George Frideric Handel: Composer of the Messiah and Master of the Baroque

George Frideric Handel was born Georg Friedrich Händel on February 23, 1685, in Halle, in the Duchy of Magdeburg (in present-day Germany), and died on April 14, 1759, in London, England. In the seventy-four years between those dates, he became one of the most significant composers in the history of Western music — the creator of Messiah, Rinaldo, Water Music, Music for the Royal Fireworks, and dozens of operas, oratorios, and orchestral works that have been performed continuously since their composition and that remain among the most beloved works in the classical repertoire. He was the German-born composer who became an English institution, the creator of a new form of musical drama (the English oratorio), and a figure whose influence on subsequent composers — including Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven — was profound and lasting.

Handel's career was defined by several remarkable features. He was one of the most productive composers in Western history, composing approximately forty operas, twenty-nine oratorios, and numerous orchestral, keyboard, and chamber works over a career that spanned more than five decades. He was also one of the most commercially minded composers of his era — a man who understood the economics of musical performance, managed his own theatrical enterprises, and navigated the complex politics of royal patronage and public taste with considerable sophistication. And he was a composer of extraordinary versatility, whose work in every genre he touched was marked by a combination of melodic invention, dramatic power, and technical mastery that made him the dominant figure of English musical life for most of the first half of the eighteenth century.

The Baroque period in which Handel worked — roughly the century from 1600 to 1750 — was the period in which the fundamental forms and practices of Western classical music were established: opera, the orchestra, tonality as we understand it, and the major musical forms (sonata, concerto, suite, fugue) that would dominate the next two centuries. Handel was born in the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach, his great contemporary and sometime rival, and the two composers represent complementary aspects of the Baroque synthesis — Bach the master of German Lutheran counterpoint and keyboard music, Handel the master of Italian opera and English oratorio, equally at home in sacred and secular contexts, equally comfortable writing for intimate chamber forces or the largest royal spectacles.

The Halle Childhood and Early Musical Training

Handel's early life was shaped by a family that was not particularly musical and by his own determination — the determination of a child who apparently knew from early childhood that music was his calling, against the wishes of a father who had other plans. His father, Georg Händel the Elder, was a surgeon-barber who served at the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels and was a practical, socially ambitious man who envisioned a legal career for his talented son. The standard story — largely derived from the earliest biography of Handel, written by John Mainwaring in 1760 — describes the young Georg Friedrich practicing secretly on a clavichord hidden in the attic, discovered by his father, and eventually winning paternal permission to pursue music after a demonstration of his talents before the Duke.

The story may be somewhat legendary in its details but appears to be substantially accurate in its outlines: Handel did study music partly against his father's initial wishes, and he did eventually receive permission to study seriously. His principal teacher in Halle was Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, the organist at the Marienkirche, who gave him a thorough training in harmony, counterpoint, and composition and introduced him to the current German musical tradition, including the Italian influences that were then transforming European music.

Handel's father died in 1697, when Georg Friedrich was twelve, and the death seems to have accelerated rather than impeded his musical development. He pursued his studies intensively, and by the time he was seventeen he had already been appointed organist at the cathedral in Halle, a position that required both technical proficiency and the kind of professional responsibility usually reserved for older musicians.