Book Review

Going straight to the top

Handel: the man and his music

Of all the great composers, probably least is known about George Frideric Handel. Almost everyone has some experience of the Messiah, and probably more amateur singers have performed in it than in any other canonical work. Zadok the Priest is firmly established in constitutional ritual, performed at every coronation since George II's in 1727. And yet Handel the man remains curiously unfocused: portly, bewigged, seemingly unproblematic - not a figure who obviously commands biographical attention.

There is a double irony in Jonathan Keates' subtitle, for until recently there were two missing hinterlands in our awareness of Handel. Of his personal life, we knew very little. The routine late-twentieth-century assumption that, in default of wife and children, he "must" have been gay or celibate was starved of the least crumb of evidence. More important is the recognition that while Messiah and Zadok were firmly established, surprisingly little else was known and performed from

Handel's huge output. He seemed - anecdotal evidence of great personal warmth notwithstanding - a perfect illustration of the iceberg principle.

Since Keates' first edition of this book in 1985, the waterline has shifted significantly. Many more of Handel's works, and particularly the long-neglected operas, have re-entered the repertory. In addition, new information has emerged about Handel's family, his early travels and intriguingly - since it already seemed the best documented period - his career in London as a kind of court composer to the Hanoverians. Nothing revelatory, nothing that shakes the paradigms, but a substantial new body of information that subtly reshapes aspects of our knowledge of the man and, crucially, adds fresh contexts to our appreciation of his music.

Handel had a powerful instinct for going straight to the top. His professional shrewdness is both impressive and seemingly innate. He did not, to be fair, have to claw his way out of the Saxon underclass, but the first inkling and acknowledgement of his genius has more than a touch of narrative convenience and family legend.

His father, Georg Händel, was a highly respected barber-surgeon in Halle. Sometime in 1695, when the future composer was just ten, Georg was summoned to Weissenfels to minister to Duke Johann August. Georg Friedrich (as he was born) apparently followed his father's coach until the old man relented and took the boy along. In a familiar version of the tale, the Duke heard Handel playing the chapel organ and declared it would be a crime if the world were denied such extraordinary beauty.

Thereafter, Handel himself took the initiative, attaching himself to whatever court, theatre or individual seemed to offer the best chance of advancement. He made his way to Hamburg and began to write opera in the new, extravagantly theatrical realism that characterised one of northern Europe's most prosperous ports. Much of the youthful work is lost but the lineaments of "Hamburg opera" remained with him even after a more Italianate style had taken over, and it was only when that form drifted out of fashion in turn that Handel turned to oratorio and produced his masterpieces Saul and Messiah.

In professional terms, Hamburg shaped him and Rome launched him. Again, Handel attached himself to a powerful figure. A papal ban meant that the city was one of the few major centres in Europe without an opera house, but under Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni religious music was enjoying a powerful revival. The leader of Ottoboni's orchestra at the Palazzo della Cancelleria was Arcangelo Corelli, an unprolific but immensely influential composer who provides another of the cherished anecdotes about the young Handel, suggesting that the "dear Saxon" was also already adept in the French style (which Corelli, of course, pretended not to understand).

These backgrounds provide a valuable new approach to Handel's work in England. He took British citizenship in 1726, having made the appropriate declarations and setting aside his original Lutheranism. However, no genuinely dramatic revelations emerge about Handel the private man. In 1923, in a still useful book, Newman Flower referred to Handel as "sexless and safe". As Keates comments, it isn't clear what he is safe from or who is safe from him. Keates might have quoted further, because Flower states flatly that Handel "never understood women; he never cared for them", making an elaborate exception for his mother. There is one further reference to this, but it comes suspiciously just above Handel's first meeting with Faustina Bordoni, the "famous Chauntress", who joined the Royal Academy company in 1725 - a major coup in London's feuding music world.

Handel may well have had affairs with his leading ladies, Faustina, Elisabeth Duparc, and Susannah Cibber, for whom he wrote "He was despised" in Messiah. All we can say is that he did not marry. (As a younger man he declined the hand of Margreta Buxtehude, though probably for professional reasons, since the post of organist in the Marienkirche in Lübeck carried the provision that one married one's predecessor's daughter.) 

And yet it scarcely matters, for in the two hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary year of Handel's death, Keates has delivered a brilliantly rounded picture of a great figure, whose humours and amours are far less interesting than his work. The only thing missing is a work-list (even a selected one) and perhaps a chronology or timeline. Otherwise, the writing is sharp and transparent, the research meticulous; the bibliography even cites a source published in the year 2204. That really is thoroughness.

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