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Friday 5 December 2008

Handel: The Man and His Music

Highs and lows of a musical career

Handel: The Man and His Music by Jonathan Keates

Since 1985, when Jonathan Keates first published this exhilarating critical biography of Handel, there have been enormous advances in the study of the composer and his oeuvre — not least the publication of two major volumes by the doyen of Handel scholars Winton Dean — and the establishment of the Handel Institute.

Such developments, along with a continuing increase in the public’s appetite for his music and the 250th anniversary of his death next year, more than justify this substantially revised edition of Keates’ book. For the paid-up Handel fan — and those like me who sometimes still need persuading — the result is an 18th-century mix of pleasure and instruction.

We know relatively little about the personal life of Handel (properly Händel, and therefore often referred to in Georgian London as Hendel). Perhaps he didn’t have much, because stern industry over half a century of unabating creativity couldn’t have left him much time for cultivating intimate relationships. ‘His amours were of short duration, and always within the pale of his own profession,’ George III reported from hearsay. There is no evidence that he was homosexual or celibate: indeed, the erotic intensity of some of his operatic heroines suggests a strong libido and great sensitivity to women, but credible details of his amours, short or otherwise, are exiguous.

What is clear is that he was not a neurotic or fragile personality — few great artists, indeed, appear to have been so steadily focused and consistently grounded. Stubborn, competitive, imperious, short-tempered and rough-tongued but also loyal, charitable and decent, he came from a secure, middle-class Lutheran background and was soundly and broadly educated. His biggest stroke of luck was that his native Halle should be the home of one of the finest music teachers of the day, Friedrich Zachow, whose lessons he doggedly imbibed (he was no prodigy). Almost everything else in his career was due to his own energy, talent and initiative, and a cussedly independent streak meant that he never sought the feather-bedding of aristocratic patronage or kapellmeistership.

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