The New Grove Handel

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is the most up-to-date body of musical knowledge ever gathered together. The New Grove composer biographies have been selected from the dictionary to bring the finest of the biographies to a wider audience.

An international collaboration between leading scholars showcases a broad spectrum of observations on Handel and his music, covering many aspects of modern interdisciplinary and traditional philological musicology.

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is the most up-to-date body of musical knowledge ever gathered together. The New Grove composer biographies have been selected from the dictionary to bring the finest of the biographies to a wider audience.

A Companion to one of the principal creative figures in Baroque music.

The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain examines the involvement of Italian opera in British partisan politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, which saw Sir Robert Walpole's rise to power and George Frideric Handel's greatest period of opera production. McGeary argues that the conventional way of applying Italian opera to contemporary political events and persons by means of allegory and allusion in individual operas is mistaken; nor did partisan politics intrude into the management of the Royal Academy of Music and the Opera of the Nobility. This book shows instead how Senesino, Faustina, Cuzzoni and events at the Haymarket Theatre were used in political allegories in satirical essays directed against the Walpole ministry. Since most operas were based on ancient historical events, the librettos - like traditional histories - could be sources of examples of vice, virtue, and political precepts and wisdom that could be applied to contemporary politics.