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Handel and His World
H. C. Robbins Landon
*Handel and His World* is the eminent musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon's accessible life-and-times of George Frideric Handel — the German-born, Italian-trained composer who became a giant of English music. Landon follows Handel across more than seventy years and several countries, from Halle and Hamburg to Italy and, decisively, London, setting the man against the vivid backdrop of Baroque Europe and the opera-and-oratorio world he dominated. Along the way he describes and analyzes the music — the operas, the great oratorios including *Messiah*, the orchestral works — for general readers rather than specialists. Generously illustrated, it's a warm, authoritative introduction that speaks to concertgoers and anyone wanting to know the composer behind the famous choruses.
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The author
Howard Chandler Robbins Landon (1926–2009) was an American musicologist, historian and broadcaster best known for recovering vast amounts of neglected Haydn and for correcting myths about Mozart. One of the most readable scholars of the Classical and Baroque eras, he brought both deep archival authority and a broad popular touch to books like this one.
The book
Published in 1984, Handel and His World combines a full narrative of Handel's life with clear analysis of his operas, oratorios and instrumental music, richly illustrated and pitched at the interested general reader rather than the academy.
How it reads
It remains a reliable, engaging single-volume introduction, its scholarship sound and its prose inviting; later research has of course added detail, and readers wanting the newest Handel scholarship can supplement it, but as an entry point it holds up well.
For more context
Landon's celebrated multivolume Haydn studies show the same blend of rigor and readability on a grander scale.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- H. C. Robbins Landon
- Publisher
- Weidenfeld & Nicolson
- Place of publication
- London
- Year
- 1984
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Colorado