Georg Friedrich Händel (23 February 1685 (O.S.) [(N.S.) 5 March] – 14 April 1759)
"Handel is the greatest composer who ever lived. I would bare my head and kneel at his grave."
Ludwig van Beethoven, 1824
As a young man, Handel’s entree into high society and the company of other gifted musicians was his astonishing talent for improvisation.
Besides the improvisation of fantasies, fugues and variations, Handel’s own keyboard works must have formed a major part of his repertoire at that time. Whether he composed these works first, or wrote them down shortly after initial improvisation in public, is not clear. In any case, by the time he was properly established in his next major port of call (London, 1710, after a short stop at the court of Hanover), Handel’s keyboard oeuvre was substantial, and by about 1717, virtually complete.
For reasons unknown, some years went by before Handel got around to publishing his keyboard works. In fact, only in response to an unauthorized Netherlands/English edition (the so-called “Roger/Walsh” print), did he release his first set of harpsichord works - the [8]
Suites de Pièces pour le Clavecin... (London, 1720).
But some clouds indeed have silver linings. In this case, the very fact that he had been pirated in the first place was proof that he had “arrived”, so to speak, as a successful composer.
Handel had no way of controlling the activities of foreign publishers such as Jeanne Roger, the Netherlands half of the Roger/Walsh pirate operation; but he eventually struck a deal with Roger’s English partner, John Walsh. By 1733, with the publication of the [9]
Suites de Pièces pour le Clavecin... Second Volume, Walsh had become Handel’s regular publisher - but not before he appears to have robbed the composer at least one more time with a pirated edition in 1727!
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| Frontispiece 1720 |
Sorting through and evaluating the 17 works in the two keyboard volumes for their exact chronological and thematic provenances would be a complicated task. The order and distribution of the suites between the Volume One (1720) and Volume Two (1733) is arbitrary, and reflects nothing of the history of their composition. Volume Two, for example, was merely a further issue of older works which could as easily have found their way into Volume One. Like many prolific composers of the eighteenth century, Handel revised, mixed, remixed, reordered and recycled his works so often as to defy retracing.
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Johannes Hieronymus Kapsberger /
