The commemoration has centered in London, where Handel lived for 49 years, until his death in at age He was born in Halle, Germany, into a religious, affluent household. But an acquaintance, the Duke of Weissenfels, heard the prodigy, then barely 11, playing the organ. The nobleman's recognition of the boy's genius likely influenced the doctor's decision to allow his son to become a musician. By 18, Handel had composed his first opera, Almira , initially performed in Hamburg in During the next five years, he was employed as a musician, composer and conductor at courts and churches in Rome, Florence, Naples and Venice, as well as in Germany, where the Elector of Hanover, the future King George I of England, was briefly his patron.
Handel's restless independence contrasted him with the other great composer of the age, Johann Sebastian Bach , whom he did not meet. Handel, on the other hand, rarely attached himself to any benefactor for long, although he would compose court music when asked.
He wrote The Water Music , one of the few of his pieces other than Messiah recognizable to the average concertgoer, for George I, to be performed for the monarch as His Majesty's barge navigated through a London canal on a summer evening. Such free-spirited musical entrepreneurship was more than possible in London, to which Handel moved permanently in A commercial boom underpinned by overseas trade had created a thriving new merchant and professional class that broke the monopoly on cultural patronage by the nobility.
Adding zest to the London music scene were rivalries that split the audience into two broad musical camps. On one side were defenders of the more conventional Italian opera style, who idolized the composer Giovanni Bononcini and brought him to London.
Enthusiasts of Handel's new Italian operas cast their lot with the German-born composer. The partisanship was captured in a verse by poet John Byrom:. Increasingly elaborate opera productions led to rising costs due, in part, to hiring musicians and singers from Italy.
But beautiful voices were often accompanied by mercurial temperaments. Oratorios were in fashion: these are dramatic works for solo singers, chorus and orchestra, that tell a story, but without staging or acting.
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Sign up for our e-newsletter. In , Handel was heavily in debt following a string of musical failures. On April 8, , Handel gave what he believed to be his final concert. Handel would also receive his own commission for composing the work, which in turn helped him on his path to reversing his own misfortune.
The composition of Messiah , the complete page oratorio, began on August 22, , and was composed in just 24 days, when Handel finished the final orchestration on September 14, During a performance of a Handel opera, two leading sopranos came to blows onstage while the audience rooted them on.
When Handel moved from opera into oratorio dealing with religious subject matter, many critics objected to the idea of mixing the sacred and secular worlds where the same theater might host religious subject matter one day and suggestive comedy the next. But only the first third of the work was about the birth of Jesus. The second act covers the death of Jesus and the third focused on his resurrection.
As such, the piece was originally conceived as a work for Easter and was premiered in the spring during the Lent season. By the 19th century, Messiah became a regular December staple particularly in the United States. Laurence Cummings, conductor of the London Handel Orchestra, told Smithsonian Magazine that the Christmas performance custom may have partly come out of necessity.
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