Handel and friends

Abstract

Given that biographies of Handel are not exactly scarce, it may be somewhat of a surprise that Ellen Harris and the august house of W. W. Norton have added a further contender. The gold standard for a factual approach is the current volume in the Master Musicians series published by Oxford University Press, Donald Burrows’s Handel, first issued in 1994. Two alternatives (not quite so well grounded) are the late Christopher Hogwood’s Handel (Thames and Hudson), and Jonathan Keates’s Handel: the man and his music (Random House), both produced for the 1985 tercentenary of Handel’s birth; in 2009 (the 250th anniversary of his death) they were still available. Burrows’s volume has undergone the greatest revision; the latest edition was issued in 2012. Biography of Handel is a long-lived exercise, and can be said to have begun with the publications of Johann Mattheson, his musical colleague at Hamburg. The two men gave rise to an important story, the sword duel of December 1705, but that was only one link in the delicate chain of friendship that seems to have disintegrated as a result of Handel’s indifference, froideur, or the perception of a slight, as it did in several other cases. Mattheson’s Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (1740), a collection of autobiographical and biographical portraits of friends and colleagues, was the first book to contain significant recollections about Handel, and its author continued to expand and correct the record after Handel’s death in 1759 by translating into German and annotating John Mainwaring’s Memoirs of the life of the late George Frederic Handel, issued in 1760, the first substantial biography of a musician to be separately published.