George Frideric Handel

london vienna eighteen seventy eight dear friend eighteen volumes footnote i had written brahms that the number of bound volumes of his works then in my library already amounted to eighteen footnote and that should not be worth the trouble of writing the letter but poor man that i am how heavily i feel the responsibility which rests on me can i ever hope by a few last volumes to justify all previous ones following your example i will now keep silence regarding everything i could say i think however we may meet at dsseldorf during whitsuntide your nineteenth volume footnote meaning his second symphony in d will have its turn there too only briefly therefore let me answer some of your interrogation points upon the whole i prefer talking and am therefore looking forward to dsseldorf the score of volume nineteen has not been in england but paul footnote richard pole a well-known writer on music and critic the gentle traitor has confessed to me that bribed by some englishman he had been making secret notes of it from the parts during rehearsals the songs in the edition for low voice are still in the hands of the copyist perhaps in those of the engraver already as to the new things i am writing you had better continue relying on your informant he decidedly knows more about it than i myself but to england i shall not easily be persuaded to come i have too great an aversion to concerts and similar disquietudes it has nothing whatever to do with the question whether i like english politics or english globetrotters or not the latter however are now being successfully outdone by the north germans from Berlin especially.

The Handel arias.

Footnote.

I had been commissioned by Dr. Christender, editor-in-chief of the Handel Society, to arrange the bass arias from Handel's Italian operas with the pianoforte accompaniment for the Society.

Brahms had undertaken to do the same in regard to the tenor arias.

End of footnote.

Au revoir, I hope.

Here is my address, Portchart-Homsay, Quentin.

If you're new to the term Baroque, you'll probably know more composers of this music than you realize.

Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Purcell, and Telemann all fall into the Baroque period.

But there are many,

many

Reinhard Kaiser was in his own lifetime arguably the most important opera composer in northern Germany.

He wrote something like a hundred operas for the Hamburg Opera House and dominated that stage for decades.

A teenage Georg Friedrich Handel played violin and harpsichord in Kaiser's opera orchestra before he'd written an opera of his own, and it's fair to say that Handel learned a great deal of his craft looking over Kaiser's shoulder.

kaiser's opera croesus first appeared in hamburg in seventeen eleven and it is based on the old story of the fabulously wealthy ancient greek king proverbial even in his own time for his riches Nearly all of Kaiser's vast output has vanished from the stage, and for a long time Croesus had too, until 1999 when René Jacobs conducted its first full modern performance at the Berlin State Opera, effectively rediscovering the piece.