Britain’s got talent

On a recent wretched sleety morning, a thread of instantly recognisable music, both stately and jaunty, floated along the sad main street of one of those grey little towns along the Thames estuary.

Pom, popom, popom… as if the heavens were supplying a soundtrack for a place where the tide of jobs has ebbed and will never flood again.

Gradually it became clear that the source of the music was not a periwigged and frock-coated baroque band outside the betting shop but, down in the railway cutting, the loudspeakers of the fortified train station, protected by grilles and anti-climb spikes.

In the 250 years since his death, the composer George Frideric Handel has become so woven into the fabric of British life that it's hard to remember just how foreign he was, an Italian-influenced German working in London for a Hanoverian king.

The Water Music seeps from lifts, the Hallelujah Chorus is a ring tone and the Messiah itself ubiquitous in amateur and professional performances every Christmas.

Handel's Zadok the Priest was written for George II in 1727, and has been used at every subsequent coronation. His operas, which fell utterly out of fashion in his own lifetime, are now regularly performed by British companies.

His Music for the Royal Fireworks, written in 1749 - as not one in a thousand who hears it would remember - for a party to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, has now entered that very special canon of classical music judged sufficiently unalarming to soothe potential trouble makers in crowded railway and tube stations (try rush hour in London's Brixton or Tottenham Court Road stations).

Baroque bonanza

It is 350 years since the thoroughly English Henry Purcell was born in Old Pye Street in Westminster. He was a major star in his day, revered by musicians ever since, and surprisingly with rock and roll credentials, cited by guitarist Pete Townshend as a major influence on the opening bars of The Who's Pinball Wizard, at least as good as Jimi Hendrix's admiration for Handel, the former occupant of his London flat.

Purcell is buried within a crotchet's throw of Handel's tomb in Westminster Abbey. But he never quite made it into that pantheon of Routemaster/Stonehenge/Bovril icons, and his anniversary will be celebrated with a respectable scattering of scholarly publications and recitals, as the tercentenary of his death was in 1995.

Handel gets the full orchestra: exhibitions at Handel House and the Foundling Museum; a co-starring role in Baroque at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A); a small but intriguing exhibition at the Bank of England demonstrating just how shrewd he was about money, a year's worth of Handel operas on Radio 3, and performances - many sneaking, in fairness, a bit of Purcell and Haydn in as well - all over the country of oratorios, cantatas, keyboard pieces, and operas.

There will, of course, be scores of Messiahs, including a major performance at Westminster Abbey on 14 April, the exact anniversary of the day when, having announced only a few hours earlier that he would no longer be receiving visitors as he was done with the world, Handel died in his own bed in his first-floor bedroom at 25 Brook Street.

This reverence for Handel as a genius unquestionably towering above all his peers, and - if you only judged him by the exhibition at the Foundling Museum - a kind of secular saint, has not been universal either in his life or since his death.

Christopher Hogwood, musician, scholar and curator of the Handel House museum exhibition, recalls that in 1862, when Dean Ramsey gave two lectures on Handel in Edinburgh, he remarked "it has been customary to represent Handel as a very dull stupid, commonplace character, apart from his musical powers".

Some of his peers were considerably ruder than that. An infamous contemporary cartoon of Handel, The Charming Brute, hangs on the grand oak staircase of the Foundling Museum, and will also figure in the Handel House displays.

It shows the great composer as a pig-faced monster, seated at the organ on a barrel, his pockets and every surface around him overflowing with food of every kind. It is said to be by his friend and collaborator, the painter and set designer Joseph Goupy, and to have cost him a bequest in the composer's will when gossips identified him as the author.

Handel and the Foundling Hospital

But even in this vicious little joke, the accompanying verses make it clear that Handel might be mocked for gluttony - his waistband swells and shrinks startlingly in various portraits in the exhibitions, depending on the desire and power of the artists to flatter - but was also seen as a marvel: "Yet no land nor clime nor Age, have equal'd this harmonious Boar," as one verse accompanying The Charming Brute has it.

