Handel lives(?)

Abstract

Handel has been a popular subject of musical biography since his death in 1759. Indeed, it was just a year later that John Mainwaring published his Memoir of the life of the late George Frederic Handel, at once both the first biography of Handel, and the first extended biography of any composer. A host of writers has followed in his wake, with ten major Handel biographies appearing since 1900. David Hunter’s book cannot exactly be said to add to the number, since, while he explores many aspects of Handel’s life in detail, his primary aim is to interrogate the corpus of Handel biographies, and the motives and preoccupations of their authors. In fact, his sights are set beyond Handel as a subject, as he explains: ‘my intention is distinctive, for while I am producing indirectly a new biography, primarily I explore the questions of biography and dissemination using Handel’s life and lives as a case study’ (p.1).