Handel E-Book

Michael Steen

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: The Great Composers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 89

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.Born within ten days of Bach and within a distance of 100 miles, Handel could not provide a greater contrast with the Lutheran master. Where Bach made pilgrimages to hear church organists, Handel sought out opera in Italy. Where Bach was 'parsimonious and prudent', Handel, the Italian-trained extrovert, became a risk-taking entrepreneur on an international scale, ending his life a wealthy man, with a house in Mayfair, honoured by his adopted nation.Michael Steen follows Handel from his early years in Hamburg, through his apprenticeship in Florence and Rome to his five decades spent in the bustling London of the early 18th century. Arriving in 1710, Handel plunged into the musical world of the capital, composing and mounting a stream of Italian operas – on average almost one every nine months during the 1720s – to universal acclaim. He set up his own opera company with royal support and went talent-hunting on the continent to bring back the best singers. When the fashion for Italian opera was finally overtaken, Handel reinvented himself as a composer of oratorios and found renewed success with audiences. Even today, annual performances of Messiah are embedded in this country's musical life, as are the coronation anthem Zadok the Priest, the Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. Three thousand people attended his funeral at Westminster Abbey when he died.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd,

Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-1-84831-801-4

Text copyright © 2003, 2010 Michael Steen

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.

Also by the Michael Steen:

The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (ebook and paperback)

Great Operas: A Guide to 25 of the World’s Finest Musical Experiences (ebook and paperback)

Enchantress of Nations: Pauline Viardot, Soprano, Muse and Lover (hardback).

He is currently engaged in a project to publish one hundred ebooks in the series A Short Guide to a Great Opera. Around forty of these have already been published' and further details on these are given at the back of this book.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

EARLY DAYS IN GERMANY AND ITALY

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON

ENGLISH MUSIC AND THEATRE

EARLY DAYS IN ENGLAND

THE ‘ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC’

THE WEST END

25 LOWER BROOK STREET

A NEW COMPANY AND TRAVELS ABROAD

COMPETITION

HANDEL’S ORATORIOS

POOR HEALTH, CHARITABLE WORKS AND DECLINE

HANDEL’S DEATH

NOTES

Other Books in the Series

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to our ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from his book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, Michael Steen explores the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Born within ten days of Bach and within a distance of 100 miles, Handel could not provide a greater contrast with the Lutheran master. Where Bach made pilgrimages to hear church organists, Handel sought out opera in Italy. Where Bach was ‘parsimonious and prudent’, Handel, the Italian-trained extrovert, became a risk-taking entrepreneur on an international scale, ending his life a wealthy man, with a house in Mayfair, honoured by his adopted nation.

Michael Steen follows Handel from his early years in Hamburg, through his apprenticeship in Florence and Rome to his five decades spent in the bustling London of the early 18th century. Arriving in 1710, Handel plunged into the musical world of the capital, composing and mounting a stream of Italian operas – on average almost one every nine months during the 1720s – to universal acclaim. He set up his own opera company with royal support and went talent-hunting on the continent to bring back the best singers. When the fashion for Italian opera was finally overtaken, Handel reinvented himself as a composer of oratorios and found renewed success with audiences. Even today, annual performances of Messiah are embedded in this country's musical life, as are the coronation anthem Zadok the Priest, the Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. Three thousand people attended his funeral at Westminster Abbey when he died.

HANDEL

ONE COMPOSER WHOSE reputation is surely assured is Handel, whose corp ulent, sombre figure towered over the musical scene in the 18th century.

Under the full-bottomed wig, behind Handel’s dour image, there was, according to the 18th-century musical historian Dr Burney, a smile, ‘bursting out of a black cloud … a sudden flash of intelligence, wit and good humour, beaming in his countenance, which I hardly ever saw in any other’.1 Without this sunny side to his character, Handel surely could not have been successful in English showbusiness, at the pleasure gardens, or at the Italian opera for which he wrote 36 works and which occupied such a large part of his professional life.2 Handel’s shows offered a venue at which London’s privileged classes could meet and his music provided a moment-ary means of escape from the city’s poverty and sordidness.

It did not matter that Handel’s audience did not understand what was being sung, even though this aspect contributed to the ultimate failure of Italian opera in London. One journalist observed that ‘our great Grand-children will be very curious to know the Reason why their Forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own Country, and to hear whole Plays acted before them in a Tongue which they did not understand’.3 Handel’s operatic ventures such as The Royal Academy prospered and his success enabled him to afford a house in Brook Street in modern Mayfair, where we shall go to see his ménage. We shall also travel abroad with him to recruit new stars.

