Handel is at the same time one of the most accessible and one of the most elusive of the major creative figures in Western music. The ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, ‘Handel's Largo’, the Hornpipe from the Water Music and the opening of ‘Zadok the Priest’ are examples of pieces of his music that have had sufficient appeal to find their way into ‘popular’ consciousness at various times during the twentieth century. Moreover, Handel's broad, attractive musical style seems to present few problems for the listener: it is to be heard in the background in restaurants and aircraft cabins, the choice of company managements that wish at the same time to find a pleasingly neutral aural background and to flatter their clientele with allusions to ‘high’ culture. No one would begrudge Handel this place in the sun: indeed, most of us would prefer that, if the aural wallpaper is to be inevitable, it should be worth listening to. But of course there is a danger that the music will be taken for granted: it is heard so often that everyone ‘knows’ it: it is assumed that there is no more to be said, and even repeat performance borders on the superfluous for real musicians. Mozart's 40th symphony and Beethoven's Fifth suffer this same hazard, but perhaps the danger to Handel is more subtle: his style is in itself sometimes apparently so effortless as to discourage further investigation. Yet there is indeed more to be said, and more questions to be asked, about the context in which Handel’s style developed, about the novelty of his own mature style, about the compositional skill that lies behind the apparently effortless fluency, and behind his knack of setting up a mood or an emotional intensity with the simplest musical means.

London, where Handel spent his mature career, can be regarded as the historical home of the public concert. John Banister's concerts in 1672 have a claim to being the first-ever series of such concerts, though Banister may previously have attempted a similar venture in Oxford. During Handel's lifetime benefit concerts, usually involving a mixed programme of instrumental and vocal items, were a regular, if occasional, part of the London theatre programmes. Hickford's concert room was an established concert venue, and was one of the places attended by a visiting Frenchman in the mid 1720s:

Handel's first oratorios Il trionfo del Tempo and La Resurrezione were produced at Rome in 1707 and 1708, respectively, under circumstances of private patronage, and the domestic records of his patrons Cardinal Pamphili and Marquis Ruspoli provide some clues about practical details of the performances. Pamphili's accounts include a payment for copying the performing material for Il trionfo – four part-books for the vocal soloists, and parts for a substantial chamber orchestra of strings and oboes. The copying account, dated 14 May 1707, gives us our only documentary evidence for the period of the oratorio's composition, but it tells us neither the exact date nor the place of the performance, which had presumably taken place in Pamphili's Roman palace at some time during the preceding couple of months. For La Resurrezione, Ruspoli's accounts provide rather fuller information, including a complete list of the orchestral performers employed (which does not exactly match the resources required in Handel's score). There were two performances, and the larger scale of the enterprise is indicated by the fact that 1500 copies of the libretto were printed: although the performance may have been a private one in Ruspoli's Bonelli Palace, it was hardly a chamber-scale event.

Handel's operas belong to a tradition, based on virtuoso singers (many of them castratos) and the almost exclusive dominance of the da capo aria, that has not only been totally lost but, since it differed radically from later developments in operatic genres, was for long universally condemned as naive, primitive and beyond hope of revival. Although the operas were acknowledged to be full of beautiful music, until very recently anyone who claimed that they qualified Handel as not merely an inventor of marvellous tunes but one of the greatest of dramatic composers would have been dismissed as a crank. To justify such a claim it is necessary to demonstrate the dramatic as well as the musical potency of the operas, and to show that the two components amount to something more than the sum of the parts. Great opera is great theatre, but recognisable as such only if both the musical and the stage performance attain the highest standard.

Although the tradition of performance was lost, it is not beyond recovery. On the musical side recent years have seen much progress, thanks to the movement for reviving early music in a form approximating as closely as possible to the manner of its original performance (the term ‘authenticity’ begs too many questions). It is the theatrical side that lags behind. From writers of the period and the research of modern scholars, backed up by the evidence of librettos and scores, we know a great deal about the theatres in which Handel's operas were performed and how they operated, about the scenery and costumes, about stage movement and the style of acting and singing.

The term ‘chamber music’ is normally understood today as referring to music for two or more instruments with a single player to each part. Anyone invited to a concert of chamber music might expect to hear works for string quartet, wind ensemble, violin and piano and so on. If the programme turned out to consist entirely, or even largely, of vocal pieces the modern concert-goer might well feel let down in his or her expectations.

This would not have been the case in Handel's lifetime. Chamber music (musica da camera) would then have been understood as including those genres, vocal as well as instrumental, which were not encompassed by church music (musica da chiesa) or theatre music (musica da teatro). The identification of ‘chamber music’ with works for small instrumental ensembles (or with the ensembles themselves) is the product of a later age, when the string quartet and allied genres (as well as the ensembles that performed them) assumed a leading role in domestic music-making and, to a considerable extent, in public concert-giving. One result of this has been that the sonatas and other instrumental works of Handel and his contemporaries have in modern times been not only heard, but also studied and discussed, separately from the vocal genres with which in the eighteenth century they would have shared a platform – and this despite the fact that the two principal vocal genres are frequently referred to specifically as the chamber cantata and the chamber duet. The present chapter will focus on some of the structural and textural features that the instrumental and vocal chamber works of Handel have in common.

