The Easiest Handel Pieces, Measured

Handel is known for enormous things — Messiah, the coronation anthems, forty-odd operas, music played on a barge for a king. What gets forgotten is that he also left a pile of very short keyboard pieces, and several of them are among the most playable things in this entire library.

We measured all 58 Handel pieces here. They run from 14 out of 100 to 79 — a narrower band than Bach, Mozart or Brahms, and with a gentler floor than any of them. Here they are, easiest first.

The Aylesford pieces are the way in

Four of the ten easiest Handel pieces in the library come from one source, and it has an unusual history.

Charles Jennens (1700–1773) — the man who compiled the text of Messiah — was also an obsessive collector, and he assembled a library of manuscripts containing very nearly everything Handel wrote. He never married, and on his death in 1773 the collection passed to a cousin who by then was the third Earl of Aylesford. It stayed in that family for over a century before being dispersed, principally at auction in 1918.

The short harpsichord pieces from it were published by Schott in 1928, edited by William Barclay Squire and J. A. Fuller-Maitland, and have been known as the Aylesford Pieces ever since. Pieces like the Menuet (14 out of 100, the easiest Handel here) and Impertinence (22) are miniatures — thirty seconds to a minute — with one clear tune and a light left hand.

They are, in other words, the domestic scraps of a composer known for spectacle, and they happen to be excellent beginner material.

Why Handel sits lower than Bach

Handel and Bach were born in the same year, 1685, and their keyboard music feels quite different under the hands.

Bach thinks in independent voices: even a small prelude usually has two lines that argue with each other, and both hands are busy the whole time. Handel more often writes a tune with an accompaniment — the Italian opera habit showing through. For a beginner that means the left hand is frequently doing something simple and repetitive while the right hand carries something you can hum.

Neither approach is better music. But if you are choosing where to start in the Baroque, Handel's texture asks less of you.

The dance movements are the sweet spot

Eight of the easiest twenty are minuets, gavottes or small airs, and eight come from the Aylesford set — heavily overlapping groups. There is a practical reason: a dance movement has to keep a steady, obvious pulse, and it is usually short and built from repeated sections. Learn the first eight bars and you often have half the piece.

The other advantage is that repeats are structural rather than decorative. If you can play the A section and the B section, you can play the movement — you just play them in order and go round again.

What is at the hard end

The suites, the fugues and the variation sets, topping out at 79. Notably, Handel's hardest here is a good deal lower than Bach's (91) or Brahms's (100), which reflects what survives in this library rather than a claim about the composers. Handel wrote plenty that is fiendish; most of it is for orchestra, voices, or both.

One thing worth listening for

Handel wrote for a public. His tunes were designed to be remembered by people who heard them once, in a theatre, and hummed on the way home — which is why the melodies on this list stick so readily. When a Handel phrase feels almost too obvious, that is the intention, not a failure of imagination.

Where to go next

For the other great Baroque option, Bach for beginners. For the whole era measured together, the easiest Baroque pieces. And for pieces short enough to finish today regardless of era, pieces you can learn in one sitting.

Facts about the Aylesford collection from Wikipedia: Charles Jennens and IMSLP). Difficulty scores are our own measurement of each transcription in this library.