The music of Handel will fill the halls and churches of Dublin next week, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the great composer’s death. Eileen Battersby looks at the exuberant and pragmatic personality behind the immortal music

EXUBERANCE IS a word that best describes the glorious music of George Frideric Handel. Together with his great contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach, Handel dominates the late baroque period, bringing humanity, passion, lucidity, robust power, earthy energy, and beauty, always beauty, to composition.

Born in Germany within a month of each other in the early spring of 1685, Bach and Handel share genius, if little else. Bach, a God-fearing church organist who never travelled beyond his national frontiers, was born into a seventh-generation musical dynasty. Handel was the son of a court surgeon who had decided his boy would be a lawyer. The young Handel, at five years of age, thought otherwise, and displaying the determination which would carry him through life, practised in secret when his father forbade him to play music.

This secrecy ended when, during a family visit to the court at Weissenfels, the duke heard the child playing the organ and was so impressed that he advised Handel’s father that little Georg (as he was then called) should study music.

Handel’s family lived near the Lutheran church in Halle, of which Friedrich Zachow was the organist. Zachow instructed the boy in counterpoint and instrumentation and, most importantly, nurtured what would become a bravura keyboard technique. Before his twentieth birthday, Handel was a cathedral organist, a composer and a close friend of Georg Philipp Telemann. The pair had met in Leipzig when Handel was 16 and Telemann was 20, and they remained friends for life, with Telemann outliving both Bach and Handel.

Yet Bach and Handel, who never met in life, tower above their contemporaries. Bach’s sublime beauty is brilliantly countered by the undaunted musicality of Handel’s tunes, which are so often as rousing and stirring as his arias are subtle and romantic.

Next Tuesday’s commemoration of Handel’s death 250 years ago, on April 14th 1759, is the ideal moment for considering the diverse art of a multifaceted composer of opera, oratorio, instrumental and chamber music.

Here is an artist who treated the human voice with the utmost tenderness, as typified by Where’er You Walk (from Semele) or the gorgeous Ombra mai fu (from Serse). While Bach saw the voice as merely another instrument to be tested to its limits, Handel was more indulgent and wrote many of his vocal works for specific singers. The German who brought Italian opera to London was a cosmopolitan, an entrepreneur who had travelled to Italy intent on absorbing the musical influences which were to prove so vital to him.

His arrival in London in 1710 was fortuitous, as the city’s musical world was in the doldrums following the premature death of Purcell in 1695. Handel infiltrated a domestic music scene which was largely based around St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal and which was still hankering after the distant golden age of Byrd and Dowland.

Handel looked to the court and to the theatre. After his first stay in London, he would return and settle for more than 30 years, becoming a naturalised British citizen and almost an English composer. His story is so different from that of Bach. Handel was a composer who moved among kings and professional singers, who won royal commissions and was conscious of production costs and the number of tickets sold. While Bach is God’s musician, Handel was a businessman who made and lost fortunes.

HOW HAD IT all happened, particularly when he had seemed destined to become a lawyer? Once his father had accepted his son’s talent, serious tuition began to shape the fledgling gifts Handel had tested on his secret keyboard. His lessons with Zachow commenced when Handel was seven and, as John Mainwaring (who began writing Handel’s biography immediately after his death) records: “The first object of his attention was to ground him thoroughly in the principles of harmony. His next was to cultivate his imagination and form his taste.” Then the boy began to discover the glories of Italian and German music. Within two years, at the age of nine, he was composing church services for voice and instruments. During a three-year period he produced a weekly service. At 11, he performed at the Prussian court in Berlin.

Handel’s father died when the future composer was 12. Handel’s relationship with his father, who was in his sixties and in a second marriage when he was born, appears to have been fond. “Ah! Bitter grief! My dearest father’s heart/ From me by cruel death is torn away,” he lamented in a poem dated the following week.

Although Handel was already committed to music, he entered the University of Halle at 17 as a law student. Within a month he became organist at the Calvinist cathedral in the town.

He knew Halle was unlikely to provide him with the life he wanted and that, as a musician, he would have to look further afield. His first work, the Trio Sonata in G minor, was completed in 1699 when he was 14. His progress continued steadily, as did his development. The young Handel appears to have been outgoing and sociable and remained so for much of his life until illness, particularly blindness, caused him to withdraw.

His friendship with Telemann would prove so important; both young men would benefit by having a kindred spirit to bounce ideas off. The fact that Handel did at first enrol to study law suggests that he was honouring his late father’s hopes to some extent, but music quickly took over when he secured the organist post in the local church.

