12/21/2021 – “And He Shall Purify” from “Handel’s Messiah performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir. And a little more – Handel’s growing up years…
Soli Deo Gloria!
“From the Lives & Times of the Great Composers” by Michael Steen:
“Early Days in Germany and Italy
We must start with Handel’s early career in Germany and Italy. He was born on 23 February 1685, in Halle, some twenty miles from Leipzip, at the centre of the European trade routes. Halle had a strong musical tradition…
Handel’s elderly father (he was in his 60s when Handel was born) was the son of a coppersmith; li9ke Monteverdi’s father, he was both a barber and a surgeon, a combination customary in the 18th century. He had prospered under the Saxxon duke, and he lived in a house in the centre of the city. With his first wife , he had six children; with the second, Handel’s mother, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, he had four. Georg Friedrich was at first destined to be a lawyer, a job suitable for the upwardly mobile, but, during a family visit to his step-brother, who worked in Weissenfels, he was heard playing the organ by the duke, who persuaded his father to let him study music. Handel learned Italian and German musical styles by studying music primers and by relentless copying….
Handle went to the University in Halle, founded a few years earlier in 1694, like other universitites, in order to train the growing ranks of state officials. The nearby reformed cathedral, smaller than the Marienkirche, and today noticeably run down, needed an organist. It could not find an appropriate Calvinist to do the job, so it employed the Lutheran Handle. His emoluments included his lodgings, a few paces from where he was born , in the Moritzburg. This was a forbidding, moated and partly ruined fortress, which had been a residence of the Archbishop of Magdeburg, until he was ejected at the time of the war.”
Soli Deo Gloria!