Don Satz wrote:

>This isn't a significant matter, but I always assumed than Handel was a
>German composer who happened to write many works while living in England.
>Did he change his citizenship? Was anything like this done formally during
>the 1700's?

This is indeed a matter of significance, at least to the British. After
a sojourn in Italy, whose style greatly influenced his own compositions,
Handel returned to Germany and took a position as director of music to the
Elector of Hanover. However, he soon left for England, settling in London
in 1712, where as it happens a couple of years later, in 1714, that same
Elector became King George I. Handel became a British subject by Act of
Naturalization in 1726. As if to set the seal on his British status at his
death in 1759 he was duly buried with high honours in Westminster Abbey --
impossible for a foreigner. (It was there that Haydn, on hearing the
'Hallelujah Chorus', is said to have risen to his feet with the crowd and
exclaimed "He is the master of us all.")  Truly an adopted son by both high
and lowly, he has always been beloved of successive monarchs and accepted
by the British people as one of their own, and his grass-roots popularity
was such that barrow-boys and coster-mongers on the streets would whistle
his tunes.

Alan Moss