Chapter 9 - Biographers’ Stories

Summary

IN the previous chapters we considered Handel's life as told by selected biographers, correcting their accounts when necessary based on new evidence and reconsideration of old evidence, and applying an approach that does not demonize those persons traditionally portrayed as Handel's enemies. I drew attention to the ways in which Handel was self-defeating, believing that the urge to exemplification has led my predecessors to minimize the extent to which Handel, despite all his gifts, was his own worst enemy. Now it is the turn of the biographers and the lives they led as writers to receive some scrutiny, in order that we can better understand how they arrived at their portrayals of Handel and his life, and how they responded to each other.

Biographers’ Biographies

ONE might suppose that Handel biographers are self-selected but that is not always the case, even if we discount the metaphysical or psychological explanation that they could not escape the siren's call. For a few, their work on Handel was a lifelong specialization; but for most, Handel was a temporary focus and their Handel volume is one of several biographies or histories. Only one author, Dean, can be said to have made his living by writing, but he also had the benefit of inherited wealth. The occupations of the biographers are diverse, and it seems that most did not continue musical training and performance experience beyond adolescence (See Table 9.1). Those who wished to incorporate more technical information, such as Mainwaring, Schoelcher, and Flower, had to rely on information provided by musically literate assistants, or had to avoid writing about the music in much detail, or at all. Herein lies a major difference between the biographers of musicians and those of figures in other fields. Musical training and experience are necessary for comprehending how music works and thus for understanding the activities of its practitioners, but we do not expect biographers of politicians to be politicians or biographers of poets to be poets, assuming that verbal language ability is sufficient to allow entrée to those worlds. Musicians as writers tend to focus on the music (their area of expertise) making it the cause and consequence of actions and emotions, to the detriment of developing techniques of historical and psychological analysis, thereby alienating the majority of readers who, typically, have little interest in musical minutiae and doubt its primary explanatory capabilities.