Conferences and research centred around Handel reception have become more common in recent years, with events such as the 2008 Handel Institute conference ‘Commemorating Handel’, the 2005 conference ‘Händels Klassizität’ as part of the Händel-Festspiele in Halle, and a current project at the Händel-Haus in Halle on the reception of Handel's music in the former German Democratic Republic. However, the various ways in which Handel's music was performed, published, edited, adapted and distributed, as well as how the Handelian figure was developed as an icon in different countries at different times, constitute an area of research in need of further attention. The aim of the conference ‘Handel after Handel’ was to consider some of these aspects of the figure of Handel, on the one hand bringing together and expanding on many of the ideas expressed at earlier conferences on similar topics, and on the other hand offering some new approaches to areas that have previously received little attention. Divided into seven sessions with twenty-one papers in English and French, the conference included themes such as the development of Handel as a national and cultural icon after 1759, Handel biography, perspectives on Handel reception in different countries, transcriptions of Handel's music and Handel in the global age.

The opening session appropriately centred on the construction of Handel as an icon, and the myths and historical truths associated with this process. Following a useful introductory overview by Pierre Dubois (Université François Rabelais de Tours) of the rewriting of Handelian historiography from the first biography of his life by Mainwaring in 1760 to the present, Annette Landgraf (Redaktion der Hallischen Händel-Ausgabe) spoke about the contrasting image of Handel in German belletristic literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I (Matthew Gardner, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg) presented a study on Handel's first biopic, The Great Mr Handel (1942), referring to its sources and wartime allegory.

The independent scholar Brian Robins (London) was the first keynote speaker, with a paper that centred on a discussion of Handel and the composer and writer on music John Marsh. Marsh's diaries, which cover a wide range of musical activities in the second half of the eighteenth century, provide a valuable source of information for Handel reception in the decades immediately after the composer's death. Based on entries from these diaries, Robins gave a detailed overview of Handel reception from 1759 into the late eighteenth century, which gathered pace following the 1784 Handel commemoration – an event, which, as Robins suggested, saved the composer from oblivion.

The theme of the second session was ‘Crossing the Desert, or Keeping the Flame Alive?’, and this began with Pierre Degott (Université de Lorraine) discussing the performance of music from Handel's operas between 1754 and 1920 – a period during which no complete Handel opera was ever performed. The only contact that audiences had with music from Handel's operas during this period was through arias published separately, some of which were in Italian, some in inadequate English translations. Others were reused in different contexts – ‘Dove sei’ from the Italian opera Rodelinda, for example, was published with the text ‘Holy, holy’ as part of Samuel Arnold's oratorio Redemption in 1786. Such arrangements are important as they provided the primary means of consuming a large portion of Handel's music in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Lionel Duguet (Laboratoire de Recherche Arts Spectacle Musique, Université d'Evry – Val d'Essonne) and Giles Courdec (ERIBIA, Université de Caen) expanded on the theme of Handel in the nineteenth century with papers on the reception of Messiah in France leading up to the foundation of a French Handel Society in 1909 (Duguet), pitched against the English musical renaissance between 1840 and 1940, and its quest for new musical heroes (Courdec). A further important moment of Handel reception occurred during the composer's own lifetime, when his works were performed outside London under the direction of others. Adrian La Salvia (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) focused his attention on the performances of Handel's operas at Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel between 1720 and 1743, discussing the translations of the recitatives into German by Georg Caspar Schürmann, before moving on to the translations required for performances in the German Democratic Republic. Michael Burden (University of Oxford) continued in the vein of opera reception with a detailed account of Giulio Cesare as performed in 1787, which was billed as Handel's original but was in fact a pasticcio of various works by Handel selected by Samuel Arnold, with a completely different plot from Handel's opera. Such works are important examples of how Handel's music was used after his death in order to ‘keep the flame alive’. The final paper of the day, by Françoise Deconinck-Brossard (Université Paris Ouset Nanterre La Défense), covered the Sharp family, their involvement with Handel's music and how they contributed to maintaining Handel's music after his death.

