Book Description

Excerpt from Handel The compiler of a short biography of Handel labours under the difficulty of superabundant material. A short, condensed statement of facts and dates is indeed possible, although Handel's life was so long and so active that even these must occupy much space. But, from the moment a single detail is admitted, it becomes evident that a well-balanced life of him must contain so many more as would demand a space five times as large as the limits of the present volume. Nor would the mere record of names and dates be, in any sense, a life of Handel. Their music apart, there are composers the external events of whose lives might be recorded, in a page. Handel's travels, and his public life as an opera and oratorio director and impresario - at a time when Italian opera, new to this country, was a source of public excitement, almost a feature in national history - cause his career to be so interwoven with the political, social, and literary life of the first half of the eighteenth century, that a great deal of extraneous matter must be touched on to render the story coherent or intelligible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.