It may seem obvious, but in the context of a program called “Handel on the Road,” it bears repeating: travel in the 18th century was neither as smooth nor as fast as what we are accustomed to. And yet George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) traveled a LOT! Today’s program is built around the places he went, the people he encountered, and the works he composed along the way. But let’s pause for a moment to try grasping just how busy Handel’s travel agent must have been:

Born in Halle in central Germany in 1685, plays for the Saxon duke at Weissenfels at the age 7, back home but then to Berlin for another court appearance at age 11, back home for a spell, then Leipzig to meet Telemann at 16. Back home to Halle, where he takes his first real job in Hamburg on the North Sea coast at 18. Short road trip to Lübeck with friend Mattheson and back to Hamburg, then leaves for Italy at 21 and travels to Rome, Naples, Florence, and Venice (turning 22 on the way), repeats the Italian circuit again (turning 23) . . . and AGAIN (turning 24)! Crosses the Alps to a new job in Hanover in northern Germany (25), pops in to see family in Halle, and ends the year in London. Holiday over, he is back in Hanover, then back in London to stay . . . more or less.

Travel starts to slow down as Handel grows older, but still includes trips to Aachen for the baths, summers in the country, and two continental sojourns through the Low Countries to Berlin, and several months in Dublin, giving birth to Messiah . . . All on foot, horseback, cart, carriage, or boat.

There’s a good chance you are as disoriented as Handel must have felt by this point, especially in those heady early days crisscrossing from Germany to Italy to England and back again. In our “Coffee Talk” event later this afternoon, we will spend more time focusing on Handel’s period in Italy between 1706 and 1710. Those were important, formative years, but this morning we have other tales to tell.

Handel grew up in an era of “on-the-job training.” Especially for church musicians, this meant being ready to pick up and move to where teachers could be found and where job prospects were better than at home. Handel had very good instruction at an early age (a church organist named Zachow played a pivotal role), but he would also continue to self-instruct as he came into contact with more diverse styles in Rome, Venice, and beyond. Even after he crossed north over the Alps in early 1710, Handel continued to think in the Italian style. He brought those ideas to Germany, where he served at the pleasure of the Elector of Hanover, one George Louis of Brunswick-Lüneburg. George was the son of Hanover’s reigning ruler and his wife, Sophia, who happened to be the granddaughter of England’s James I. With strong Hanover-London connections already in place, Handel was given leave to visit the English capital in late 1710 and again two years later, never returning to his Hanoverian post despite the Elector’s request to do so.

As fate would have it, his former German employer soon became King George I of England. Handel smoothed the day of reckoning by writing the dazzling Water Music at the king’s request. On July 17, 1717, King George and his retinue embarked on a river outing – in this case, an extravagantly decked out barge – beginning at Whitehall and heading up the Thames to finish at Chelsea. Musicians were stationed on a second, less extravagant barge and performed during the upstream and downstream portions of the trip. Like Music for the Royal Fireworks, the premiere of Water Music involved some 50 musicians – small for Mahler, but massive for an ensemble in Handel’s time. The roughly 20 movements were later divided into three suites or collections based on a shared key: F, D or G major.

Suite No. 3 in G Major begins with a serene and understated Sarabande. Opening a large-scale orchestral work with a slow Sarabande would be remarkable, but we must recall that Handel did not structure these suites himself; we have no evidence that he envisioned “making a statement” by this subtle opening gambit. The scoring for strings and winds suggests the smaller orchestras Handel would have encountered in his youth. No imposing brass or percussion here. After this reflective start, Handel inserts a spirited Rigaudon. This dance seems to have originated as a folk dance in southern France during the 17th century, which made it suitably exotic for British audiences from Handel’s own era. The suite closes with two additional dance pairs retaining the string and wind texture; bassoons come a bit more to the fore during the Minuet, whereas the minor-mode Allegro with prominent recorders has become a recognizable movement often excerpted from the suite.

