Herbert Francis Peyser - George Frideric Handel

Handel’s long career resembles a gigantic tapestry, so bewilderingly crowded with detail, so filled with turmoil and vicissitude, with vast achievements, extremes of good and ill fortune, and unending comings and goings that any attempt to force even a small part of it into the frame of a tiny, unpretentious booklet of the present sort is as hopeless as it is presumptuous… Handel was time and again a composer of exquisitely delicate colorations, and sensuous style, not to say a largely unsuspected master of many subtle intricacies of rhythm. The present pamphlet, wholly without originality or novelty of approach, may, perchance, induce the casual reader to renew his interest in Handel’s prodigious treasury, so much of it neglected, not to say actually undiscovered by multitudes of music lovers. — Summary by Author's Foreword