From a certain point of view, Handel studies already started to be published during his lifetime, with essays, evaluations and polemical pamphlets appearing across several decades even before John Mainwaring’s Memoirs of the life of the late George Frederic Handel (printed in 1760, one year after its subject’s death). With Messiah, the Water Music and Zadok the Priest, and a few popular arias never having fallen from the repertory since the mid 18th century, it is sometimes easy to forget that so much of Handel’s musical output, not to mention attention to its performance practice, and critical scholarship based on the examination of original sources and historical evidence, has only really flourished since the mid 20th century. Nevertheless, there remains much that is far from settled, and plenty more to discover, as is attested to in the present issue of Early Music—not the first to be dedicated to Handel’s music in the journal’s history, and unlikely to be the last. Twenty-first-century Handel studies show little sign of slowing down, and, even as the field expands to include all sorts of interdisciplinary and contextual research, there is an enduring fascination for Handel’s career in Germany, Italy and Britain, his compositional output for the theatre, chamber and chapel, and what we can learn from discoveries about the musicians he worked with.

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从某个角度来看，亨德尔的研究在他有生之年就已经开始发表，甚至在约翰·梅瓦林的已故乔治·弗雷德里克·亨德尔生平回忆录（1760年印刷，一年）之前的几十年里，论文、评价和论战小册子就已经出现了。对象死后）。与弥赛亚、水上音乐和祭司撒督，以及一些自 18 世纪中叶以来从未从曲目中消失的流行咏叹调，有时很容易忘记亨德尔的音乐作品如此之多，更不用说对其表演实践的关注，以及基于对原著的审查的批判性学术来源和历史证据，自 20 世纪中叶以来才真正蓬勃发展。尽管如此，仍有许多远未解决，还有更多的发现，正如本期《早期音乐》所证明的那样——这不是该杂志历史上第一个致力于亨德尔音乐的人，也不太可能是最后一个。二十一世纪的亨德尔研究几乎没有放缓的迹象，而且，即使该领域扩展到包括各种跨学科和背景研究，亨德尔在德国、意大利和英国的职业生涯仍然令人着迷，他为剧院、房间和教堂，以及我们可以从与他合作的音乐家的发现中学到什么。