George Frideric Handel

George Frideric Handel was a German-born Baroque composer who made his career in London and became a British subject in 1727. Trained in the Lutheran church music of central Germany and polished in Italy, he wrote dozens of Italian operas for London audiences before turning to English oratorio, a form he largely created. Messiah, the Water Music and the coronation anthem Zadok the Priest have kept his name familiar for nearly three centuries.

He was born Georg Friedrich Händel in Halle, in the Duchy of Magdeburg, a territory of Brandenburg–Prussia, on 5 March 1685; Johann Sebastian Bach was born that same year. His father, a barber-surgeon already in his sixties, wanted him to study law. After the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels heard the boy play the organ, Handel was sent to study with Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, organist of Halle's main church.

His father died in 1697. In 1702 Handel enrolled at the new University of Halle and became organist of the city's Calvinist cathedral on a one-year contract.

In 1703 he moved to Hamburg, a free city with a public opera house, where he played violin and harpsichord in the orchestra. His first operas, Almira and Nero, were staged there in 1705. In 1706 he went to Italy, the home of opera, at the invitation of a member of the Medici family. In Rome, where opera was then banned, he wrote church music and cantatas for wealthy patrons. His opera Agrippina, staged in Venice in 1709, ran for 27 nights and made him famous.

In 1710 Handel became Kapellmeister to George, Elector of Hanover, but soon left for London, where his opera Rinaldo was a great success in 1711. He settled in England for good in 1712 and received a pension from Queen Anne. When the elector became King George I, the Water Music, played on the River Thames for the king in July 1717, is said to have helped restore relations. From 1717 he also worked for the future Duke of Chandos at Cannons, near London.

In 1719 a group of aristocrats founded the Royal Academy of Music to stage Italian opera, and Handel travelled to Dresden to recruit singers for it. Living from about 1723 in Brook Street, in 1724–25 he produced Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano and Rodelinda. For the coronation of George II in 1727 he wrote four anthems, among them Zadok the Priest, which has been sung at every British coronation since. The Beggar's Opera of 1728 mocked Italian opera, a rival company backed by the Prince of Wales drew away singers and audiences, and Handel's later ventures struggled. In 1737 he suffered a stroke that temporarily paralysed his right arm.

Handel gradually turned to oratorios: dramatic works on mostly biblical themes, sung in English without costumes or staging, which cost less and appealed to a broader middle-class public. Saul and Israel in Egypt followed in 1739, and his last opera was staged in 1741. That summer he was invited to Dublin, capital of the Kingdom of Ireland, to give charity concerts. Messiah, written in London in just over three weeks, received its first performance there on 13 April 1742. Later oratorios such as Judas Maccabaeus celebrated the defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1745.

The Music for the Royal Fireworks of 1749 drew some 12,000 people to its first performance. From 1750 Handel gave annual performances of Messiah for London's Foundling Hospital, a home for abandoned children. He was blind by 1752. He died at his Brook Street home on 14 April 1759, aged 74, and received a state funeral in Westminster Abbey.

His oratorios remained central to British musical life, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arranged German versions of Messiah. Since the mid-20th century his operas have been revived, and he is now ranked among the great musical dramatists.

Our 1700 and 1715 maps show his native Brandenburg-Prussia, soon to become the Kingdom of Prussia, while the 1715 map shows Great Britain, part of the British Empire, just after the Elector of Hanover became its king.