Word: handels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Handel to Christoph Willibald Gluck...
Nobody in his time understood the English eardrum better than George Frederick Handel, and nobody played on it with more conspicuous success. It was the wonder of his career that this adopted son who spoke a heavily Teutonic-flavored English and shaped his musical style after the Italians managed to leave his bulky imprint on England as no composer before or since. When he was buried with regal pomp in Westminster Abbey in 1759, 3,000 people attended the ceremony, and the press reminded its readers that Handel was to music what "Mr. Pope was in poetry." Last week, with...
Dragons & Drama. Handel was just 26 on the February day in 1711 when his first opera for an English audience-Rinaldo-opened at the Queen's Theater in the Haymarket. The son of a German barber-surgeon, Handel had left his home town of Halle at 18, had spent three years in Italy schooling himself in opera and oratorio. On his first visit to England, he patched Rinaldo together in a scant two weeks. Based on the poem by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), the opera was derided by Addison in The Spectator for its "Painted dragons spitting wildfire...
...almost 50 remaining years of his life, Handel (who became an English subject) turned out 39 Italianate operas, which shaped English operatic style for a generation, and almost singlehanded gave a new, dramatic shape to oratorio style. A shrewd businessman, he combed Italy for singers, scored such a success with famed Soprano Francesca Cuzzoni -described by one listener as having "a nest of nightingales in her belly"-that she sold out a benefit performance of his Ottone at a top of ?50 a seat...
...Daniel Larner, who made the intelligent abridgement of the opera. Xerxes has pretty costumes and sets as well, and Peter Brown's staging is appropriately mock-serious. A trip to Agassiz is unquestionably worthwhile, if only to hear fine music which will probably remain unperformed again until the next Handel year...