Within a year he was off to Hamburg, which offered a lively music scene and an opera house. Handel secured work at the opera, initially as a second violinist and later as a harpsichordist.

In Hamburg he made another important friendship, with Johann Mattheson (1681-1764), who would later become a composer. Just as Bach would later go, the two went to Lübeck to visit the great Danish composer, Dieterich Buxtehude, and thought about applying to succeed him in his poisition as organist there. There was a tough condition though: the successful applicant was obliged to marry Buxtehude’s daughter. Neither pursued the post.

Handel’s first opera, Almira, was performed in 1705, when he was 20, and it was a success. His second flopped. A further two operas were staged in 1708, but by then he had moved on. There are few lulls in Handel’s story; he was always in a hurry. At this early stage of his career, there was only one place that mattered to a composer intent on opera: Italy.

INVITED TO FLORENCE by a Medici prince, he arrived there at the end of 1706. He was to spend more than three years there, between Florence, Rome and Venice, with one visit to Naples. Opera had been banned in Rome by the pope, but several influential cardinals, as well as princes, were keen opera fans and Handel received at least four commissions.

During this period Handel also wrote cantatas, which were mostly secular, for solo voice and continuo, comprising two songs, usually on the theme of unrequited love. These graceful, melodic pieces were to prove useful to him as an opera composer. While in Rome he also completed one of his most dazzling choral works, Dixit Dominus (1707), with its urgent, emphatic rhythms. Even as early as this, Handel was demonstrating his flair for chorus writing, which would become one of his many strengths. During the winter of 1709-10, Agrippina was so successful that there were 27 performances.

The Italian sound would dominate Handel’s work. While in Italy he met Corelli (1653-1713), a violinist and composer whose small body of instrumental work, dominated by his 12 Concerti Grossi Op 6, made him extremely influential and whose spirit certainly presides over Handel’s mature Concerti Grossi (1734) and, to some extent, his 12 Grand Concertos (1740).

He also met Vivaldi, the master of the concerto, of which he wrote some 500, including almost 250 for solo violin. Other musicians in Italy included the dynamic Scarlatti dynasty, made up of domineering father Alessandro (1660-1725) and his son, Domenico, who was the same age as Handel and would die two years before him. It was with the younger Scarlatti that Handel engaged in performance duels. Sources differ as to who was the superior harpsichordist, but all agree that Handel was the virtuoso organist.

The Italian years offered Handel many opportunities to showcase his gifts. He received many offers, particularly from English patrons, but the one he accepted was Kapellmeister at the court of Hanover. The obvious political connections with England would eventually surface (the elector of Hanover was heir to the English throne, expected to succeed the ageing Queen Anne).

Handel accepted the Hanover post on condition that he could first spend a year in London, a wish that was granted. Handel set off and quickly established contacts in a city where theatre was alive even if opera was still dependent on the enthusiasm expressed by English admirers of Italian and German music who had heard it while abroad.

Early in 1711 Handel composed Rinaldo, the first Italian opera for London audiences. It was a success despite the fuss created by the release of live sparrows during a woodland scene and the fact that some English intellectuals resented a work performed in Italian, never mind the presence of castratos. Handel returned to Hanover and composing pieces for the court. He also applied himself to learning English, as he had a definite career plan.

By late 1712 he was back in London, where he composed another four operas. He was also establishing himself at court and composed a Te Deum for performance at St Paul’s. In 1714 Queen Anne died and the elector of Hanover, Handel’s employer, was crowned King George I. Handel, although absent from Hanover, had never lost royal favour and within days of arriving in England, the new king was delighted to hear Handel’s latest composition, for a river party. Water Music is one of his most popular works with its uplifting use of horns and trumpets, and as Handel always makes wonderful use of ceremonial effects, there is often a celebratory tone.

When he first moved to London Handel resided at the home of Lord Burlington, who was committed to the arts. From there he moved to the country residence of the Duke of Chandos, where he composed sacred music, including the Chandos Anthems and dramatic works.

AS A PERSON, Handel appears to have been straightforward, blunt and humorous. He was sociable, witty, “impetuous, rough . . . but totally devoid of ill-nature or malevolence”. He liked eating and would become famously, and ultimately dangerously, corpulent. He did not keep diaries and wrote few letters. Nor did he marry; there were romances but no known children.

Many admirers of his operas and arias know little of his orchestral works. Similarly, musicians, amateur and otherwise, who know Handel’s extensive organ repertoire, chamber music and orchestral pieces aren’t always that familiar with his operas.

