Händel und Shakespeare

Handel enjoyed considerable popularity at the end of the eighteenth century, when his music was performed in London, Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna and Breslau. However, interest in him had waned by the mid-nineteenth century, when it was rekindled by a small group of music-lovers including Georg Gervinus (1805-71), a historian of literature based in Heidelberg. Gervinus lobbied for a Handel memorial in Halle, was a founder of the first German Handel society in 1856, and in 1858 published Händel und Shakespeare, which drew parallels between his favourite writer and favourite composer. In it, after two long chapters on music history and aesthetics, he compared their intellectual development and attributed the similarities between them to their shared Germanic roots. Although the book was not a great success in its day, it marked an important turning point in European Handel studies, and is still referred to today.