Legacy
History has been somewhat unkind to Handel. Performance of his works has declined, and he is popularly known for very little besides the Messiah and a handful of minor pieces.
But in the last couple of generations his works have been increasingly revived, in part as a result of the Early Music movement. First-rate recordings now exist of all of his major works, and many leading conductors have been eager to reintroduce them to the world as they were meant to be heard. For ideas on where to find such recordings for reasonable prices, visit our Where to Shop section.
Notwithstanding the quality of these works, their revival is not an easy task. Oratorio especially is an unfamiliar genre, and the audience difficult to find. In his own time, Handel found that those who enjoyed the spectacle of the opera were uninterested in music without staging. Others scoffed at dramatic music in general, thinking it shallow and flashy, as indeed much of it was.
Handel has fallen victim to this schism. The oratorios that one hears most frequently, such as Messiah or Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, are not dramas. Because dramatic oratorios are less familiar than operas, such works rarely get played, further deepening their obscurity. Nor does the fact that many are based on unfamiliar Biblical stories help the situation.
Fortunately, the ability to record music allows Handel an advantage he never would have imagined. A new day has dawned for music lovers in which we can hear music without a local group playing it. Oratorios thrive in the recorded mediums precisely because they do what operas usually cannot; tell a story with only music. Handel may be the greatest musical dramatist ever for his ability to bridge this divide, and his fame is now steadily increasing.