The composer Beethoven knelt before
"The greatest composer that ever lived," said Beethoven of George Frideric Handel — "I would uncover my head and kneel before his tomb." Born in Germany, polished in Italy and adored in England, Handel became the first truly international musical superstar. He wrote music for kings and for crowds — the Water Music, the Music for the Royal Fireworks, and above all Messiah, whose Hallelujah chorus may be the most famous minute of choral music ever composed.
From a secret attic clavichord to royal barges
Handel's father wanted him to be a lawyer, so the boy reportedly smuggled a clavichord into the attic and practised while the household slept. The gamble paid off spectacularly: by 1717 his Water Music was drifting down the Thames on a barge beside King George I, who liked it so much he demanded it played again and again. A born entrepreneur, Handel ran his own opera company through boom and bust, and when Italian opera went out of fashion he invented something new — the English oratorio. Messiah, composed in a white-hot three and a half weeks, premiered in Dublin in 1742 as a charity concert. In old age he went blind but kept performing organ concertos from memory; when he died in 1759, three thousand mourners filled Westminster Abbey for his funeral.
Handel and Prague
Like Johann Sebastian Bach — born just a month before him in 1685 — Handel never saw Prague. Yet the city's baroque churches and halls are his natural element: the Hallelujah chorus rings out under centuries-old vaults, and the trumpets of the Water Music and Fireworks suites were made for exactly these acoustics. Prague's concert programmes love to unite the great baroque masters — Handel, Bach and Vivaldi — on a single evening. The two giants of 1685 never managed to meet in person, though Bach tried twice; in Prague's concert halls, they share the bill nearly every night.