The Lives of George Frideric Handel by David Hunter (review)

There is a long tradition of biographies on London’s leading composer of the first half of the eighteenth century. The first of these to be published individually was John Mainwaring’s Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frideric Handel, appearing just one year after the composer’s death in 1760. Throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries Handel has continued to attract biographers, who adopt various approaches: some favour the documentary biography, such as Otto Erich Deutsch (1955) and Donald Burrows et al. (2013–); others focus on Handel’s life and music, for example Hogwood, Handel (1984) and Burrows, Handel, 2nd edition (2012). The two things that most biographies of Handel have in common is that Handel and his life are at the centre of the study, and the material is presented in chronological order. David Hunter’s new biography, The Lives of George Frideric Handel, favours a different, context-based approach, generally avoiding Handel’s music, and focusing instead on how the composer’s life can be positioned in eighteenth-century London as a whole and considering the ways in which Handel has been represented in the history of biography. In Hunter’s own words: ‘I am producing indirectly a new biography, primarily I explore questions of biography and dissemination using Handel’s life and lives as a case study’ (p. 1). The main text of 445 densely filled pages is divided into nine chapters, covering topics such as eighteenth-century audiences, Handel’s health, his friends, as well as stories about the composer and an enlightening deconstruction of select biographies of Handel since the eighteenth century. Hunter concentrates on the composer’s time in London and thus largely omits (other than a brief discussion of patrons) Handel’s early life and career in Halle, Hamburg, Italy, and Hanover.

Readers familiar with Hunter’s work will recognize a substantial portion of the book from his previous publications, as ‘the chapters draw on – to a greater or lesser extent – [his] articles published in the scholarly literature over the last twenty years’ (p. 5). They have nevertheless been revised where necessary and supplemented with new material painting a detailed picture of what London was ‘really like’ in the eighteenth century. The chapters frequently refer to what would have been everyday knowledge, but which has not previously been included to such an extent in Handel biographies. For example, Hunter incorporates such details as London Bridge having only a 20-foot wide carriageway with shops on either side and being the only fixed crossing across the Thames until Westminster Bridge opened in 1750. His account of Handel statues is also a unique contribution to Handel scholarship, as is the fifty-page chapter on Handel’s health, covering, among other things, gluttony and obesity, as well as eating disorders. Much of the material included in the book is not only relevant to Handel but also to eighteenth-century Britain as a whole.

Hunter’s study, however, is not without its flaws. In the first large chapter, ‘The Audience: Three Broad Categories, Three Gross Errors’, Hunter puts forward his theory that the audience is ‘a voluntary and temporary association of individuals at a place of entertainment’ (p. 13; see also p. 89)—i.e. those who attended his performances. As this represents a very small percentage of the London population (the wealthy), Handel’s audience was small and he was therefore unpopular (pp. 13–19). In this somewhat misguided interpretation, Hunter neglects to take into account seriously the vast publishing trade, subscribers, students, and collectors, all of whom contributed to the wider dissemination of the composer’s music, as well as performances outside the theatre (e.g. in cathedrals across the country, at the Three Choirs Festival, in Oxford and Hamburg (during Handel’s London period)). While he does acknowledge the importance of some of these (pp. 122–45), he does not consider those who...