Night Waves - Handel Week - Handel's Borrowing

Presented by Rana Mitter. For Radio 3's Handel week, the programme revisits the great debates of the 18th century about artistic originality, asking if the 21st-century arts, riven by arguments about intellectual property in an age of new technology, could learn something from Handel and his artistic peers. Handel's compositions were littered with borrowings and copying from not only his own work, but other musicians as well. Even by the standards of his day he was liberal with the sources of his inspiration. But for much of 18th century society this didn't matter - there were no obsessions with artistic originality, unlike now. And this very different attitude to originality could be found across the cultural world of the day. Historian Margaret MacMillan - winner of the Samuel Johnson prize for her book Peacemakers - talks to Rana about her book The Uses and Abuses of History, which explores the way history has been hijacked by individuals and governments, and exaggerated, distorted or suppressed. MacMillan argues that post-war Germany's attempts to deal with Nazism was exemplary, unlike Turkey's treatment of its Armenian past, and asks whether governments should apologise for the sins of the past? MacMillan urges us to treat the past with care and respect.