Nearly 30 years after Water Music, Handel’s prestige was unrivaled in London’s musical scene. This is not to say his struggles were all behind him; far from it. However, he had survived cutthroat professional competition, fickle public tastes, and financial ups and downs. Beginning in the 1730s and continuing for two decades, Handel produced a series of oratorios in English, works sharing a great deal in common with traditional Italian opera but typically based on Biblical stories rather than pagan myth or secular history. Semele, presented during Lent in 1744, is truly an opera in all but name. In fact, Handel was working from an existing opera libretto. Moreover, its very non-Biblical plot – Jupiter’s infatuation with the mortal woman Semele, resulting in the birth of Bacchus and her own destruction – clearly clashes with traditional oratorio. Semele’s first audiences rejected his covert attempt to insert a “bawdy” (their words) musical drama into the traditional Lenten season, and the work closed after only a few performances. Modern audiences are far kinder, as the work is performed regularly and remains some of Handel’s finest material.

Act 3 of Semele opens with Jupiter’s angry wife, Juno, seeking revenge upon her mortal rival. She has come to the cave of Somnus, god of sleep, to secure his help in stupefying the dragons that guard Semele’s location. Awaking from his slumber, Somnus sings “Leave me, loathsome light.” Handel luxuriates in slow sustained strings and drooping melodic lines that continue without ceasing, infecting Somnus’s own drowsy delivery. This is music for a rainy afternoon. And lest its powers here on a Sunday morning prove too strong, stay alert! We have more music to come!

Years earlier, before Handel’s mature successes in England, he was just one of many very talented musical children coming out of central Ger-many. As a teenager, he left home to become an orchestral musician in the bustling port at Hamburg, which boasted one of Europe’s finest opera houses. It may be noted in passing that, before arriving in Hamburg, Handel had been offered a position at the Prussian court, but he rejected it for ideological reasons. Handel felt musicians in Prussia were treated too much like pure servants; he bristled at the notion of having to flatter visiting musicians whose abilities (he felt) were below his own. By contrast, the “free city” of Hamburg, center of the Hanseatic League, provided this headstrong young man a place to find his own way. In Hamburg Handel met and quickly befriended another brilliant upstart: Johann Mattheson.

Born and raised in Hamburg, Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) is best remembered today as a music theorist and author of numerous influential treatises on compositional style, the connection between music and the passions, harmonic formulas, and more. In 1709 Mattheson married an English woman and maintained strong connections to London throughout his career, even serving as an English diplomat. In fact, he chose to publish a massive collection of keyboard suites around 1714 in London. From this publication, we hear the brief Prelude from his Suite No. 1 in D Minor, a work similar to a Bach two-part Invention. However, in his younger days, when he knew Handel, Mattheson enjoyed considerable success in Hamburg’s opera scene as both a professional singer and composer. The two met shortly after Handel’s arrival in June 1703. Handel played violin in the opera orchestra, and likely viewed Mattheson with a mixture of esteem and jealousy.

Their friendship nearly came to a fatal rupture in 1704 at the premiere of Mattheson’s opera about Antony and Cleopatra. Handel had been asked to stand in for the ailing conductor. He direct matters from the keyboard until Mattheson finished his last solo aria, at which point the latter would take charge of the orchestra and Handel would go back to his normal place among the second violins. At the key moment, however, Handel refused to relinquish the baton. The performance, as they say, went on, but tensions burst afterwards and spilled over into a literal duel outside. As the story goes, Mattheson’s fatal thrust was foiled only by a large metal button on Handel’s coat. Whatever the exact details, the two men managed to reconcile soon thereafter and maintained a friendship until Handel’s death 50 years later. That didn’t stop Handel from putting a little space between them via a trip to Italy.