When Handel’s opera business ground to a halt, ever resilient, he developed a new product, the oratorio. This was less expensive to mount and thus far less risky financially. His best-known oratorio is surely Messiah, which was first performed in Dublin. In his final two decades, he continued to write oratorio and took an increasing interest in charitable works, but suffered very bad health and became blind. He was very wealthy when he died, aged 74.

EARLY DAYS IN GERMANY AND ITALY

We must start with Handel’s early career in Germany and Italy. He was born on 23 February 1685, in Halle, some twenty miles from Leipzig, at the centre of the European trade routes. Halle had a strong musical tradition: it had been the home of Samuel Scheidt, one of the trio of important Saxon composers in the early 17th century, Schütz, Scheidt and Schein.4 In the wake of the devastating Thirty Years War of 1618–48, Halle was passed around. At first, it was administered under the Elector of Saxony; then it was detached and became a distant outpost of the Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia. The family of the previous Saxon ruler, who had resided in the city and underwritten its prosperity, moved the court to nearby Weissenfels. No wonder Halle was in decline.

Handel’s elderly father (he was in his 60s when Handel was born) was the son of a coppersmith; like Monteverdi’s father, he was both a barber and a surgeon, a combination customary before the 18th century. He had prospered under the Saxon duke, and he lived in a house in the centre of the city. With his first wife, he had six children; with the second, Handel’s mother, the daughter of a local Lutheran pastor, he had four. Georg Friedrich was at first destined to become a lawyer, a job suitable for the upwardly mobile; but, during a family visit to his step-brother, who worked in Weissenfels, he was heard playing the organ by the duke, who persuaded his father to let him study music. Handel learnt the Italian and German musical styles by studying music primers and by relentless copying.5 He was also taught by the organist at Halle’s Marienkirche, a pleasant man who enjoyed knocking back a ‘chearful glass’.6

Handel went to the university in Halle, founded a few years earlier in 1694, like other universities, in order to train the growing ranks of state officials.7 The nearby ‘reformed’ cathedral, smaller than the Marienkirche, and today noticeably run down, needed an organist. It could not find an appropriate Calvinist to do the job, so it employed the Lutheran Handel. His emoluments included his lodgings, a few paces from where he was born, in the Moritzburg. This was a forbidding, moated and partly ruined fortress, which had been a residence of the Archbishop of Magdeburg, until he was ejected at the time of the war.8

Halle was not an ideal location for a highly ambitious young man to stay. It is said that the Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia offered to send Handel to study in Italy, but he shrewdly knew that this would be con-ditional on taking up a permanent post in Berlin, with little or no flexibility to get away. It seems that he was spotted at the ducal court by the director of the Hamburg Opera House, Reinhard Keiser. So, at the age of eighteen, Handel set out for the metropolis of Hamburg, 200 miles away. This was in the same year as Vivaldi joined the staff at the Pietà and Bach took up his first job in the small town of Arnstadt.

Hamburg, the leading North Sea port and financial centre, had largely avoided the depredations of the war and was booming (see colour plate 3).9 It was positioned at the gateway to the inland, up the Elbe; it provided a short-cut to the Baltic through its sister city, Lübeck, some 40 miles overland. It was staunchly Lutheran. Consistent with its dignity, it had its own opera. Keiser, probably the first ‘big-time’ impresario, was a big-spending mass producer: he wrote seventeen operas during his four-year directorship. 10 Germans took the parts; and, as there were no castrati that far north, ‘market women and dames of more than questionable reputation sang the female roles’.11 The more pious and orthodox Protestant merchants were unhappy with this state of affairs, and resented the fact that Hamburg’s secular music had eclipsed the sacred music at which it had excelled some 50 years before.12

The bustling city, with its population of over 70,000,13 must have been a change for young Handel. We do not know whether he took as dim a view of the weather as Brahms did many years later: on one occasion, Brahms wrote that ‘the weather is vile as only Hamburg weather can be, and is, on 360 days a year. It is difficult enough to hit the other five’.14 During the winter three years before Handel arrived, the Elbe was so frozen that coaches could travel on the river.

Handel teamed up with Johann Mattheson, formerly a musical infant prodigy, the son of a tax collector. In many ways the two young men were very similar: both were ambitious, highly gifted and also intended originally for the legal profession. They went off to Lübeck’s Marienkirche to compete in an audition to succeed the elderly and renowned organist, Buxtehude.15 But neither liked the terms, which included marriage to his daughter. This was not a bad deal: frequently, it was the widow who came with a vacancy like this. As Bach also turned down the position two years later, Fräulein Buxtehude has always been assumed to have been plain. At least, she must have been of riper years, because eventually she found a widower ‘ten years younger’. Her husband succeeded her father in 1707; he survived her and married again. This was a normal pattern at the time; Buxtehude himself had married his predecessor’s daughter.16