England has been home to three great composer-entrepreneurs since 1700: Benjamin Britten in the 20th century; Arthur Sullivan in the 19th; and George Frederick Handel in the 18th. The operatic landscape they encountered was relatively fallow, yet each cultivated his patch of earth, produced works of astonishing originality and impact, and revolutionised both the art form and the country’s opera industry, at least for a time.
Handel was the most incongruous of the three, this gruff German son of a barber-surgeon, with heavily accented English who, aged 26 and following the phenomenal success in London of his opera Rinaldo, found himself parachuted into the centre of British court and theatrical life. Briefly resuming his position as Kapellmeister to Georg Ludwig, the Elector of Hanover, Handel returned to London in late 1712, making his theatrical home at the Queen’s Theatre — Sir John Vanbrugh’s gorgeous building in the Haymarket — and his liturgical home with the Chapel Royal.
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