Handel

Romain Rolland, the Nobel laureate novelist who gave us 'Jean-Christophe,' turns his biographer's eye on George Frederick Handel and finds something revelatory: not merely the composer of 'Messiah' and the 'Water Music,' but a relentless artist who clawed his way from provincial German organist to the most celebrated musician in England. Rolland traces Handel's early years in Halle, where his father adamantly refused to let music be his son's profession, the young prodigy's apprenticeship under Zachau, and his meteoric rise through the Italian and English musical scenes. What emerges is a portrait of enormous will and practical cunning: Handel the opera impresario, the courtier, the man who went deaf but finished 'The Messiah' in three weeks. Rolland writes with the sensitivity of a fellow artist, understanding that Handel's true subject was never religion or mythology but the raw, glorious affirmation of human voice in all its theatrical grandeur. For readers who want biography that breathes, that understands artistic creation as struggle and triumph.