About G. F. Handel
George Frideric Handel is regarded as one of the finest composers of the Baroque era. He wrote some of the best-known and most widely performed works of classical music, including Messiah, Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks.
Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived … I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb.Ludvig Van Beethoven
Handel showed prodigious gifts as a keyboard player and composer from an early age. After formative years in Hamburg and an extended stay in Italy absorbing opera and sacred styles, he settled in London in 1712 and, in 1727, became a naturalised British subject, a telling sign of how completely he had thrown in his lot with this city and its audiences.
Handel’s first London triumphs were theatrical. Cultivated and wealthy Londoners wanted to hear in their own city the Italian opera seria that had thrilled them on the Grand Tour, and Handel could supply it, announcing his London presence with Rinaldo (1711). When aristocratic backers founded the Royal Academy of Music in 1719 (no relation to the later conservatoire), importing star performers such as Senesino and Francesca Cuzzoni, Handel was the principal composer.
Handel’s stagecraft during these years produced such enduring masterpieces as Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda. When the Royal Academy collapsed in 1728 amid rising costs and changing taste (confirmed by the runaway success of The Beggar’s Opera), Handel continued to produce a succession of masterpiece operas, including Orlando, Ariodante and Alcina – but with dwindling audiences once the war of 1739-48 deprived London of Italian stars..
Music for Kings and Crowds
Handel was also the city’s pre-eminent composer of public ceremonial. His Water Music suite (1717), written to entertain a royal water party on the Thames, was lengthily admired in diplomatic despatches. Zadok the Priest, one of the four Coronation Anthems for George II, has been performed at every British coronation since. Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749), written for celebrations in Green Park marking the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, brought London traffic to a halt and filled the air with martial brilliance for winds and drums. These works, alongside his organ concertos and the Concerti grossi Op. 6, show Handel’s unrivalled gift for music that could speak with equal force to courtly audiences and to the crowds.
Charity, Community & Legacy
Handel’s music-making was inseparable from public life. He lent his fame to the Foundling Hospital, from 1750 giving annual charity performances of Messiah to raise funds for London’s first children’s charity; his bequest of the music enabled the tradition to continue after his death. He was a co-founder of the charity now called the Royal Society of Musicians; he was a governor of the Lock Hospital for venereal diseases. In his later years, a regular worshipper at his local church, St George’s Hanover Square, he was ‘the great and good Mr Handel’, and his philanthropic instincts connected his art to the city’s civic fabric in a way few composers have matched. When he died in 1759, he was buried with honour in Westminster Abbey, and Londoners continued to hear his music in their concert halls, churches and pleasure gardens for generations.
Why Handel Matters Today
Handel’s style is bold, theatrical, and immediately communicative. He wrote with singers’ voices in mind, and gave choirs an unprecedented dramatic role; he mastered Italian elegance and German counterpoint, yet spoke fluent musical English. Above all, he understood audiences, crafting works that could thrill, console and inspire in equal measure. That is why Messiah remains an annual ritual for many and why his stage works continue to be rediscovered in historically informed performances and imaginative new productions.
The London Handel Festival exists in that same spirit: to celebrate a composer who made London sing, and to bring his music to today’s city and enrich lives for audiences around the world.
