Word: handel
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...occupied land, where remainders of German defeat, shame and partition are visible everywhere, is finding cultural solace and renewed pride in its heroes and native sons. In 1983, on the 500th anniversary of his birth, East Germany celebrated Martin Luther. Today, in their tercentenary year, it praises George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach, the two greatest composers of the Baroque. Here, where the lives and paths of such men as Luther, Handel, Bach, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Richard Wagner intersect, the glory, unity and tragedy of German history are a living memory...
Linked forever by a happy accident that saw them born within a month of each other in cities only 80 miles apart, Bach and Handel make an odd couple. Handel, whose 300th birthday was last month, was the son of a Halle barber- surgeon who wanted his boy to study law. A well-traveled cosmopolitan, he settled in London, anglicized his name from Handel, and became the dominant operatic and oratorio composer of his day. When he died, a bachelor at 74, he was buried with great ceremony in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey. By contrast, Bach, whose birthday...
Modern history has drastically reversed the judgment that earlier generations made of the two composers. A poll taken in the mid-18th century would undoubtedly have found Handel the more admired, especially in England, where his German-accented ghost smothered native British music for more than a century. Bach was considered an outdated figure working in a dying contrapuntal medium of four-part harmony and abstruse fugues. "The old wig" his son Johann Christian is said to have called...
...Today Handel's 41 operas, once so fashionable, are infrequently performed. This is due to changing tastes and the disappearance of the singers for whom many of his major roles were written: the castrati, the surgically altered male sopranos whose vocal power, awesome breath control and dazzling technique stunned audiences from the Sistine Chapel to Covent Garden. Of his 24 oratorios in English, only the redoubtable Messiah is a concerthall staple, and his best-loved instrumental works are such occasional pieces as the Water Music. Oddly, for one who used to loom so large, Handel awaits popular rediscovery...
...million or more. In October the bank shocked the financial community by announcing a $72 million third-quarter loss that stemmed from a write-off of $278 million in bad loans. The new disclosure was an added loss of face for First Chicago's management. Said William Handel, director of financial-industry research at the consulting firm of Whittle & Hanks: "This is definitely going to hurt its reputation as Chicago's premier bank...