Handel (Master Musicians)

Celebrating its 100th anniversary, this extraordinary series continues to amaze and captivate its readers with detailed insight into the lives and work of music's geniuses. Unlike other composer biographies that focus narrowly on the music, this series explores the personal history of each composer and the social context surrounding the music. In a precise, engaging, and authoritative manner, each volume combines a vivid portrait of the master musicians' inspirations, influences, life experiences, even their weaknesses, with an accessible discussion of their work-all in roughly 300 pages. Further, each volume offers superb reference material, including a detailed life and times chronology, a complete list of works, a personalia glossary highlighting the important people in the composer's life, and a select bibliography. Under the supervision of music expert and series general editor Stanley Sadie, Master Musicians will certainly proceed to delight music scholars, serious musicians, and all music lovers for another hundred years.In this volume, Donald Burrows's relates Handel's life and his music, devoting particular attention to two crucial junctures in Handel's his transition from a church-trained musician in Germany to a successful opera composer in London, and the gradual transformation of his theater career from opera to oratorio, some thirty years later. In the oratorio form, as Burrows demonstrates, Handel was able to combine the techniques of large-scale construction and of aria writing that he had developed in his operas with an experience of choral music that went back to his earliest training as a church organist. The result was music that succeeds to this day in capturing the imagination of a vast audience.

Donald Burrows is a leading authority on the life and music of George Frideric Handel. His book Handel and the English Chapel Royal has been recognised as the first full-scale study of Handel's English church music. His published editions of Handel's music include the oratorios Messiah, Samson, and Belshazzar; the operas Imeneo and Ariodante; the complete violin sonatas; and the suite for two harpsichords.