His father wanted a lawyer and banned instruments from the house. He smuggled a small keyboard into the attic and practised while the family slept.
Handel was born in Halle, Germany, in 1685 — the same year as Bach, less than two hundred kilometres away. The two never met.
His father, a barber-surgeon, wanted a lawyer and kept instruments out of the house. The story goes that he hid a small keyboard in the attic and practised at night; true or not, he did enrol in law at seventeen, became organist of Halle cathedral that same year, and abandoned his studies the next to play violin in the Hamburg opera orchestra.
In his early twenties he went to Italy for three years — Rome, Florence, Venice — and brought the whole Italian operatic manner home with him. In 1712 he moved to London and never again lived anywhere else for long; he became a British subject in 1727.
He was a composer who ran a business. He co-managed opera houses, cast his own singers, courted his own backers, and sold Italian opera to London for twenty years. Then the market turned — audiences tired of a language they could not follow, a rival company poached his singers, and he went bankrupt twice.
After sixty he changed direction. He turned to oratorio in English: no scenery, no costumes, sung in the audience's own language, and far cheaper to stage. In 1742 Messiah was premiered in Dublin as a benefit for a hospital and for prisoners' debts. It has been performed every year since.
He went blind in his last years and still sat at the organ improvising. He died in London in 1759 and was buried in Westminster Abbey; three thousand people came.
The easiest thing to recognise in Handel is that the music stands up straight the moment it opens. Melodies usually start from a clear chord tone and the phrases come in even lengths, like someone finishing a sentence before drawing breath — quite unlike Bach's habit of winding one line around another.
The second mark is how well he builds by layering. The same bass pattern comes round again and again, and each time another kind of movement is added above it: long notes first, then broken chords, then continuous fast notes. You do not notice it getting more complex, only that the sound keeps filling up. His passacaglias and chaconnes show this most plainly.
The third is the directness of his slow movements. Few detours, one tune carried all the way, harmony laid underneath without competing. What he wrote for listeners never takes the long way round.
