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Others have invented human girlfriends, blowing up the Bombace story, for instance, into a full-blown putative affair. Suggesting with utmost seriousness that he was simply too unearthly to think about sex (this about a composer whose love of other earthly pleasures, including food, drink and bawdy humor in several languages, was attested and legendary).
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Some have offered pious maunderings about his supposed exalted spirituality, But none of it is supported by any credible evidence.Įver since then, Handel biographers have had to resort to a certain amount of strenuous huffing and puffing to avoid the worrisome possibility that there might have been something, you know, funny about his love life. One rumor, dating back to his first biographer, has him romantically linked to an older married singer nicknamed "La Bombace" ("The Bombshell"). There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that King George II asked him flat out about his "love of women," to which Handel replied evasively that he had no time for anything but music. The question of his sexual life, in fact, inspired curiosity and interest even in his own day. Despite spending nearly his entire career as a celebrity in London - a city whose love of gossip was every bit as developed in the 18th century as it is today - he left no solid indication that he ever had a love affair of any kind, gay or straight. One of the things that makes Handel's private life so tantalizing is how very private it was. They represent the last great cache of unknown Handelian music, and Harris doesn't merely document their existence - she uses them to explore the role of sexuality in dramatic music, and to challenge the way we think about the biographies of great artists. These short pieces - each one typically consisting of a handful of arias and recitatives for one or two voices with simple accompaniment - were written to librettos on pastoral and mythological themes for private performance among close-knit circles of aristocratic friends. Harris analyzes Handel's chamber cantatas, more than 100 dramatic works written mostly during his formative years as a young composer in Italy. In a sober and densely scholarly study, Massachusetts Institute of Technology musicologist Ellen T.