Barockstar: George Frideric Handel (review)

This hour-long documentary chronicles the life and music of George Frideric Handel, tracing his travels from his birthplace in Halle to Italy and ultimately to London, where he would end his days a celebrated composer of opera and oratorio. Along with narration available in German, English, Italian, and French, the DVD includes numerous interview snippets with conductors (notably Christopher Hogwood and Trevor Pinnock), performers, descendants of some of Handel’s Italian patrons, and the British Handel scholar, Donald Burrows. The historical narrative of the film is interspersed with performance excerpts of a range of Handel’s music, from early organ works to cantatas to opera and English oratorio. The performers featured on the DVD are all of very high quality, among them the soprano Sandrine Piau, The English Consort, and the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin. With the exception of perhaps one or two performances (rehearsal recordings) where the solo voice is rather muddy, the overall sound quality of the musical performances on the DVD is excellent. The disc also includes bonus material: extended interviews with some of the film’s commentators, including Hogwood and Burrows, on a range of subjects, including Handel’s Italian and English patrons, and Messiah.

Barockstar offers two main theses from the outset: that Handel was the first superstar of classical music, and that he was a “modern” composer, whose music remains vital and meaningful today. The first half of the film documents Handel’s years in Halle, Hamburg, and Italy, during which time he received his formative musical training as an organist, violinist, and composer and began his rise to fame in the world of Italian opera. The latter half of the film focuses on Handel’s career in London, first as a superstar composer of Italian opera, and later as the inventor of the English oratorio. Along the way, the film offers historical context, discusses Handel’s many patrons, and touches upon other aspects of Handel the man, including his charitable work. The film concludes with an assertion of Handel’s on-going popularity and relevance, offering scenes from modern-day Halle and the annual Händel-Festspiele.

In the main, Barockstar is entertaining and informative, with some very fine musical performances, and would be suitable for under-graduate students. It is not, however, without a few shortcomings. The English narration often feels rushed and, though the narrator is clearly a native speaker, is sometimes annoyingly unidiomatic-sounding in its cadences and rhythms. The narrative also occasionally shifts gears abruptly, as when Handel, without preamble, up and leaves Halle for Hamburg, or when music historian Donald Burrows throws in an odd non sequitur hinting at connections between Handel’s personality and his penchant for erotic paintings of female nudes.

Balance is also an issue: more than half of the film is devoted to Handel’s early continental years—and this part of the film sometimes feels like a European travelogue, with long, lingering tours through resplendent Italian baroque palazzi—with only about 20 minutes given to the longest and most important part of Handel’s career, the eponymous “Barockstar” London years of 1712–59. This means that the bulk of his operas and oratorios get the short shrift. For example, the film lauds and includes—at the expense of better-known and more important works—substantial excerpts from Handel’s 1730 comic opera Partenope, a rather atypical opera that was considered a failure in Handel’s lifetime and only very recently fully revived. Moreover, although it purports to celebrate Handel as the inventor of a new musical genre, the English oratorio, the film discusses only one of Handel’s oratorios, the Messiah, with just a few brief performance excerpts from the “Hallelujah” chorus.

Despite imbalance and a few other peccadilloes, Barockstar is visually-compelling and includes some insightful commentary and fine performances of indisputably beautiful music. It is an accessible introduction to the life and music of George Frideric Handel and to the world of baroque Europe generally.