Despite this reconciliation, Handel clearly saw that his prospects in Hamburg were limited. Other vistas beckoned, and he took an offer to go to Italy in early 1707. Handel’s Italian sojourn forever altered the direction of his career. If nothing else, it brought him first-hand exposure to Italian opera in the places it was being cultivated at the highest level: Naples, Rome, and Venice. Handel tried his hand at sacred music, semi-operas, and full-blown opera seria. Among his earliest efforts was an intimate chamber opera on the legend of Acis and Galatea (Aci, Galatea e Poliferm) in 1708. Years later, when back in England and seeking material to win London audiences to his cause, Handel dusted off his Italian Aci to become a successful opera in English.

Another motivating force behind this revised Aci was literary. Three prestigious humanists had a hand in penning Handel’s new libretto: John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and, mainly, John Gay, librettist of the wildly successful Beggar’s Opera. The challenge was to create an engaging depiction of untrammeled nature and naïve love tinged by the tragic. Their libretto for Acis and Galatea contains the core of the Ovidian story related in Metamorphoses XIII: the love of Acis and Galatea for each other, the infatuation of Polyphemus for Galatea, and finally Acis’s death and transcendence. Our selection this morning, the bass aria “O, ruddier than the cherry,” finds the monstrous Polyphemus in a tender vein. In the middle of Act 2, he vents his passion for Galatea in a recitative tirade (“I melt, I burn, I rage!”). Immediately after, calling upon the persuasive tones of the woodwinds, Polyphemus celebrates his beloved’s beauty in a vigorous da capo aria. Like Messiah, this opera is one of few works by Handel that never left the performing repertory from his day to our own.

Often lost amid the spectacle of Handel’s dramatic, large-scale works are the numerous chamber compositions he created throughout a long career. Before our selection from Acis, we hear two movements from a Sonata for Recorder and Continuo, HWV 367a. This piece was likely written around 1712, either during his final moments in Hanover or when he arrived permanently in London. In either case, its manuscript exists on Italian paper. Thus it is possible Handel began sketching ideas for the sonata even before leaving Italy in 1710. In Rome, for instance, Handel worked alongside Arcangelo Corelli, the violinist-composer who did more than any other individual to develop the sonata genre. English audiences were enamored of all things Italian during these years, such that Handel would find a ready market for music written in the latest Italian style. In total, HWV 367a contains seven movements, though this morn-ing we hear only the first two: a tender Largo and lively Vivace in binary form. Handel composed at least two dozen sonatas for solo instruments, and many – this sonata included – were later published as his official Opus 1 in 1732.

If you attended last evening’s concert, you may recall the dazzling first piece: a sonata for violin and keyboard by Corelli based on the folia theme. This morning’s concert now closes with another take on folia, a piece directly inspired by Corelli’s model. As a reminder, the Portuguese folia emerged from a festive peasant dance. The term itself may derive from folle (crazy), although numerous different etymologies have been proposed. Already in the early 16th century, many of the characteristics familiar from later folia were set: it featured a repeating, ground-bass chord progression above which virtuosi of the day would improvise or ornament an existing melodic line. It proved most popular in Italy during the 1600s, but already by mid-century it had migrated to other countries.

Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762), a flourishing violinist, had the good fortune to learn directly from Corelli during a short period in Rome. Like Handel, whom he would soon meet in person, Geminani followed early training in Italy with a move to England around 1714. The very next year he performed as the violin soloist in several of his own concerti before King George with Handel himself at the harpsichord. While Geminiani built his career around teaching, he returned to Corelli’s famous Opus 5 sonatas to produce versions for orchestra, creating twelve Concerti Grossi directly based on Corelli’s music. Thus, the last of the set, No. 12, is an orchestral version of Corelli’s folia sonata. Geminiani’s twenty-four variations range from vigorous and brilliant (as in No. 9) to pensive and subdued (as in No. 14). When we know Corelli’s original, we can begin to observe how Geminiani handles the role of orchestrating different passages for just soloists (as in No. 10) and others involving the full ensemble. His piece offers a fitting homage spanning two generations of violin virtuosi.

Jason Stell, © 2026