George Frideric Handel (The Norton Library)

"[Paul Henry Lang] not only knows Handel and his work better, and sees them more clearly, than most of his distinguished predecessors in the field: he gives us the intellectual and cultural, even political background with equal assurance, whether he is dealing with Germany or Italy or England.... He clears away the vast acretion of pious mythology, ill-founded conjecture, and national or religious prejudice which make it so difficult to see the man as he really was.... The critical part of the book has a parallel duty to perform—and performs it with even more devastating efficiency..... Lang is a musicologist writing for the intelligent layman, even in his hundred-page examination of Handel's musical style."
-Gerald Abraham, New York Times Book Review
"It is refreshing to read a book in which a composer is studied as a human being and not as a theory or a romantic symbol. Dr. Lang is equally interesting when he writes of Handel's life and background and when he investigates the music. This is a book about Handel that has long been needed."
—Ross Lee Finney
"I was so impressed by what Dr. Lang has done in his new and very fresh approach to Handel, his life and works, that I can find only one word to express my feeling about it Monumental!"
-Eugene Ormandy
Paul Henry Lang's definitive biography re-examines the life and works of Handel, to show his boundless courage, his single-minded and almost ruthless determination to conquer, and the genius with which he set to music human passions and the forces that control human destiny. As a result of this study an entirely different man emerges: one of the greatest composers the world has known, whose time has come after two centuries of misrepresentation.