page_title: George Frideric Handel
section_title: Cannons (1717–19)
hierarchical_section_title: George Frideric Handel / Move to London / Cannons (1717–19)
context_page_description: George Frideric Handel was a German, later British, Baroque composer who spent the bulk of his career in London, becoming well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi and organ concertos. Handel received important training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712; he became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the great composers of the Italian Baroque and by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition. He would become a huge influence on classical composers such as Mozart and Beethoven.
  Within fifteen years, Handel had started three commercial opera companies to supply the English nobility with Italian opera. Musicologist Winton Dean writes that his operas show that "Handel was not only a great composer; he was a dramatic genius of the first order." As Alexander's Feast was well received, Handel made a transition to English choral works. After his success with Messiah he never composed an Italian opera again. Almost blind, and having lived in England for nearly fifty years, he died in 1759, a respected and rich man.
context_section_description: In 1717 Handel became house composer at Cannons in Middlesex, where he laid the cornerstone for his future choral compositions in the Chandos Anthems. Romain Rolland wrote that these anthems (or Psalms) stood in relation to Handel's oratorios, much the same way that the Italian cantatas stood to his operas: "splendid sketches of the more monumental works." Another work, which he wrote for The 1st Duke of Chandos, the owner of Cannons, was Acis and Galatea: during Handel's lifetime it was his most performed work. Winton Dean wrote, "the music catches breath and disturbs the memory".
  In 1719 the Duke of Chandos became one of the composer's important patrons and main subscribers to his new opera company, the Royal Academy of Music, but his patronage declined after Chandos lost money in the South Sea bubble, which burst in 1720 in one of history's greatest financial cataclysms. Handel himself invested in South Sea stock in 1716, when prices were low and sold before 1720.
caption: "The Chandos portrait of Georg Friedrich Händel"
  by James Thornhill, c. 1720
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