Mainwaring's Handel: Its Relation to English Aesthetics

Abstract

JOHN MAINWARING'S Handel' has long been familiar to students of the composer as an early (if not always reliable) biographical source. It is generally accorded a place in music history-or, rather, the history of musical scholarship-as the first extended biography of a composer. One might expect from a pioneer effort in musical biography little more than the usual collection of anecdotes, authentic and apocryphal, that surround a great artist, and Mainwaring has not disappointed in this respect. But his work is far from being a mere biographical memoir, containing, as it does, a protracted section of critical Observations on Handel's compositions.2 These Observations embody a critical point of view that owes its existence to developments in criticism and aesthetic theory characteristic of late I7thand early I8th-century English thought.