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Thomas McGeary, Handel as Orpheus: the Vauxhall statue re-examined, Early Music, Volume 43, Issue 2, May 2015, Pages 291–308, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cav003
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Abstract
In her book Handel as Orpheus, Ellen Harris argues that throughout his career in Italy and Britain, Handel was publicly associated with homosexuality and homoeroticism, through associations of him with the mythic musician Orpheus. One of her key examples for this association is Louis François Roubiliac’s statue of Handel that was installed at Vauxhall Gardens in 1738. Harris claims that the statue ‘was commonly understood to depict the composer as Orpheus’, thus linking Handel to homosexuality. Using a range of readily available textual and visual evidence, this article argues that in the statue Handel’s contemporaries more likely would have seen the composer in the guise of Apollo, and that the comparisons of Handel to Orpheus do not carry an association with homosexuality.