The Handel House Museum is a museum in Mayfair, London dedicated to the life and works of the German born baroque composer George Frideric Handel, who made his home in London in 1712 and eventually became a British citizen in 1727. Handel was the first occupant of 25 Brook Street, which he rented from 1723 until his death there in 1759. Almost all his works after 1723, amongst them many of his best-known operas, oratorios and ceremonial music, were composed and partially rehearsed in the house, which contained a variety of keyboard instruments, including harpsichords, a clavichord and a small chamber organ.
The museum was opened in 2001 by the Handel House Trust as the result of an initiative of the musicologist and Handelian Stanley Sadie in 1959. It comprises a carefully restored set of period rooms on the first and second floors of 25 Brook Street together with exhibition rooms in number 23, the adjacent house on the terrace.
Read more about Handel House Museum: The Museum, History, Restoration, Permanent Collection, The Rooms of 25 Brook Street, Opening Hours and Events, 23 Brook Street
Famous quotes containing the words handel, house and/or museum:
“Herein is the explanation of the analogies, which exist in all the arts. They are the re-appearance of one mind, working in many materials to many temporary ends. Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakspeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Painting was called “silent poetry,” and poetry “speaking painting.” The laws of each art are convertible into the laws of every other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Whenever our neighbour’s house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)