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George Frederic Handel (Music)

 George Frederic Handel (Music)
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 George Frederic Handel (Music)
 George Frederic Handel (Music)
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 George Frederic Handel (Music)
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 German-born English composer (23 February 1685 – 14 April 1759), an exact contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach (Bach was born 37 days after Händel), although they never met, even though they were from the same general part of Germany (Handel's birthplace of Halle being not quite 200 km by road from Bach's hometown of Eisenach; anyway, both towns are in the southern part of the old East Germanynote This caused no small amount of awkwardness for the GDR officialdom, who had a lot of reasons to drum up pride in these truly great composers, but could not ignore that both composers were known for their sacred music and that Handel's secular music was largely written for the British monarchy.).note They did, however, have an unfortunate mutual acquaintance—they both were taken in by the English quack "oculist" John Taylor, whose attempts to surgically correct their cataracts probably robbed both of what was left of their eyesight. Bach actually died from complications of the treatment. His birth name was Georg Friederich Händel, but when he moved to England and became a naturalized citizen he anglicized the spelling; music scholars will go either way with it.Händel made his name and fortune composing operas in Italian, writing over 40 of them, most of them for the English market after he moved to London; he was the first ever composer to become rich and famous from composing. So many people wanted to attend just the rehearsal of his "Music for the Royal Fireworks" that it caused a three-hour-long traffic jam on London Bridge. In the 1740s, the audience's taste for Italian opera mysteriously went away, helped along by the smash hit of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera in English. So after a brief period of reconsideration Handel, recognizing what the audience wanted, began to write oratorios in English, the most famous of which (and most famous overall) is Messiah. (Yes, it's the one with the "Hallelujah" chorus.)He is mentioned as being dead in the song "Decomposing Composers" by Michael Palin sang on Monty Python's Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album.
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