Mercurial, opportunistic and pragmatic, he was adept at recycling tunes and motifs; he is a composer for all preferences. Among his great oratorios, such as Israel in Egypt (1739) Messiah (1742), Samson (1749), the early Acis and Galatea (1718) – which is to be performed by Opera Theatre Company next week as part of the Dublin Handel Festival (see panel) – is Saul (1739), most famous for its haunting Dead March, a plaintive, thoughtful piece that was played as Parnell’s funeral cortège moved through the streets of Dublin in 1891. The same work contains the arias, Such Haughty Beauties and Oh Lord, Whose Mercies Numberless.

In common with many classical composers, and more so than some, Handel owes a debt to the recording industry – or perhaps that should be, the recording industry owes Handel. Either way, recordings have alerted us to the scale and diversity of his work. He was meticulous in preserving his scores and bequeathed them to his faithful copyist, Smith the Elder, whose son later passed them on to George III and the British Library. Singers such as soprano Emma Kirkby and the German countertenor, Andreas Scholl, have contributed to our appreciation of Handel’s arias and cantatas. Kirkby performed in the 2001 world premiere recording of Handel’s Gloria.

So who do we look for? For many, it is Handel the opera composer, of Giulio Cesare (1724), Rodelinda (1725), Orlando (1732) or the playful pre-Mozartian Serse (1738). Or do we look to the oratorios, of which he composed more than 30, including Messiah, a work from which most people can hum entire sections without much effort? Water Music has cheered up many a commuter trapped in traffic, as has Music for Royal Fireworks.

Yes, Handel was an artist, but he was also an entertainer. When his fortunes failed with the decline of Italian opera, he rallied with Messiah and Samson (drawing on Milton’s poetry).

For his final six years, he was blind. Spirituality supplanted his socialising. His church attendance increased. Having fainted during, ironically, a performance of Messiah in London, he knew his end was approaching and he prepared his will and his farewells. His death on April 14th 1759, 17 years and a day after the first performance of Messiah, was followed by a huge funeral. More than 3,000 Londoners came out to mourn “their” composer.

Handel is buried in Westminster Abbey, as he had wished. More than a century later, in 1870, Charles Dickens would be laid to rest in the space at Handel’s feet. Beethoven revered Handel, while Wagner declared that musicians held a Handel score “as if it were a prayer book”.

Baroque around the clock: a week of music and events for Handel 250

The Dublin Handel Festivalruns next week from Monday, April 13th to Sunday, 19th. Under the auspices of Temple Bar Cultural Trust, it will celebrate the composer's Dublin connections, so it's offering everything from a historical walking tourin the company of Pat Liddy (Monday, 13th, 11am), through an exhibition of the Messiah manuscript scoreat Marsh's Library (daily, except Tuesday and Sunday), to a talk on Fashion and Shopping in Handel's Dublin (Friday, 17th, 4pm).

The heart of the programme, as one might expect, is Handel's Messiah, with Our Lady's Choral Society giving a performance of excerpts on Fishamble Street (Monday, 13th, 1pm) and Christ Church Cathedral Choir doing a full performance at the cathedral (Thursday, 16th, 7.30pm). On Tuesday, 14th, the 250th anniversary of Handel's death, Our Lady's presents a commemorative concert of the composer's greatest choral hits at the National Concert Hall (8pm).

The Guinness Choir will perform the magisterial Solomon oratorio(that's the one which has the famous Queen of Sheba musical interlude) at St Patrick's Cathedral on Saturday, 18th, while for fans of Handel's magical operas, Opera Theatre Company will present a site-specific Acis and Galateaat the Guinness Storehouse in St James's Gate on Wednesday, 15th, at 8pm.

On Tuesday, 14th, at 6pm, young Irish countertenor Graham Josephwill give a recital of Handel's songs and arias at St Audoen's Anglican Church in Cornmarket. Christ Church Cathedral, meanwhile, goes all jazzy with the David Rees-Williams Trio(Friday, 17th, at 8pm).

For a bit of Handel-inspired madness, check out the Classic Buskers'show at the Chester Beatty Library on Wednesday, 15th, at 1pm). The Irish Baroque Orchestra, with guest Peter Sweeney on theorbo, go for the period baroque sound in their concert, The Golden Age of the Trio Sonata, at 8pm on Wednesday, 15th, in St Audoen's Catholic Church on High Street.

For further details of the Dublin Handel Festival, consult the Temple Bar Cultural Information Centre, 12 East Essex Street (01-8883610, www.templebar.ie).

Arminta Wallace