The Foundling Museum, and the Georgian charity for abandoned babies from which it grew, certainly wouldn't call the harmonious boar a dull commonplace character: he raised sums for the charity through recitals, and left the organisation a complete set of orchestra parts for the Messiah in his will to ensure it continued its work.

He conducted his first benefit concert - including the inaugural performance of his Foundling Hospital Anthem - in 1749, raising £350 to complete the hospital chapel, and returned in 1750 to conduct the first of many performances of the Messiah in the chapel, from the organ he had donated.

The chapel was so packed - despite the plea that swords and hooped skirts be discarded - that a repeat performance was held a fortnight later for people who had already bought tickets but simply couldn't get in.

He attended every subsequent performance in his lifetime, even when he was too ill to conduct, and the tradition continued long after his death: in 1786 alone, the Foundling Handel festival raised £3,300.

He still draws people through the doors, since the Foundling also holds the enormous Gerald Coke Handel Collection, including his will. Visitors can start with the formal exhibition in the basement and end up in the attic in one of the supremely comfortable red leather armchairs which play his music.

The extent of his philanthropy - as rare loans in the exhibition demonstrate, he supported equally lavishly the Society for Decay'd Musicians founded in 1738 when the widow and children of an orchestral player were found to be literally starving - is startling, given his other reputation for being tight.

This is the first major exhibition since Lars Tharp took over as director, and he thinks it's a perfect fit for the museum, mixing as the original charity did the worlds of philanthropy, social history and art, building links with other museums and collections, and filling the building with music in an impressive programme of recitals: the Foundling is part of the year-long Baroque 09 programme linking concert halls, galleries, broadcasts and museums.

Revealing Handel

If Handel emerges as a noble but rather two-dimensional figure from the Foundling Museum, Christopher Hogwood's exhibition at Handel House - which will give free admission on the actual anniversary of his death - strives to colour in the picture.

Handel Reveal'd includes some touchingly personal objects, such as the score for the last piece he wrote, Jephtha, with a note in German in the margin, dated February 1751, recording that he was no longer able to work due to the weakening of his left eye.

Although he did finally become almost blind - despite horrific surgery without anaesthetic - he recovered enough to finish the score six months later, and other scores on which he has written shopping lists for his wine merchant and apothecary.

Hogwood attempts to recreate the daily life of the surprisingly modest household, including some gossip of the day, such as his alleged threat to drop a recalcitrant soprano out the window, and the moan by one visitor that while he was entertained on bread and rather inferior cheese, the great man kept retiring into the back room insisting he had to note down a musical inspiration - until he peeked in and saw Handel feasting on far better fare.

Like the Bank of England display, it shows the composer was unlikely ever to need the care of the Society for Decay'd Musicians - he was remarkably savvy with his money, and though he invested in the South Sea Bubble, he managed to get his money out a fortnight before the crash.

"A special obligation"

There is also a section titled "Handel in Love?" "You will notice the question mark," says Martin Wyatt, deputy director of the museum. "It recognises some less-known anecdotes regarding Handel and various women, and engages with the fact that some recent commentators have speculated on whether he was gay or not. The jury's out on that one."

So, 250 years on, does the harmonious boar justify all this attention? At the V&A, co-curator Joanna Norman describes Baroque as the world's first truly international style and Handel as a key figure, a German who imported the world of Italian opera into England.

Handel will also perform one crucial role in the exhibition: it ends in an evocation of a Baroque fireworks display - and inevitably, the sound of the Music for the Royal Fireworks, which will waft visitors gently towards the shop.

The Handel House Museum has a dazzlingly simple justification for cashing in on the anniversary with an exhibition devoted to him. "We've never done one," Wyatt says, sounding slightly puzzled, adding "he was an extraordinary figure, and deserves every honour we can heap upon him."

Hogwood says sweetly that despite this glut of musical anniversaries, Handel does deserve special recognition - if only because "he chose to be English, so we have a special obligation".

And we will never know if the man himself would actually have preferred the tribute of Halle, the town of his birth, which has created a special anniversary chocolate named in his honour, each hand inscribed in a Baroque flourish, GFH.

Maev Kennedy is the heritage correspondent for the Guardian