"The view of Handel as the last giant of Baroque music rests primarily on stylistic grounds. Against this view stands one based on socio-historical realities: the half-century Handel spent in Britain and the extent of his achievements there place him squarely within modernity. If anything, the two conflicting perspectives help us understand Handel as a transitional figure who exchanged the fixed hierarchies of the Baroque with the self-affirmation (and anxieties) of a modern artist. This paper explores the composer’s life and career as sites of transition. An artist of exceptional will power and adaptability, Handel managed to transform himself from a prestigious agent of foreign taste to a paragon of British values; and from a representative of an aging style to the classic exponent of the sublime in music. This change involved biographical details like his attachment to the Hanoverian dynasty and the devotion he received from influential admirers. Far more important, it was inscribed in the social dynamism of early Georgian Britain, and defined by the Hanoverian Succession, the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, London’s entrepreneurial theatrical scene, the explosion of print culture, and the rise of charitable institutions. Their combined force enabled Handel to advance socially and achieve a degree of independence hitherto unavailable to members of his profession, thus becoming the culturally fortified artist whose music and status would inspire the Viennese Classics. "

Looking back on the first Handel Festival in Halle in 1922, it is argued that a close connection between science and practice has been characteristic of the Halle Festival from the very beginning. Arrangements of Handel’s works were made both by performing musicians and by recognised musicologists. Despite this common editing practice, the opera-pasticcio group of works has been disregarded until the early twenty-first century. Since 2012, the Stiftung Händel-Haus in Halle has been considering a reassessment of this group of works. Alongside performances, editions were to be produced. The positive results of this initiative are listed, but its failures are also pointed out. It is believed that the pasticci and Handel’s composition practice will ultimately only receive a suitable appreciation if a new aesthetic of the music work is applied as a foundation.

Irving, David R. M. ‘Handel and the Violin’. Early Music Performer 32 (2013): 4–12.

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George Frideric Handel’s English-language works were immensely popular with the eighteenth-century public, and many remain staples of concert repertoire today. Important research exists on the philosophical import of the texts for these works, and on the oratorio-listener as reader, but it focusses on a small part of the composer’s English output, while musico-linguistic analysts have neglected eighteenth-century English music in general. Addressing these understudied areas, the aim of this thesis is two-fold. First, to apply recent models of musico-linguistic analysis to Handel’s English output as a whole, in combination with aesthetic commentary of the period. Secondly, to investigate the dissemination of these libretti as wordbooks without music, published copies independent of musical scores, and other sources offering the text a potential for appreciation parallel to (or separate from) music. When writing texts for Handel, what decisions did poets make regarding verse form, rhyme scheme, and metre? What input did the composer have in this process? How did his music reflect the formal nuances of the finished libretto? Musico-linguistic analysis offers new perspectives on such issues, illuminating the deeply collaborative nature of these works. Furthermore, while Handel’s English word-setting is often criticised for unidiomatic prosody, I explore counterintuitive stressing as a fruitful tension between musical and verbal communication. Handel’s librettists are frequently dismissed as mediocre poets, merely providing frameworks for music. I argue that audiences’ engagement with the published texts of Handel’s English works formed a more integral part of their musical experience than has previously been acknowledged. Through the concept of reader-listenership, I explore the literate nature of eighteenth-century music-consumption, including the reading of a libretto before and during its performance, of stage directions for a music-drama always intended to be unstaged, and of a poetic text whose formal and semantic implications could conflict with those realized in performance.