HANDEL, GEORG FRIEDRICH. - Musician, b. in Halle on 23 Feb. 1685, d. in London on 14 Apr. 1759.
he was maestro di cappella at the court of Hanover, but at the end of the same year he moved to London, where he remained for the rest of his life, which was rich in struggles, setbacks and triumphs.
The events of his theatrical career are well known in relation to the financial difficulties of the Royal Academy of Music founded by him and to the economic-artistic rivalries first of Bononcini and then of Porpora. The copious theatrical production was followed by the creation of a new dramatic form in which H.'s genius has left its enduring mark. Saul and Israel in Egypt (1738-39) were the first essays of this personal conception of the oratorio; there followed the Messiah, performed in Dublin in 1742 with great success, which was not repeated in England. Equally unfortunate were the secular oratorios Hercules and Belshazzar (1744), but Judas Maccabaeus (1747), written to celebrate the victory of the Duke of Cumberland over the partisans of the Stuarts, was triumphantly received. Fruits of an inexhaustible creative vein were the oratorios composed from 1747 to '51: Joshua, Solomon, Susanna, Theodora, Jephtha. In his last years the musician was struck by blindness, but he was comforted by an admiration that was by then undisputed and universal: he was buried, as a mark of great honor, in Westminster Abbey. H.'s work, admirable also in the field of instrumental music, excels in the oratorio, in which his imagination was able to unfold with a marvelous grandeur of architecture and fullness of expression: the epic dramatic quality of the choruses and the intense melodic lyricism of the solo parts merge into the harmonious and firm artistic unity of the composition, always marked by characteristics of noble and solemn stylistic vigor.
Bibliography5 works
Luigi Ronga