Georgian splendour

Teatro alla Scala

HIS father, a well-connected doctor in the east German town of Halle, had wanted young Georg Friedrich to become a lawyer. But when the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels chanced to hear the ten-year-old playing the organ, he was so impressed that he persuaded Mr Händel to allow the boy to train as a musician. By the time the organ-player died in London on April 14th 1759, aged 74, he had become “the great and good Mr Handel”. Since then, Handel has enjoyed 250 years of uninterrupted posthumous fame.

To mark the anniversary of his death, the musical world has been getting the bouquets ready. Britain's BBC is planning to broadcast all 42 of his operas during this year. The seven-week London Handel Festival is already in full swing, and festivals in Halle and Göttingen will follow in April and May. A season of the composer's opera “Alcina” (pictured above) has just begun at La Scala in Milan. The Handel House Museum in London's Brook Street, where he lived for the last 36 years of his life, is putting on an exhibition about him next month. Another exhibition, “Handel the Philanthropist”, is already running at London's Foundling Hospital, one of Handel's favourite charities. Even the Bank of England, where the great man kept his money, is planning a new display about his financial affairs.

What is it about Handel that has made him so enduring? Some of his hits are played so frequently that even the tone-deaf would recognise them: “Messiah”, the “Water Music”, the “Music for the Royal Fireworks” and a handful of others. But there is a vast oeuvre, from chamber music to concerti grossi, that gets far fewer airings. And many of the operas and oratorios on which his reputation was built during his lifetime have only recently been dusted down again.

For all the reverence in which he is held now, Handel was a musical entrepreneur with a strong commercial orientation. He wrote fast and prolifically. A recent critic called him “the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day”. He also had a habit of reworking musical material, both his own and other people's, that some people found hard to stomach, though at the time it was common practice among musicians.

Having spent time in Italy and learnt how to write Italian operas, he accepted a post as Kapellmeister to the elector of Hanover when he was 25, but was soon off moonlighting in London, putting on Italian operas for a receptive audience. Eventually he got the sack from his post in Hanover for being away so much, but by then he was firmly established in London, receiving a royal pension from the ailing Queen Anne. A few years later he found himself working for his old boss again when the elector of Hanover became King George I.

By 1727 Handel was so well entrenched in London that, as George Frideric Handel, he became a naturalised British citizen (which required an act of Parliament). The British public took him to its heart and he was well in with the court. Later that year he wrote four anthems for the coronation of King George II, including “Zadok the Priest”, which has formed part of every British coronation since.

He had been pouring out the operas, assembling stellar casts of singers from all over Europe and laying on sumptuous productions, but as time went by the expense of mounting full-blown operas and the public's waning appetite for the Italian variety pitched him into financial crisis. His solution was to turn increasingly to oratorios: musical dramas mostly based on a biblical text, unstaged and, crucially, sung in English. They were much cheaper to put on than operas; they could be performed during Lent, when operas were forbidden; and the audiences mostly lapped them up. Although not all of them were successful, they made him not only famous but wealthy too. He left nearly £20,000 in his will, worth almost $4m in today's money.

For all his fame, Handel the man remains an enigma. He never married but had lots of friends, many in high places, and could be good company, though with a stormy temper. He cracked jokes in four or five languages yet retained his thick German accent to the end. His one vice was a huge appetite for food and drink which in time produced a waistline to match.

By the time he died, blind and afflicted by various ailments, he had become so much of a national institution that his wish to be buried in Westminster Abbey was instantly granted, with a large marble statue topping his grave. A year after his death he was honoured with the first full-blown biography of a composer, by John Mainwaring. The tributes just kept coming. Mozart, Haydn and Gluck were strong admirers and Beethoven described him as “the greatest composer that ever lived”.

The celebrations of the centenary of Handel's birth set a pattern for the next 150 years that did his music no favours. Bigger was judged to be better, with enormous orchestras and choirs being assembled for a blockbuster series of concerts. The Victorians went even further over the top. Handel-worship reached a climax in a series of festivals at London's Crystal Palace in the late 19th century. A “Messiah” in 1883 featured 4,500 singers and, no doubt, a soupy sound that Handel had never intended.

But despite all this adulation for Handel's music, the operas remained untouched for 180 years after his death. The convoluted plots and the conventions of the opera seria style, with their long da capo (repeat) arias, were thought to make them unperformable. When at long last some of them were revived in the 1920s, they were severely cut down and many of the lead parts, written for the star castrati of Handel's day, were transposed an octave down for a tenor or a baritone, leaving them barely recognisable.

Happily, the past few decades have brought a complete turnaround in the appreciation of the operas, many of which have entered the mainstream repertoire. Laurence Cummings, the musical director of the London Handel Festival, suggests multiple causes: more research into period performance that has led to more historically informed playing with smaller musical forces and a clearer, purer sound; the rise of the countertenor, the modern equivalent of the castrato without the unacceptable job requirements; even the growth of the recording industry, always on the lookout for new gems.

Modern audiences may have rediscovered in Handel what Sir John Hawkins, a contemporary, described as “that dignity and grandeur of sentiment which music is capable of conveying”. For now, they are proving Hawkins right in his prediction that Handel's work will “continue to engage the admiration of judicious hearers as long as the love of harmony shall exist.”