This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
George Frideric Handel was a German-born composer, naturalized British in 1727, born February 23, 1685 in Halle and died April 14, 1759 in London, where he was buried in Westminster Abbey. That naturalization, formally becoming a British subject partway through a career built almost entirely in London, marks a deliberate change of national allegiance rather than a mere residence, made by a composer who had already spent more than a decade working in England before formalizing the change.
His burial in Westminster Abbey, the resting place of British monarchs and the country's most honored public figures, is itself a marker of how completely Handel's adopted country came to claim him as its own composer by the time of his death, a German-born musician whose reputation and legal nationality had, by 1759, both become thoroughly English rather than remaining tied to the country of his birth. The move from Halle to London, and the formal naturalization that followed it, places Handel among the composers whose most productive and best remembered work was written in a country other than the one they were born in, a pattern of adopted national identity that shaped how his music was received in Britain during his own lifetime as much as it has shaped how it is remembered since.