The Life Of George Frederick Handel

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

How have Handel's 'lives' in biographies and histories moulded our understanding of the musician, the man and the icon?

Discusses the life and career of the eighteenth-century German composer.

During his lifetime, the sounds of Handel’s music reached from court to theater, echoed in cathedrals, and filled crowded taverns, but the man himself—known to most as the composer of Messiah—is a bit of a mystery. Though he took meticulous care of his musical manuscripts and even provided for their preservation on his death, very little of an intimate nature survives. One document—Handel’s will—offers us a narrow window into his personal life. In it, he remembers not only family and close colleagues but also neighborhood friends. In search of the private man behind the public figure, Ellen T. Harris has spent years tracking down the letters, diaries, personal accounts, legal cases, and other documents connected to these bequests. The result is a tightly woven tapestry of London in the first half of the eighteenth century, one that interlaces vibrant descriptions of Handel’s music with stories of loyalty, cunning, and betrayal. With this wholly new approach, Harris has achieved something greater than biography. Layering the interconnecting stories of Handel’s friends like the subjects and countersubjects of a fugue, Harris introduces us to an ambitious, shrewd, generous, brilliant, and flawed man, hiding in full view behind his public persona.

Document from the year 2010 in the subject Biographies, , language: English, abstract: The script “The Triumph of Time and Truth” deals with life and career of George Frideric Handel starting with his early years in Halle, Handel’s birth place, where he already got into music as a little boy by secretly playing a small clavichord on the attic. At Weissenfels, the court of the Duke of Saxony, the budding spirit of the ten year old firstly became obvious to an audience listening. His friendship with George Phillip Telemann led him to Hamburg at the very beginning of the 18th century. Here his genius became already visible and he began to develop his own particular style of composing operas which remained so significant for him for decades. In Rome, his next domicile, it was the oratorio beside the opera he focused on. The time he spent in Italy was most formative for his further personal development. The main focus of this script is on Handel’s London years from 1711 to 1759 where his career reached its peak. Here it was that his entirely new creation, the English oratorio became such a great success. This almost half a century brought glory, crisis and wealth to George Frideric Handel.