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 The
great musician who made England his adopted country and passed
there the greater part of his long life, was born at Halle, in
Lower Saxony, in 1685, his family name being HANDEL. His musical
genius asserted itself at the age of seven, and his father, a
surgeon, was compelled to give him a regular musical education.
As a boy he was regarded as a prodigy; his first opera was produced
before he was 20; and it contains the beautiful air afterwards
known as "Lascia ch'io pianga." At the age of 21 he
went to Italy, where he passed three years, and on his return
he was made Chapelmaster to the Elector of Hanover (George I).
He came to England in 1710, being then twenty-five, and from
that time he made this country his home.
Between 1720 and 1738 he was occupied mainly with the opera,
of which he undertook the direction, and for which he composed
between thirty and forty pieces. He embarked his fortune and
consumed his energies in a series of ventures which caused him
incessant anxiety, fatigue, disappointment, and embarrassment.
The miserable personal ambition and vanity of his rivals beset
him with continual opposition, which his proud, irascible, and
independent spirit was not well fitted to soften. The aristocracy,
whose favour he was too proud to solicit, supported his rival
Buononcini, and for some time English society was divided into
violent partisans supporting the two composers. Handel in the
end triumphed, and carried with him the public applause; but
his opera house was a commercial failure; he became bankrupt
in 1737; and his health failing, he soon after renounced his
connection with the stage.
Happily he found his true vocation in Oratorio, to which he
now devoted himself at the age of 55, saying that "sacred
music was best fitted to a man descending in the vale of years."
In 1740 he produced Saul and Israel in Egypt, in
1742 Messiah, then twelve other oratorios, ending with
Jephthah, 1752. Shortly afterwards he became blind, though
he still continued to compose and even to perform in public.
But disease and exhaustion overtook him, as his fame became assured:
he died in his house in Brook Street (No. 25) and was buried
in Westminster Abbey, where a monument by Roubillac is placed
over his grave in Poets' Corner.
Handel was a man of strong, simple, independent character:
generous, sincere, indomitable, and vehement. He was never married,
and led a reserved, plain, and assiduous life. He produced some
twenty oratorios, about forty operas, and hundreds of cantatas,
psalms, songs, and instrumental pieces. His industry was prodigious,
and his rapidity of intense concentration such, that many of
his works are said to have been almost improvised. His massive
choral effects were exactly suited to impress a people saturated
with Biblical ideas, and accustomed to public demonstrations
of national and patriotic enthusiasm. Handel is thus in a singular
degree the musical expression of the England of Marlborough,
Chatham, Defoe, and Wesley. No artist perhaps in any line has
more deeply touched the national fibre of that country; and none
has ever more completely vivified patriotic aspiration and religious
fervour in masses of people.
Handel was unquestionably one of the greatest creative geniuses
in the history of art: his Messiah, of which he selected
the words from the Bible, proudly declining the officious assistance
of a courtly bishop, is itself, apart from the music, a drama
grandly conceived, and worked out with the feeling of a poet.
The instrumental portions of his oratorios, to modern ears somewhat
thin and rudimentary, have been filled in and completed by Mozart and other musicians; and the
other instrumental pieces of Handel, though some of them remain
from their intrinsic beauty, are slight and conventional in form.
But Handel was in no sense great only in majestic choral effects.
Many of his solos, and a few of the songs from his operas, are
still cherished amongst the most exquisite and pathetic melodies
which art has given us. With Bach, Gluck, and Mozart, Handel
is certainly one of the great powers in the evolution of modern
music in the three centuries which separate the birth of Palestrina
from the death of Beethoven.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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