ludwig, the Elector of Hanover, one of the richest German rulers. There Handel adapted the French style in music that was popular among all the German nobles.

Then he became the employee of King George I of England in 1714. Handel had already settled by then in London, where he was left remarkably free of official duties and acted as a free agent, an independent operatic entrepreneru on the lively city stage. He lived in England for the rest of his life. Over the rough quarter century between 1711 and 1738, Handel presented some three dozen operas. Acting at once as composer, conductor, producer, and, eventually, his own promotional agent, he became wealthy.

Beginning in the 1730s, however, a new generation of opera composers arrived in London. A rival company, the so-called Opera of the Nobility, engaged the latest Italian composers and, more important, the services of the great castrato Farinelli, around whom a virtual cult had formed. After a few seasons of cutthroat competition, both HAndel and his competitors were near bankruptcy, and HAndel was forced out of the opera business. With his acute business sense, he realized there was a huge potential market ion English oratorios, those biblical dramas presented without staging. He produced nearly two dozen between 1732 and 1752, and his adaptation of this old-ffashioned genre offered something quite new and appealing: full-length works in English rather than in Italian or Latin and rife with many thrilling choruses.

Handel';s was the exemplary cosmopolitan career of the early eighteenth century, a career epitomized by his operatic middle years, in which a gErman-born composer became famous by producing Italian-language operas for English-speaking audiences. His style was neither German nor Italian nor English but a hybrid that belended existing national genres and idioms, mixing in the French as well. France was the one country where Handel, althoguh an occasional visitor, never lived or worked, but French music, as the international court music, informed not only the courtly music that he wrote for his royal patron but the overtures to his operas and oratorios as well. Handel, a great musical synthesizer and consummate musical entrepreneur, commanded pan-European prestige.

Handel was a theater bro. "In much of his music , instrumental and vocal, secular and sacred, we perceive his theatrical sensibility.

More than three dozen operas on themes both serious and comic, encompassing a wide range of historical, romantic, and literary plots. After the French overture to start, they typically consisted of a string of recitatives and arias, usually in da capo form, with an occasional duet or chorus. The libretto was written in a language that was often neither the composer's nor the audience's. The complex but conventional plots tended to follow a strict pattern, teaching a moral lesson through the actions of the characters. The great opera composer was the one who could give the cut-and-dried, obligatory stories a freshly vivid embodiment that could be conveyed essentilaly without words.


Saul: How was it new? The traditional Italian oratorio was, for the most part, an opera seria on a biblical subject, sometimes even performed (by the eighteenth century) on stage with action. In England, the acting out of a sacred drama was prohibited, so there were no sets or costumes. Saul was nonetheless similar to an opera in the sense that its unstaged action proceeded through the same musical structures, its dramatic confrontations being carried out through the customary recitatives and arias. This made it easy for audience members to supply the implied stage action in their own imaginations. All the same, Saul--like Esther and Deborah before it and SAmson, Judas Maccabeus, and others after it--remained centered in its plot on dramatized human relations, the traditional stuff of opera. Isreal in Egypt, his next oratorio after Saul, almost completely abandoned the dramatic format--that is, the representation of human conflicts and confrontations through recitatives and arias--in favor of impersonal biblical narration, much of it carried out directly by the chorus, often split into two antiphonal choirs as in the old Venetian choral pieces.
The specifically Handelian conception of the oratorio as an essentially choral genre--a pageant rather than a drama--transofrmed it. While operas presented a string of da capo arias, the glory of Handel's oratorios were the choral sections. So thoroughly did Handel "Handelize" the oratorio for posterity that it comes now as a surprise to read contemporary descriptions of his work that emphasize its novelty, indeed its failure to conform to audience expectations. One contemporary listener wrote with perplexity about Handel's next biblical oratorio--namely Messiah, now the mostr famous oratorio in the world and the one to which all the others are compared--that "although called an Oratorio, yet it is not dramatic but properly a Collection of Hymns or Anthems drawn from the sacred SCriptures." That is precisely what the word oratorio has connoted since Handel's day. Now it is the dramatic oratorio that can seem unusual.

Handel was a famous "borrower" of music, often from his own music and even from other composers. Kinda a problem that he would steal, and then cover it up (suggesting he felt guilty about it).

Used an erotic duet for "For unto us a Child is born" and "all we like sheep have gone astray".

The use of secular material as the basis for an oratorio on the life of Christ has tended to perplex those for whom the sacred and the secular are mutually exclusive spheres or who think that musical styles are inherently connected to one or the other. Generations of musicians and audiences have praised how exquisitely Handel conveys the biblical text from the book of Isaiah, oblivious to the fact that when the compsoer first thought of the music the words were completely, scandalously different. But Messiah was actually not church music. It awas a self-proclaimed "entertainment", and its music was designed to amuse a public in search of diversion, however edifying.

But what chiefly mattered was was Handel's success. Again the old theatrical entrepreneur had seized the main chance. His adaptable nature, his uncanny ability continually to remake himself and his works in response to the conditions and opportunities that confronted him was Handel's great distinguishing trait. It marks him as perhaps the first modern composer, the prototype of the consumer-conscious artist, a great freelancer in the age of patronage, who managed to succed in living off his pen and living well.

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