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Unlike Johann Sebastian Bach, who was also born in Saxony in 1685, Georg Friedrich Handel did not come from a family of musicians. Nevertheless, his talent was discovered early. After working in his home town of Halle and Hamburg, where he composed his first operas, spending four years in Italy and taking up a short-term position in Hanover, he moved to London in 1711, where he spent the rest of his life. With the anglicised spelling George Frideric Handel, he also officially became a British composer through naturalisation in 1727.
In London, Handel enjoyed enormous success with his operas and great oratorios over a period of almost 50 years. Among his most famous works are Rinaldo, Giulio Cesare, Orlando and Alcina, all of which follow the model of the Italian opera seria. In the city’s already highly commercialised music scene, Handel also worked as an impresario, winning over audiences for his productions by engaging famous prima donnas and castrati and using spectacular stage effects. After tastes changed and the opera market became saturated with competing entrepreneurs, the composer increasingly turned his attention to English-language oratorios. Even in his final years and after he lost his sight, Handel remained active as a composer and concert musician. While some of his oratorios, especially Messiah, have retained their popularity without interruption to the present day, his operas were only rediscovered in the 20th century. Today, thanks to the commitment of singers such as Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato and Philippe Jaroussky, they now form a key component of the repertoire. In the first decades after their founding, the Berliner Philharmoniker often performed Handel’s oratorios together with the renowned Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. The fact that the composer’s music regularly appears on the orchestra’s programmes today is thanks in part to the French original sound expert Emmanuelle Haïm. Since her debut as a conductor in 2008, she has performed Handel’s works with the Philharmoniker on several occasions.
