ABSTRACT
While Handel’s silence about his private or “inner” being helped ensure an exalted a erlife as mythic icon and consumer commodity, it also worked to generate a lot of “mysteries” to be pondered, “puzzles” to be solved. Questions, triing or serious, have ourished in the vast literature of Handel scholarship over the years: Did Handel meet Bononcini in Rome? (It’s a good possibility.) Was Gustave Waltz Handel’s cook? (Well, he might have been, for a while.) Why did Handel borrow? (For some very good reasons.) Was Handel insane? (Are you kidding?)3 None has proved more insistent or troublesome, however, than the one euphemistically couched as his “relationship to women”: Did Handel sleep with them? Or, in the form in which I am asking it, was Handel gay? e composer’s interest, or noninterest, in the opposite (“apposite”?) sex has been a vexed question for biographers, music historians, and others from Handel’s time to the present; it has constituted, in the words of Paul Henry Lang, a “problem [that has] puzzled his biographers for the last two hundred years.”4
