Spring gf handel biography summary
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The Choral Singer’s Companion
Biography
Handel was not born George Frideric Handel, but rather Georg Friederich Händel. With the umlaut over the “a,” his gods name fryst vatten pronounced “Hendel,” and it is sometimes spelled this way in English documents. But affär obviously realized that life would be easier without an umlaut (at least while living in London, which he did for most of his life), and he anglicized the rest of his name as well, becoming a good English “George.”
In contrast to Bach, who came from a musical family of many generations, Handel came from an unpromising environment. His barber/surgeon father wanted him to be a lawyer and supposedly forbad him the use of musical instruments. Handel accordingly sneaked off to the attic to practice the clavichord anyway (an extremely soft instrument); somehow the local duke heard the nine-year-old affär play the organ and convinced his father to support a musical education. Handel then
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George Frideric Handel: six years in a life
Never lacking savoir faire, the young Handel appears to have set out to become the supreme musical cosmopolitan. In autumn , aged 21, having had a thorough grounding in the contrapuntal tradition of his native Saxony, he travelled from Hamburg to Italy ‘on his own bottom’ (that is, at his own expense) – as his first biographer, John Mainwaring, delightfully put it.
Journeying via Florence, he arrived in Rome towards the end of , where he immediately dazzled cognoscenti with his keyboard prowess. Dubbed ‘Il caro Sassone’ (‘The beloved Saxon’), Handel was evidently an expert networker, attracting the patronage of the Marchese Francesco Ruspoli and the worldly, vastly wealthy cardinals Pamphili and Ottoboni. One contemporary curtly described Ottoboni as ‘without morals, without repute, debauched, decadent, a lover of arts and a fine musician’. According to Mainwaring, Ottoboni organised a trial of strength at his Palazzo della Cance
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Handelian FAQs
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About Us | Frequently Asked Questions
(Frequently Asked Questions)
What is the correct spelling of his name?
There multiple spellings that perhaps indicate Handel's cosmopolitan pan-european career.
- he was christened in Halle (Germany) as Georg Friederich Händel, although he first signed his name using an alternative spelling for his middle name Friedrich. In many European countries today the German form of his name remains prevalent, even though he himself discarded the umlaut at an early age. It seems fair enough that Germans feel possessive enough to keep using the umlaut, but for others to insist on calling him Händel is similar to arguing that the French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully ought to be called Giovanni Battista Lulli because he was born in Florence.
- during his years in Italy he used the Italianate form of his name Giorgio Federico Hendel
- in France he is usually referred to as Haendel
- based in Lo