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George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel ( / ˈhændəl /; [a] baptised Georg Fried (e)rich Händel, [b] German: [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈhɛndl̩] ⓘ; 23 February 1685 – 14 April 1759) [3] [c] was a German-British Baroque composer well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concertos. Handel received his ...
- List of Compositions by George Frideric Handel
Portrait of George Frideric Handel by Thomas Hudson. George...
- Messiah
Messiah (Handel) Messiah. (Handel) Messiah ( HWV 56) [1] [n...
- Zadok The Priest
Zadok the Priest (HWV 258) is a British anthem that was...
- Handel's Naturalisation Act 1727
An Act for naturalizing Louis Sechehaye, George Frideric...
- Will of George Frideric Handel
George Frideric Handel (23 February 1685 – 14 April 1759)...
- Haydn
Portrait of Haydn by Thomas Hardy, 1791. Franz Joseph Haydn...
- John Taylor
Taylor, depicted at upper left, in William Hogarth's 1736...
- List of Operas by George Frideric Handel
George Frideric Handel's operas comprise 42 musical dramas...
- The Harmonious Blacksmith
The Harmonious Blacksmith is the popular name of the final...
- List of Compositions by George Frideric Handel
Portrait of George Frideric Handel by Thomas Hudson. George Frideric Handel (23 February 1685 – 14 April 1759) composed works including 42 operas; 24 oratorios; more than 120 cantatas, trios and duets; numerous arias; odes and serenatas; solo and trio sonatas; 18 concerti grossi; and 12 organ concertos. Collected editions of Handel's works ...
George Frideric Handel's operas comprise 42 musical dramas that were written between 1705 and 1741 in various genres.Though his large scale English language works written for the theatre are technically oratorios and not operas, several of them, such as Semele (1744), have become an important part of the opera repertoire.
HwvTitleLibrettoPremière Date1Almira ( Der in Krohnen erlangte ...Friedrich Christian Feustking, after ...8 January 17052Nero ( Die durch Blut und Mord erlangete ...Friedrich Christian Feustking25 February 17053Florindo ( Der beglückte Florindo)Hinrich HinschJanuary 17084Daphne ( Die verwandelte Daphne)Hinrich HinschJanuary 1708- Background
- Synopsis
- Writing History
- Later Performance History
- Music
- Recordings
- Editions
- See Also
- External Links
The composer George Frideric Handel, born in Halle, Germany in 1685, took up permanent residence in London in 1712, and became a naturalised British subject in 1727. By 1741 his pre-eminence in British music was evident from the honours he had accumulated, including a pension from the court of King George II, the office of Composer of Musick for th...
In Christian theology, the Messiah is the saviour of humankind. The Messiah (Māšîaḥ) is an Old Testament Hebrew word meaning "the Anointed One", which in New Testament Greek is Christ, a title given to Jesus of Nazareth, known by his followers as "Jesus Christ". Handel's Messiah has been described by the early-music scholar Richard Luckett as "a co...
Libretto
Charles Jennens was born around 1700, into a prosperous landowning family whose lands and properties in Warwickshire and Leicestershire he eventually inherited. His religious and political views—he opposed the Act of Settlement of 1701 which secured the accession to the British throne for the House of Hanover—prevented him from receiving his degree from Balliol College, Oxford, or from pursuing any form of public career. His family's wealth enabled him to live a life of leisure while devoting...
Composition
The music for Messiah was completed in 24 days of swift composition. Having received Jennens's text some time after 10 July 1741, Handel began work on it on 22 August. His records show that he had completed Part I in outline by 28 August, Part II by 6 September and Part III by 12 September, followed by two days of "filling up" to produce the finished work on 14 September. This rapid pace was seen by Jennens not as a sign of ecstatic energy but rather as "careless negligence", and the relation...
Dublin, 1742
Handel's decision to give a season of concerts in Dublin in the winter of 1741–42 arose from an invitation from the Duke of Devonshire, then serving as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. A violinist friend of Handel's, Matthew Dubourg, was in Dublin as the Lord Lieutenant's bandmaster; he would look after the tour's orchestral requirements. Whether Handel originally intended to perform Messiah in Dublin is uncertain; he did not inform Jennens of any such plan, for the latter wrote to Holdsworth on 2...
