WHEN I was ten (or thereabouts) I was asked to sing the air ‘He shall feed his flock’ from George Frideric Handel's Messiah at a wedding. The choice of music was, presumably, the bride’s. The young woman had selected a piece that validated her involvement with the church, her expectation of child bearing, and her faith in the continued provision of succour through Jesus Christ. While the choice was, in mid-twentieth-century terms, conventional in sentiment, the piece would not have been heard at an eighteenth-century wedding. Having rehearsed the music a few days before the event, I came down with a bad cold and sore throat and the family doctor recommended against my singing. I missed the service but I still have the copy of the printed music I was to use. Though a minuscule part of the continuing tradition of Handel's music, the copy provides a point of entry into the complex world of dissemination history, the process by which works in the broadest sense – the images that we create and maintain of the people and things around us – are circulated. The choices that composers, writers, performers, readers, listeners, and brides make all pertain to dissemination, but those choices are not easily made, measured, or understood.

The bride's choice was active, and signified both a continuing relevance for and availability of the work, a choice that could not have been made without education, printing, money, occasion, and the composer's reputation. Establishing and maintaining reputation (good, bad, or indifferent) is one of the functions of biography. To the extent that I seek to distinguish fact from fiction, I will be bringing new facts to bear on the matter of Handel's reputation as well as on those of his friends and supposed enemies. In that way, this book is no different from preceding biographies, many of which claim that they exceed their predecessors through improved research. But my intention is distinctive, for while I am producing indirectly a new biography, primarily I explore questions of biography and dissemination using Handel's life and lives as a case study.

Survival after death is possible only through preservation in media. Before the technological innovations of recorded sound and moving pictures in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, only static visual and written images were available.