Händel's Factory | Staatsoper Hamburg

Everyone knows the Hallelujah from Handel's oratorio The Messiah, perhaps without knowing where it comes from. Along with Bach and Telemann, Handel was the most brilliant composer of the Baroque era, a star not only in his adopted country of England. At the premiere of the Messiah, the ladies in the audience had to dispense with sweeping hoop skirts because of the crowds, so that more people could be seated. Handel donated his fee to benefit a hospital for the poor and the inmates of a prison. Himself terminally ill, work on the Messiah had brought the composer back to life. The superstar of the Baroque era was a man full of contradictions and secrets that have not been revealed to this day. In Handel's Factory, voices of the past and present mingle on the traces of genius and despair, of love and loss.