George Frideric Handel

George Frideric Handel was born in Halle in 1685. He learned his craft from the organist Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow and at eighteen joined the orchestra of the Hamburg opera as a violinist. A court appointment in Hanover followed, but the success of his opera Rinaldo in London in 1711 showed him where his future lay, and he soon settled in England for good. For the next three decades he was above all a composer of Italian opera for the London stage, and he wrote ceremonial music for the Hanoverian kings, the Water Music among it. When the taste for Italian opera faded in the 1730s he turned to oratorio in English, a form he largely made his own, with big choruses at its centre. He suffered a stroke in 1737 and recovered. He went blind in old age but continued to work, and died in London in 1759.