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Updated: June 16, 2025
At the end of March 1726 she left Vienna for London, where she made her first appearance, on May 5, in Handel's new opera Alessandro, which had been designed especially to show off both Faustina and Cuzzoni in parts of exactly equal importance and difficulty.
Among the boys who sang and acted in the "masque" were Beard, who afterwards became Handel's favourite tenor, and Randall, eventually Professor of Music in Cambridge, who took the part of Esther.
The choir had just come to the end of a little thing of Handel's. There was no reason to suppose that the gallery appreciated Handel. Nevertheless, they were making a deafening noise. Clouds of dust rose from the rhythmical stamping of many feet. The noise was loudest and the dust thickest by the big window, beneath which sat the men from Kay's. Things were warming up.
Bach in 1719 was in the service of the Prince of Anhalt-Coethen; hearing that Handel was in the neighbourhood, he went over to Halle, a distance of about twenty miles, but found that Handel had already departed for London. The exact date of Handel's return is not known, but as there was a meeting of the shareholders of the opera on November 6, 1719, he may have been in England by that time.
Handel's music, he holds, was from the first congenial to the English temperament, but he never regards it as being at all English in style, though in other writings he naturally recognises the occasional indebtedness of Handel to the influence of Purcell. It was only in the nineteenth century that Handel came to be regarded as a national institution.
Handel is represented in a loose robe, sweeping the lyre, and listening to its sounds; which a little boy sculptured at his feet seems to be writing down on the back of a violon-cello. The whole composition is in an elegant taste." Commissioned by an impresario who had made a fortune out of the use of Handel's music, it now appropriately adorns the vestibule of Messrs.
On December 26, the first night of the carnival season, his opera Agrippina was produced at Venice. The libretto was by Cardinal Grimani, who had already written other dramas for music, all produced, like Handel's, at the Teatro San Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice.
It contains no "Unto us a Child is born" nor a "Worthy is the Lamb," nor a "Now love, that everlasting boy"; but in several places the sublime is reached in "Then round about the starry throne," the last page of which is worth all the oratorios written since Handel's time save Beethoven's "Mount of Olives"; in "Fixed is His everlasting seat," with that enormous opening phrase, irresistible in its strength and energy as Handel himself; and in the first section of "O first created beam."
The idea of the latter came from an odd character, the village blacksmith, who lived in Edgeware in Handel's day and who acquired some fame as a musician. His tombstone in the churchyard consists of an anvil and hammer, wrought in stone. Afterwards Handel became more widely known, and was called from Whitchurch for larger fields of work. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
"Almira, Queen of Castile," Handel's first opera, was brought out in Hamburg in 1705, and was followed by two others, "Nero," and "Daphne," all received with great favor, and frequently performed.
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