None of Handel's English writers could be described as professional librettists in the sense of making their living by writing librettos, though all of them except the wealthy Charles Jennens (1700–73) had to earn their livings. It is not certain whether oratorio libretto-writing was a money-earning activity; we do not know if librettists shared in composers' benefit nights, or if there was a royalty arrangement on the sale of wordbooks. As with other forms of writing, there could be an expectation of financial return from a dedication. Thomas Morell (1703–84) dedicated his first libretto, Judas Maccabaeus, to the Duke of Cumberland, ‘as a compliment … upon his returning victorious from [quelling the Rebellion in] Scotland’, and was rewarded with ‘a handsome present’. Some phrases of Handel's suggest that he may usually have paid his English librettists. Having received the second instalment of the libretto of Belshazzar he writes to the author, Charles Jennens: ‘I profess my Self highly obliged to You, for so generous a Present’, and once the final instalment has arrived, he reiterates his ‘grateful acknowledgments for your generous favours’, which implies gratitude for something not only estimable but not ordinarily given. But libretto-writing was only one intermittent activity among many others for Handel's English collaborators; none was as fully engaged in this occupation as, for example, Paolo Rolli was with Italian opera librettos. Only John Gay (1685–1732) and Samuel Humphreys (c. 1698–1738), the earliest collaborators, were writers to the exclusion of other occupations.

There is plenty of evidence that Handel was a good linguist. According to one eighteenth-century account he

Ferdinando de'Medici, in a letter of recommendation to Carl Philipp von Neuburg in Innsbruck in 1709, wrote that among Handel's many talents was a ‘gran pratica delle lingue’ (an ‘excellent knowledge of languages’). As well as his native German (and some Latin learnt at school), he had a good command of French, a necessary skill in those days for all educated Germans, whose own tongue was in some circles considered unsuitable for formal discourse. He wrote French stylishly in letters to his compatriots such as Telemann, Mattheson and his own brother-in-law in Halle; in addressing the latter as ‘Monsieur mon très Honoré Frère’ he was following the same cultural tradition as his fellow German King George II of England, who, as his wife Caroline lay dying and urged him to marry again, uttered the immortal words ‘Non, non, j'aurai des maîtresses’; and, according to Mainwaring, when Cuzzoni grew temperamental about singing an aria in Ottone, it was in French that Handel threatened to throw her out of the window.

Studies of Handel's compositions have in general understandably stressed his use of and sensitivity to the human voice: studies of his orchestral works have, also understandably, dwelt on the Concerti Grossi and other purely instrumental works. Yet the orchestra was the underpinning for the vast majority of his compositions – for all of the operas and oratorios, for example, which are the heart of his output. It was the working musical ensemble at the core of Handel's career, but apparently he did not consider it a viable separate concert ‘instrument’: in his own performances, the orchestra was merely a part of a larger entertainment, featured at times, but never self-sufficient.

We know almost nothing about the orchestra at Hamburg's Theater am Gänsemarkt, where Handel's first surviving major work involving orchestra was performed. Johann Mattheson, Handel's mentor and friend in Hamburg, tells us only that the orchestra used just one harpsichord, and that he (Mattheson) favoured orchestral direction from the keyboard. Almira (HWV 1, 1705), the only surviving Handel score from this period, uses an orchestra of two upper wind parts (mainly oboes, occasionally recorders), one bassoon part, three trumpets, timpani, and strings (up to three violin parts, one viola part and basso continuo). It is not known how many string and woodwind players performed each part, or how many other realising continuo instruments were present. Even further from view is knowledge of the workings of the orchestra in terms of the division of continuo labour, or the extent to which the full string section may have been reduced occasionally to concertino players.

When George Frideric Handel touched English shores late in the year 1710, he arrived in a country that was in an alarming condition of social change and political turmoil. The composer immediately thrust himself into London's public life on its highest levels. He acted in a diplomatic as well as a musical capacity upon arriving there, emerged as the leading figure in one of the key cultural activities of the upper classes, and in so doing participated directly in the fast-moving changes that were taking place in English life.

What was going on in British politics at the turn of the eighteenth century was novel and forward-looking, but very dangerous. Britain was the first Western nation in which political dispute became public, uncensored, and driven by parties. Despite the triumph of Parliament over the Crown in 1688–89, the country remained deeply divided constitutionally, threatened by the prospect of a new civil war, and shaken by openended ideological conflict which was publicly promoted in uncontrolled pamphleteering. If anything, people from other countries saw the English as the wild men of Europe. But in many respects the political activities that began in this period marked the start of modern, ideologically defined political parties. While we must be careful not to cast this history in the terms of mid-Victorian Peelites and Conservatives, a new political order was being established in England at the turn of the eighteenth century.