Handel has been the source of inspiration for many composers, both during his lifetime and after his death, and this formed the theme of the third session of the conference. Steven Young (Bridgewater State University) gave an account of late romantic organ transcriptions and adaptations of Handel's works such as those by Sigfrid Karg-Elert of Messiah and Alexandre Guilmant's arrangement of ‘See, the conqu'ring hero comes’ from Joshua (and later Judas Maccabeus), as well as works for harmonium such as William Faulkes's Grand Choeur alla Handel. The session continued with Jean-Philippe Heberlé (Université de Lorraine) on Handel and Michael Tippett, showing how twentieth-century composers turned to Handel, Purcell and Dowland as a way of linking the past and present, while Yazia Bermúdez Cubas (Conservatorio Superior de Música de Badjoz Bonifacio Gil) offered an introduction to the use and emotional impact of Handel's music in mainstream cinema.

Donald Burrows (The Open University) gave the second keynote speech, on ‘Turning the Handel: How Handel's Music Survived 250 Years’. A highlight of the conference, the paper presented an overview of the ways in which Handel's music was kept in the repertoire after 1759 and the reinvention that this required. In the years after Handel's death this consisted of three main elements: first, John Christopher Smith (junior) and his efforts to maintain Handel's cultural presence, including performances of Messiah in the 1760s at the Foundling Hospital and provincial performances of Handel's music; second, ‘renewing the memory of the man’ through biographies starting with Mainwaring in 1760; and third, publications such as the editions by John Walsh and Samuel Arnold. Burrows also discussed some of the problems of Handel biography, for instance the large number of documents referring to performances and events, but the small number that mention Handel himself, as well as the pitfalls of placing emphasis on events such as the 1784 Handel commemoration or the Crystal Palace performances of Handel's music in the nineteenth century. These were exceptional, and not the prevalent way in which Handel's music was consumed; a strong tradition of domestic performance also existed. Burrows concluded by highlighting the low point of Handel performances in the interwar period, the introduction of opera performances in Germany and oratorios in Cambridge, and how the nineteenth-century view of Handel the religious composer was gradually replaced by the image of Handel the musical dramatist.

In ‘Interpreting Handel Today’, which focused on gender issues and music for the stage, the theme of singers, especially the problem of how to cast a castrato part and the various solutions available, entered the discussion. First, Ivan Ćurković (Sveučilište u Zagrebu / Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg) analysed contemporary DVD recordings of Handel operas, raising the question of whether gender can become ambiguous when a female singer takes on the role of a male (castrato) character; then Maja Vukušić Zorica (Sveučilište u Zagrebu) spoke on gender issues associated with castratos, countertenors and haute-contres; and finally Jacques Coulardeau (Université Paris 8–Vincennes Saint Denis) addressed the role of male altos in performances of Agrippina, pointing out that castratos underwent a strict educational regimen that singers today no longer endure, and suggesting that if this educational process were employed today, it would perhaps be possible to gain a better impression of the level of skill possessed by castratos. To bring the topic of Handel interpretation to a close, Albert Gier (Universität Bamberg) gave an overview of the performances, concentrating on the operas, given at the Karlsruhe Handel Festival since its foundation in 1978, with some references to the festivals in Göttingen and Halle.

The final day of the conference consisted of two sessions, on cultural transfer and ‘Handel in Our Contemporary Life’. Denis Tchorek (Lycée Jean-Baptiste Corot de Douai), taking up some of the themes referred to by Steven Young the previous day, began by giving a detailed account of Handel's organ concertos and the transcriptions for romantic organs made by nineteenth-century French organists and composers such as Guilmant, who were inspired to write works for organ and orchestra themselves. Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud (Université de Toulouse II–Le Mirail) considered how singers and dancers can be integrated into stage works and their role in sacred contexts. James Garratt (University of Manchester) brought the conference to a close with a paper on how Messiah is consumed in the global age, considering how ‘classicality’ conditions its reception and how the oratorio's own ‘classicality’ conditions its reception in turn. Garratt addressed diverse contexts of performance and consumption, mentioning interpretations of Messiah in various mediums such as steel band and other popular musical styles, suggesting that Messiah has become unique among Handel's works in its ability to cross boundaries and cultures, and in some cases is so detached from the ‘original’ that it is difficult to find a connection back to the composer.

Publication of the conference papers is planned for 2013.