Word: handel
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...time he was eleven, he was composing a church service every week ("I used to write like the devil in those days," he apologized later). He toured the petty courts of Italy and Germany, played for cardinals, dukes and princes. By the time he was 25, George Frederick Handel was Hanover's Kapellmeister and one of the most talked-about young musicians in Europe...
Last week, 189 years after his death, George Frederick Handel was more widely talked-about than ever. Sir Newman Flower's revised edition of his scholarly George Frideric Handel, His Personality and His Times had just been published in the U.S. (Scribner; $6); the late Romain Rolland's Essays on Music (Allen, Towne & Heath; $5) had a fat chapter on him. Handelian Robert Manson Myers had written a book-Handel's Messiah, a Touchstone of Taste (Macmillan; $5), out next week-on his greatest oratorio. Handel was not always so well treated...
Ocean of Neck. The London Handel moved to in 1712 was a bawdy place of brawling and bawling. Handel did well at court. Queen Anne, who had little use for musicians, pensioned him just to spite her Hanoverian cousins. Anne's successor, lumpish George I, attended almost all his operas with his favorite German mistress and her "two acres of cheeks ... an ocean of neck." The rest of London was more fickle. Addison, who had written an unsuccessful opera himself, denounced and ridiculed Handel's music. Handel's rival, the egocentric Giovanni Battista Bononcini, kept him fighting...
...time, Londoners were far more interested in the caperings of Handel's two leading prima donnas, Faustina and Cuzzoni, than in his music. Almost nightly at the opera house, heads were bashed, windows smashed. The cheers & jeers drowned out Handel's arias, while the two "fighting cats" scratched at each other's eyes and pulled at each other's hair...
...Handel's Messiah (Thurs. 11:30 p.m., CBS) performed by the Kansas City Philharmonic and a 250-voice choir...