Georg Friedrich Handel is buried in central London, in Westminster Abbey, across the street from Parliament. There are also kings and queens, prime ministers, writers (Chaucer, Dickens, Kipling), scientists (Newton and Charles Darwin). On the grave - a monument: sculptural Handel in human stature holds open notes of "Messiah" - the oratorio, written in 1741, one of the most famous of his works. The other is the antheme "Sadok priest", which Handel composed in 1727 on the occasion of the coronation of King George II. Since then, the play has been performed every time the British monarchs are coronated, and the arrangement by British composer Tony Britten is known to football fans as the UEFA Champions League anthem.
Some parts of the Messiah, especially the Hallelujah Choir and the Sadok Priest, were deeply rooted in the British consciousness, but they were written by a German who settled in London in 1712 in the hope of a musical career. He was under thirty, he was talented and ambitious - and became the first truly international composer in the history of music, mixing the musical traditions of the entire Europe.
Handel was born in 1685 in Halle, Saxony. He began to write in Germany, between 1706 and 1710 he worked in Italy, and then moved to London in search of work. Here the composer was lucky twice. First, the young writer and impressionary Aaron Hill in 1711 headed a new and unpopular opera house - Her Majesty's Theatre in Heimarket. Hill was a trendsetter of tastes. He gathered a brilliant troupe of singers to perform Italian operas, which quickly became the most fashionable musical entertainment in London. Handel was just in the capital, and Hill suggested that he compose music for "Rinaldo". The instant success of the first Italian opera in Italian, written specifically for the London stage, made Handel famous in England a year before he finally moved there.
And then the German Elector Georg, to whom the composer joined the service in Hanover, in 1714 became king of Great Britain. Having arrived in London, the monarch left Handel at his service, who wrote several successful operas for the theater in Heimarquet (renamed to Royal), quickly got rich and moved to Brook Street in the prestigious Mayfair district.
However, he could not rest on his laurels. The Italian opera, which he specialized in, in the 1720s began to rapidly lose popularity. Simple Londoners were annoyed that the leading singers paid exorbitant fees, and satirists mocked the obsession of the London public with foreign culture. The Royal Academy of Music, the company that ran the Royal Theatre's operas, experienced numerous difficulties. For example, in 1727, the year Handel became a British citizen, the country's economy collapsed, and as a result, many of the company's "subscribers" were no longer able to pay contributions. In the 1730s, the Royal Academy of Music and Handel had a strong competitor - the company Opera of the Nobility, which managed to get into the troupe of two real stars - singers Castrates Senezino and Farinelli.
But Handel was lucky again. Although he continued to write operas until 1741, since 1732 his main activity has been to write oratorios
to the English texts. The oratorio Esther of 1732 was a huge success, and the following year Handel wrote two more, Deborah and Atalia. And in 1742 in Dublin premiere of "Messiah" took place. The Dublin Journal wrote about the "Messiah" in the following way: "According to the best connoisseurs, this creation is far superior to all of its counterparts ever performed in this or that other kingdom. In the UK, the oratorio took more time to be recognized, but it is now one of the most frequently performed choral works in the country.
Johann Sebastian Bach is perhaps the most important and influential figure in the history of Western music for us today. And at the same time, as the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould once put it, unless he exaggerated slightly, "had absolutely no impact on his contemporaries - neither on musicians nor on the public. He was considered to be old-fashioned, his music contrary to the trends of the time, and it was only a century after his death in 1750 that musicians and scholars began to understand the significance of what he had done.
Bach's life saw his sons as pioneers in music, especially Carl Philippe Emanuel (1714-1788) and Johann Christian (1735-1782), his eighteenth child and the youngest of his eleven sons. It seemed that their music - sometimes called "gallant music" - ordered and facilitated the complex and strict baroque style to which their father belonged. She turned the bridge to Classicism, where the talents of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven blossomed. And Johann Christian played a direct role here: in 1764, he taught the eight-year-old Mozart in London for five months.