ABSTRACT
Browsing along the bookshelves of any music library, the casual reader quickly becomes able to recognise in which language any one of the multitude of Handel biographies is written, simply by the spelling of the composer’s name. The process of anglicising his name took some time, and until 1720, Handel’s name was generally written as it was pronounced: Hendel (or Hendell, or Hendle, etc.). Only after this time did the familiar English spelling start to be used, and presumably his name start to be mispronounced, and Georg Friedrich became George Frederick.1 Indeed, Mattheson in his Critca Musica of 1725 comments that ‘the English have made a Handel out of Hendel’.2 What one writer describes as the ‘Battle of the Umlaut’ was already under way.3
