The Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia

Handel is the greatest composer who ever lived – this is a remark attributed to Beethoven. After discussing Handel's sacred and secular output, his “lofty entertainments”, the sublimity of the Messiah and the more pragmatic matter of borrowings, and his legendary relationships with singers like Farinelli, Richard Taruskin (in his monumental Oxford History of Western Music, volume two on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Taruskin, 2010), concludes that Handel, after the triumph of writing a new aria for the castrato Guadagni for the Messiah, once again achieved huge success:

These two aspects of George Frideric Handel (1685‐1759)...