Edinburgh International Festival: Last week on this page Jonathan Mills, Festival director, described the music of Bach and Handel as the twin pillars of this year�s EIF music programme.

Last week on this page Jonathan Mills, director of the Edinburgh International Festival, described the music of Bach and Handel as the twin pillars, or the two mighty buttresses, of this year's EIF music programme.

In many ways the two composers are logical bed-mates in a programme which is throwing a spotlight on the music of the Baroque period and of the Enlightenment. Both were German-born, though Handel thrived and latterly lived out his life in London.

Both were born in 1685, within three weeks of each other. And, perhaps principally, the two composers are the musical giants of the period, each with influences on subsequent generations that echo down the ages, even until today. Both were master craftsmen. Both were geniuses.

Yet in numerous respects they were utterly unlike each other. They lived in completely different environments and worked in comprehensively different conditions and circumstances. Bach, as we sketched last week, worked for the church. Whatever his genius, whatever the glories of his music, he was a jobbing composer, an employee who had to produce for each Sunday a new cantata to be performed at the service.

The fact that, in these routine, workaday, perhaps humdrum conditions, Bach produced hundreds of top-drawer compositions, many of them now appreciated to be great and enduring masterpieces, uniquely jewelled and deeply profound exemplars of the species, is one of the great miracles of music and demonstrations of genius in the history of the artform.

Handel was in another sphere; another world, even. He was summed up in a recent book as "in many ways his great contemporary's great opposite".

Festival director Jonathan Mills has a natty way of putting it: "Handel is a kind of Andrew Lloyd Webber of the 18th century (though a far greater composer, of course).

"What I mean is that, in terms of Handel's pure commercial success on the London stage, nothing quite like that had been heard in London; ever. Handel had shows going on everywhere: think of those first five operas, happening under the auspices of the Royal Academy of Music and His Majesty's in the Haymarket.

"I'm constantly thinking of that extraordinary, historical moment in London. What must it have been like to witness music move from a sacred society, a more pious society, into a more secular society, with the Vauxhall Gardens, the Pleasure Gardens and the idea of promenading?

"They are all very human things, very caught up with the activities of an emerging middle class; and all captured very much in the music.

"And that music, simultaneously, is incredibly sophisticated and incredibly approachable. Handel had huge commercial success with it."

Mills is also intrigued and appalled that this great surge into the Enlightenment, into a new era for thought, humanity and the arts, was happening in the same year, 1727, as Janet Horn was burned at the stake in Dornoch, the last woman to be executed for witchcraft in Scotland.

Her fate, and its implications for community life in small villages, is the subject of another festival event in the Traverse Theatre's production of Rona Munro's play, The Last Witch.

But back to Handel. There is, of course, says Jonathan Mills, much more to Handel than his commercial success. "On the one hand he was an absolute populariser, a man patronised by the great and the good, who is completely capable of operating in a commercial realm. He is someone for whom kings stood in awe at some of his choruses. But, like the great architects of the age, he was also someone who had that very particular ability to summarise aspirations and conjure a sense of space.

"When you listen to things like Zadok the Priest, or the Exodus Music from Israel in Egypt, to say nothing of the operas, you feel the architecture of where these spaces were, and the appropriateness of them in Handel's interpretation. You feel it too in the Water Music and the Fireworks Music."

All of the aforementioned will be performed in this year's festival. And what of the operas and the dramatic works?

Mills has a firm view on Handel's place in opera history. "Handel is the person, a bit like Verdi a generation later, who brings to a much more tangible reality an interpretation of a character than certain dramatists might have done."

He breathes fire, life, spirit and drama into his characters, in other words.

"His music is capable of really driving the drama and making clear the physical intentions of the drama."

We'll hear Handel's first dramatic work written in England, Acis and Galatea, variously described as a serenata, a masque, a pastorale opera, a "little" opera, an entertainment, and even an oratorio, depending on who you read.

We'll hear Rinaldo, Handel's first opera for London, and the first Italian opera composed specially for the London stage. These will be concert performances, with stellar casts.

And we will see, freshly-minted from its premiere last month, a new production of Admeto, King of Thessaly, created by film maker and producer Doris Dorrie for the International Handel Festival in Gottingen, with its classical Greek world re-imagined as the world of the samurai, featuring Butoh dancing and conducted by one of the great Handelians of the day, the mercurial Nicholas McGegan, artistic director of the Gottingen Festival.

There will also be instrumental and orchestral music, a modest infiltration of the Bach at Greyfriars series by a solo cantata from Handel, John Eliot Gardiner's elite Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in the Usher Hall with Israel in Egypt, and the hardy annuals of the Water and Fireworks Music given the Jordi Savall treatment with Le Concert de Nations - if they play it as they do on CD, then you will never have heard it like this. It goes like the wind.

And then, of course, there is the opening concert, a performance of the oratorio Judas Maccabeus, which has already provoked a rising of hackles in some quarters that its subject, with words written specifically to celebrate the Duke of Cumberland's victory over the Scots in the recent Jacobite uprising, is, to put it mildly, inappropriate as the launch vehicle for Scotland's greatest arts festival. (I'm staying out of this one; I'm a Tynesider and have my own prejudices).

"Handel is a problematic figure for Scotland," says Mills. "Judas Maccabeus is a very political piece with a very political statement. It's also a very adroit statement by a composer who knew where his bread was buttered.

"But it's a statement that works on two levels, and this is where Handel is a genius. He is, of course, making a statement that placates everything his employer would want of him: he praises the Duke of Cumberland: See, the conqu'ring hero comes,' and all that sort of stuff.

"But when you look closely, what's the subject about? It's about Judas. It's about betrayal. It's about someone who'd sell his best friend out for a trifle.

"It's a wonderful allegory. So yes, Handel is the in-house propagandist for the House of Hanover at one level. But he was also an extraordinary humanist who actually took allegories, myths, legends and stories that had accumulated a certain history and told them in compelling, dynamic ways."

But will this placate those who object to Jonathan Mills's decision to launch the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival with such a provocative piece? Don't hold your breath. Scotland is a small country with a long memory. Atavism is just one strand in the Scottish DNA.

All programme details: www.eif.co.uk.