18th century
During the 1750s Messiah was performed increasingly at festivals and cathedrals throughout the country. Individual choruses and arias were occasionally extracted for use as anthems or motets in church services, or as concert pieces, a practice that grew in the 19th century and has continued ever since. After Handel's death, performances were given in Florence (1768), New York (excerpts, 1770), Hamburg (1772), and Mannheim (1777), where Mozart first heard it. For the performances in Handel's l...
19th century
In the 19th century, approaches to Handel in German- and English-speaking countries diverged further. In Leipzig in 1856, the musicologist Friedrich Chrysander and the literary historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus founded the Deutsche Händel-Gesellschaft with the aim of publishing authentic editions of all Handel's works. At the same time, performances in Britain and the United States moved away from Handel's performance practice with increasingly grandiose renditions. Messiah was presented in...
20th century and beyond
Although the huge-scale oratorio tradition was perpetuated by such large ensembles as the Royal Choral Society, the Tabernacle Choir and the Huddersfield Choral Society in the 20th century, there were increasing calls for performances more faithful to Handel's conception. At the turn of the century, The Musical Times wrote of the "additional accompaniments" of Mozart and others, "Is it not time that some of these 'hangers on' of Handel's score were sent about their business?" In 1902, Prout p...
Organisation and numbering of movements
The numbering of the movements shown here is in accordance with the Novello vocal score (1959), edited by Watkins Shaw, which adapts the numbering earlier devised by Ebenezer Prout. Other editions count the movements slightly differently; the Bärenreiter edition of 1965, for example, does not number all the recitatives and runs from 1 to 47. The division into parts and scenes is based upon the 1743 word-book prepared for the first London performance.The scene headings are given as Burrows sum...
Overview
Handel's music for Messiah is distinguished from most of his other oratorios by an orchestral restraint—a quality which the musicologist Percy M. Young observes was not adopted by Mozart and other later arrangers of the music. The work begins quietly, with instrumental and solo movements preceding the first appearance of the chorus, whose entry in the low alto register is muted. A particular aspect of Handel's restraint is his limited use of trumpets throughout the work. After their introduct...
Part I
The opening Sinfony is composed in E minor for strings, and is Handel's first use in oratorio of the French overture form. Jennens commented that the Sinfony contains "passages far unworthy of Handel, but much more unworthy of the Messiah"; Handel's early biographer Charles Burney merely found it "dry and uninteresting". A change of key to E major leads to the first prophecy, delivered by the tenor whose vocal line in the opening recitative "Comfort ye" is entirely independent of the strings...
Many early recordings of individual choruses and arias from Messiah reflect the performance styles then fashionable—large forces, slow tempi and liberal reorchestration. Typical examples are choruses conducted by Sir Henry Wood, recorded in 1926 for Columbia with the 3,500-strong choir and orchestra of the Crystal Palace Handel Festival, and a cont...
The first published score of 1767, together with Handel's documented adaptations and recompositions of various movements, has been the basis for many performing versions since the composer's lifetime. Modern performances which seek authenticity tend to be based on one of three 20th-century performing editions.These all use different methods of numb...
Messiah (Handel): Scores at the International Music Score Library ProjectHandel's Messiah at the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the HumanitiesDer Messias, ed. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, K. 572: Score and critical report (in German) in the Neue Mozart-AusgabePeople also ask
When did George Frideric Handel write his will?
How many works did George Frideric Handel write?
Did Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel meet?
How did George Frideric Handel get his name?
George Frideric Handel (German: Georg Friedrich Händel) (23 February 1685 – 14 April 1759) was a German composer who went to live in England when he was a young man and later became a naturalised Briton. Johann Sebastian Bach and Handel were born in the same year. They were the greatest composers of their time, but they never met.
Georg Friedrich Haendel [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈfʁiːdʁ ɪ ç ˈhɛndəl] a Écouter ou Georg Friederich Händel b ( en anglais George Frideric Handel c [dʒɔː(ɹ)dʒ ˈfɹɛd(ə)ɹ ɪ k ˈh æ ndəl] d) est un compositeur saxon, devenu sujet anglais, né le 23 février 1685 à Halle-sur-Saale et mort le 14 avril 1759 à Westminster .
George Frideric Handel (23 February 1685 – 14 April 1759) wrote his will [1] [2] over a number of years and with a number of codicils. Handel created the first version of his will with nine years to live, and completed his will (with the final codicil) three days before his death. Handel's will begins with the following text:
