Commemoration

Handel’s Manuscripts
The First Biography
Commemoration
Performances outside England
Arnold Edition
Adaptation to Contemporary Taste
Standard Edition
Chrysander Edition
The Handel Monument in Halle
Handel Opera Festivals in Göttingen
Handel Festivals in Halle and Karlsruhe
Workers’ Handel Festival 1926
Handel Falsifications
“Reichs-Händelgedenktage” 1935
Handel Societies

Handel’s Manuscripts
Handel bequeathed his manuscripts to his secretary John Christopher Smith; his son, also named John Christopher, presented them about 1774 to England’s Royal House. In 1911 this collection was made over by King George V. on permanent loan to the British Museum, where it is still kept to day.

In his own lifetime Handel achieved great fame in London, as is shown by the erection of the monument to him in Vauxhall Gardens as early as 1738. The number of concerts in which his music was performed without his personal participation now began to increase. This prepared the ground for the growing attention paid to his music after his death.

The First Biography
In 1760, only one year after his death the first Handel biography, written by John Mainwaring, appeared; it was indeed the very first biography to be written about an individual musician. In a year’s time German readers had a translation of it by Johann Mattheson in their hands.

Commemoration
In 1784 the homage paid to Handel reached its first great peak with the celebration, fixed a year too early, for the hundredth anniversary of his birth. At the time it was believed in England that he had been born in 1684 as his gravestone tells (it is probable that it has been connected with the different changeover to the Gregorian calendar as you can learn from the annotation there). His works were performed in Westminster Abbey with an enormous array of singers and instrumentalists quite unusual for the times. We can read all about this in a detailed report by Charles Burney, which also includes a short biography.

After 1784 great Handel celebrations became a tradition in England and especially in London and the number of performers rose in the years 1857 to 1926 to several thousands.

Performances outside England
Soon after Handel’s death various places on the continent of Europe began, at more or less the same time and independently of each other, to perform his music. The first performances outside England of which we have information were:

1766 Berlin Alexander's Fest (J. P. Kirnberger)
1768-1774 Florence Alexander's Fest (several performances)
1769-1771 Berlin Alexander’s Feast and Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day (several performances)
1771/72 Utrecht Te Deum
1771-1772  Vienna Alexander's Fest (two performances)
1771 Hamburg Alexander's Fest
1771 u. 1772  Brunswick Judas Maccabaeus
1772 Acis and Galatea
1774 Judas Maccabaeus

This list shows clearly the concentration on a few works only, which must have been dependent on the availability of scores but even more on the fact that these works were of particular interest, because of changes in style and taste that had taken place among musicians and the musical public at large.
But it was the Messiah that played a particularly important part in the history of Handel performances. In Germany the following are known to us:

1772  Hamburg (two performances - Michael Arne)
1775-78 Hamburg (five performances - C. Ph. Bach)
1777  Mannheim (Georg Joseph Vogler - greatly reworked version in Italian)
1780 Schwerin
1780-81 Weimar (three performances - Ernst Wilhelm Wolt)
1786-87   Berlin (two performances - J. A. Hiller)
1786-87  Leipzig (two performances - J. A. Hiller)
1788 Breslau (J. A. Hiller)
1789 Vienna (Mozart’s arrangement)

Arnold Edition
A prime necessity for the promotion of Handel’s music was the large-scale printing of his many scores and especially the publication of his collected works. Samuel Arnold (1740-1802), Organist and Composer of the Royal Chapel, from 1789 Director of the Academy of Ancient Music and from 1793 organist of Westminster Abbey played a most meritorious part in this latter task. Arnold’s scores appeared between 1787 and 1797 in 180 numbered folios and were the first edition of Handel’s (nearly) complete works. (It was the very first edition of a composer’s complete works, too.) This edition does indeed contain numerous mistakes but for all practical purposes it was invaluable. Arnold’s expressed intention to produce a new, revised and really complete edition was never fulfilled.

Adaptation to Contemporary Taste
Most of Handel’s enthusiastic admirers in the last part of the 18th and in the 19th century - and these included Mozart, Mendelssohn and Robert Franz - had come to the same conclusion: They saw their task not in the restoration of the original performing practices, but in the wholesale adaptation of the “old works” to the aesthetic tastes of their own times.

In 1788 and 1789 Mozart “revised” the following works for Baron van Swieten:
    • Acis and Galatea (HWV 49a) (KV 566)
    • Messiah (HWV 56) (KV 572)
    • Alexander’s Feast (HWV 75) (KV 591)
    • Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day (HWV 76) (KV 592)

Standard Edition
In 1843 a Handel Society “ for the production of a superior and standard edition of the works of Handel” was founded. It was dissolved in 1848 but even after that date some works appeared in print. In addition to the chamber duets and trios the edition included thirteen oratorios, among them Israel in Egypt in Mendelssohn’s adaptation.

Chrysander Edition
In 1856 the German Handel Society for the publication of Handel’s works was founded on the initiative of Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805-1871). The first 18 volumes were published by Breitkopf & Härtel from 1858 onwards, the rest came from Friedrich Chrysander’s own press.

Friedrich Chrysander (1826-1901) worked practically single-handed on the whole process of publishing the Complete Works in almost 100 volumes, from research into the sources to the typographical setting and final printing. He met the enormous costs out of his own pocket and of donations. This tremendous achievement taken together with the basic research which flowed into his Handel biography, and his numerous exertions in getting Handel’s works performed all combined to make him the key figure in the Handel renaissance of the second half of the 19th century. Despite the errors and compromises which are especially apparent in his Handel editions after 1894, his main purpose was to present the “original” Handel to his contemporaries.

