By: Samir Caceres

George Friederich Händel was born in 1685, a vintage year indeed for baroque composers, in Halle on the Saale river in Thuringia, Germany on February 23rd.

 Though his father had intended him for the law, Handel's own musical inclinations seem always to have been clear to him. At the age of 18, in 1703, he traveled to Hamburg, where he took a job as a violinist at the Hamburg Opera and gave private lessons to support himself

 Handel became acquainted with Johann Mattheson who later chronicled the known events of Handel's life during his stay there and together they visited Buxtehude in Lübeck in that first year.

 Handel's great love of opera, its flamboyant singers and the challenge of inciting and maintaining the interest of a fickle public audience began to draw him away from the fairly constricted circle of the court and its music.

 In 1727, shortly before the death of George I, Handel became a British subject, adopting his "new" names of George Frideric. Retaining his position as composer to the Chapel Royal a post he had held since 1723, Handel composed four large-scale anthems for the coronation of George II and his consort Queen Caroline at Westminster Abbey on October 11th, 1727 which was, by contemporary reports, an occasion of great magnificence

 The move from Opera to Oratorio was not of course an instantaneous one. Handel's Esther composed around 1720 for the Duke of Chandos was performed not in the Chapel at Cannons but in the "grand saloon" as a costume-stage production, already a "halfway house" between Opera and Oratorio. In 1732 Handel revised this work and re-presented it at the Haymarket Theatre. Though it may reasonably be said that Handel "invented" the Oratorio, it was in fact at the instigation of the Bishop of London, who intervened at that point, banning any form of theatrical action on stage of a biblical subject.

 In April 1737 Handel suffered a stroke or an injury which seriously affected his right hand. He was exhausted from the stresses of the last five years and his friends and patrons wondered whether he would ever play or compose again. He retired to Aix-la- Chapelle to take the vapor-baths; six weeks later he returned to London, miraculously restored.

 During the summer of 1741 Handel received an invitation from the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin to compose a new sacred oratorio which would crown a series of performances of Alexanders Feast, Acis and Galatea, the Ode for St Cecilia's Day and L'Allegro, to be given at the New Music Hall, Fishamble Street, Dublin, in 1742.

 Almost immediately Handel became a legend. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, his burial site marked by a monument, again by Roubiliac. Documents on his life began to flow, and on the 25th anniversary of his death in 1784 an unprecedented series of three commemoration concerts was organized at Westminster Abbey and the Pantheon, culminating on May 29th in a massed performance at the Abbey of the Messiah. Indeed it is perhaps most of all through this great and enduring work that Handel is best known today.