George Frederick Handel

I listened to an interesting program about George Handel and his favorite charity, the London Foundling Hospital. It was on a program on BBC3, The Early Music Show. The program dealt with the music that Handel wrote for the benefit of the orphans.

This gets to one of my pet peeves. At what point after long decades of occupation does an artist, musican, scientist or whatever begin to identified with his chosen country. Handel spent most of his life in England. Listz, French-Polish, spent his entire adult life in France, shouldn't he be considered a French composer rather than a Polish composer who never composed anything in Poland. Whistler painted in England, and Madame Currie spent her productive years, the last 43 out of 67, in Paris.