The Handel Monument in Halle
The town in which Handel was born looked upon its famous son from a respectful distance. As far as we can tell, his music at first made no impression on Halle at all. But from the beginning of the 19th century onwards it began to gain ground here too. Since 1803 nearly every year Handel’s oratorios were performed. On the initiative of Ludwig Wucherer (1790-1861) a committee was founded in Halle in 1855 to prepare for an appropriate celebration of the centenary of Handel’s death. The original plan to build a concert hall in his honour in the town of his birth came to nothing. But a call to set up a Handel monument in Halle met with widespread support not only among the population of Halle but among Handel admirers and music lovers from all over Germany and England.

On 14 April 1859, the 100th anniversary of Handel’s death, the monument was due to be unveiled. But as the monument’s designer, the Berlin sculptor Hermann Rudolf Heidel (1810-1865), fell ill, the unveiling could not take place until 1 July.

Handel Opera Festivals in Göttingen
In the 19th century Handel’s oratorios were his works that enjoyed greatest popularity: It was only now and again that an aria or two from his operas were performed. On 26. June 1920 the art historian Oscar Hagen (1888-1957) who had his stimulation from lectures by Hermann Abet in Halle produced Handel’s opera Rodelinda with the support of the Göttingen Universitätsbund. And since 1921 Handel opera festivals took place in Göttingen. This led to the foundation in 1924 of a Handel Festival Community, from which arose in 1931 the Göttingen Handel Society.

Handel Festivals in Halle and Karlsruhe
Only a little while after, 1922, a Handel Festival took place in Halle, too. But its program went far beyond that of Göttingen. And the opera performance (Orlando furioso arranged by Hans Joachim Moser) seemed to go an original way. This promising start had been continued by the Deutsche Händel-Gesellschaft (German Handel Society), founded 1925 by Hermann Abert (1871-1927).

The tradition of Handel Festivals in Karlsruhe began in the middle of the 1920ies too.

Workers’ Handel Festival 1926
In the 1920s the workers’ choir movement grew to an extent which no one could have foreseen. Smaller choirs amalgamated to form larger ones, which more and more devoted themselves to oratorios, particularly those of Handel. The endeavours of the leaders led to the spectacular Worker’s Handel Festival in Leipzig of 1926, organised jointly by the Leipzig General Workers’ Educational Institute, the Leipzig District of the German Workers’ Singers’ Clubs and various choral societies led by the workers’ choir conductors Barnet Licht, Otto Didam and Paul Michael. This cultural event met with a widespread response and even bourgeois critics were compelled to recognise the achievements of the workers’ choirs. But in the context of this festival ideas on workers’ culture and the relationship of them to the cultural heritage, which found expression in the programme booklet, in Kulturwille (the monthly journal for working-class culture), in speeches and in lectures, were almost as important as the festival itself.

Handel Falsifications
These promising beginnings however were nipped in the bud by the “Gleichschaltung” (“bring into line”) of cultural bodies, of the complete control which the Nazis exercised over them when they came to power. Most workers’ choirs fell victim to this. In the following years the Nazis tried with brazen impudence to underscore their criminal, demagogic and essentially anti-cultural policies by falsifying Handel’s work. Downright condemnation of Fascist falsification of Handel were made, for example, by Lion Feuchtwanger in his novel Exile 1939, and by Albert Norden in his essay published in "Das Wort" - in conditions of illegal struggle he used the pseudonym “Behrend.”

"Reichs-Händelgedenktage" 1935
The Nazis were eager to appropriate the artistic and cultural resources of the Central German region for their own propaganda and ideological purposes. During the anniversary year of 1935, the “Reichsmusikkammer” (governmental music board) was assigned to produce the “German Bach-Händel-Schütz-Celebration of 1935.” The “National Handel Commemoration Days” were organized within this framework in Halle, the city of Handel’s birth. This also marked the beginning of massive misrepresentation and interference with Handel’s works.

Handel Societies
After 1945 Halle was the source of fresh initiatives for a new Handel renaissance. An important part in this was played by the Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft, founded in 1955. But in various parts of the world there were and still are a whole number of organisations with the aim of cultivating Handel’s work. Several were founded in connection with choral unions dedicated to the regular performance of choral works, especially, those of Handel. Some wanted to popularise his works principally by the publication of his music. Here are some of the most prominent Handel organisations:

      • Handel Society of Dartmouth College, USA, founded 1807
      • Handel and Haydn Society, USA, founded 1815
      • Handel-Society, Great Britain, 1843-1848
      • Deutsche Händel-Gesellschaft, Germany, 1856-1925
      • Händel-Gesellschaft e. V., Germany, 1925-1933/34?
      • Handel-Society, Great Britain, 1882-1939
      • Hallischer Händelverein, founded 1918
      • Göttinger Händel-Gesellschaft e. V., Germany, founded 1931
      • Brisbane Handel Society, Australia, founded 1934
      • Deal and Walmer Society, Great Britain, founded 1940
      • Hallische Händelgesellschaft e.V., Germany, 1944/1948-1955
      • Haendel Vereniging, Holland, founded 1947
      • Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft, Germany, founded 1955
      • Handel Opera Society, Great Britain, founded 1955
      • West Riding Handel Society, Great Britain, founded 1966
      • The American Handel Society, USA, founded 1985
      • The Karlsruher Händel-Gesellschaft, founded 1985
      • The Czech Handel Society, Czech Republic, founded 1990