What Handel’s secretary wrote

What Handel’s secretary wrote

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norman lebrecht

May 26, 2015

Who knew the secretary was a composer? He’s my album of the week on sinfinimusic.com.

Very few great composers have been exposed by a private secretary, perhaps because few could afford the luxury of employing one. In Handel’s case we know about his secretary chiefly because the man’s stepson, a churchman known as the Rev. William Coxe, published in 1799 a revealing set of Anecdotes of George Frederick Handel and John Christopher Smith, in which the composer comes over as a gruff brute and the secretary as ‘sincere, benevolent and humane’.

Click here to read more.

handel with manuscript

Comments

  • Francis says:

    It’s going to be an interesting read:

    https://archive.org/details/anecdotesofgeorg00coxe

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