Handel

by Handel- The Man

  4

  Noble Oratories

  The musical London in which Handel arrived in 1710 was far from being the desert that has occasionally been portrayed. True, the death of Purcell in 1695 had deprived English music of a central figure, versatile, prolific and highly regarded by his contemporaries, to whom he seems to have given the kind of co-ordinating inspiration which was only to be renewed by Handel himself. But as the seat of a royal court and noble patrons, a flourishing centre of church music and host to a lively tradition of amateur performance, London could hardly be considered a dull or backward capital. Among the official musicians at court and in the Chapel Royal were several accomplished composers, including William Croft, an ex-chorister of the Chapel and a protégé of Purcell’s mentor John Blow. In 1708, following Blow’s death, Croft had been made Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal and organist of Westminster Abbey, which meant that he had to provide music for all the various state occasions celebrated by the court. Though he lacked melodic inspiration, his anthems and keyboard music show a lucidity and expansiveness of design unrivalled by any of his English contemporaries.

  He clearly took his functions as teacher, composer and performer very seriously, which is more than can be said for the eccentric, though undeniably talented John Eccles, who had been made Master of Music by King William in 1700. He had started as a sympathetic songwriter for the actress Anne Bracegirdle, who appointed him her music director at Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre, and had joined Daniel Purcell, John Weldon (candidate for authorship of ‘Purcell’s’ Tempest music) and Gottfried Finger, who had done so much to promote new instrumental styles among English players, in a competition for setting Congreve’s The Judgment of Paris. Two hundred guineas was divided among the competitors, Weldon being the winner, Eccles runner-up, Daniel Purcell third and Finger a disgruntled fourth, who promptly left England in justifiable chagrin. It was Eccles who provided the earliest setting of Congreve’s Semele, later to be treated more elaborately by Handel. Though it may have been planned as an inaugural spectacle at the opening of the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket, in 1705, the composer did not complete it till two years later and it was never performed.*(g)

  Linked with the world of court and theatre music was the more obviously social pleasure of the various concert clubs. Following the lead given by promoters like John Banister, with his curtained music gallery in a large room opposite the back gate of the Temple, the vogue for convivial meetings at which the players were a mixture of well-known professionals and talented amateurs quickly became an established feature of London life. Many of the concerts took place at taverns, such as the Angel and Crown in Whitechapel, the Devil near Temple Bar and the Castle in Paternoster Row. Such was the enthusiasm that several private individuals threw open their doors for music meetings, including the printer William Caslon, whose houses in Ironmonger Row and Chiswell Street were the venue of the ‘Lunatics’, so called because their concerts took place on the Thursdays nearest the full moon, allowing everyone to walk home in safety. ‘In the intervals of the performance the guests refreshed themselves at a sideboard, which was amply furnished; and when it was over, sitting down to a bottle of wine, and a decanter of excellent ale, of Mr Caslon’s own brewing, they concluded the evening’s entertainment with a song or two of Purcell’s sung to the harpsichord, or a few catches, and about twelve retired.’

  The most remarkable of all these regular meetings were those taking place in the house of Thomas Britton ‘the musical small-coal man’ in Aylesbury Street, off Clerkenwell Green. Encouraged by that Royalist Methuselah Sir Roger L’Estrange, ‘a very musical gentleman, and who had a tolerable perfection on the bass viol’, Britton, who dealt in coal from the ground floor, turned the upper storey into a concert room notoriously long and narrow, and reached by some rickety stairs. In a tiny and highly effervescent artistic community like that of eighteenth-century London, Britton’s meetings, featuring the finest musical hands in the city, attracted a glittering patronage: among others, ‘a lady of the first rank in this kingdom, the Duchess of Queensberry, now living, one of the most celebrated beauties of her time, may yet remember that in the pleasure which she manifested at hearing Mr Britton’s concert, she seemed to have forgotten the difficulty with which she ascended the steps that led to it’. Handel himself is said to have taken part in Britton’s concerts and among the performers were several who became his friends. The poet and critic John Hughes, who had supplied him with English cantata texts, played in the band and so did Henry Needler, civil servant and violinist, instrumental in popularizing Corelli’s concertos in England. The great fiddle virtuoso Matthew Dubourg, who was to lead the orchestra at the first performance of Messiah, made his solo debut in Britton’s concert room, a small boy standing on a joint stool.

  Not far away, within the City itself, music of a different kind was offered. The new cathedral of St Paul’s, still incomplete and the centre of heated controversy between the various parties involved in the rebuilding, boasted a splendid organ, and Handel, attending evensong, used to stay behind to play on it himself. Afterwards he and the choir lay vicars would adjourn to the nearby Queen’s Arms in St Paul’s Churchyard, a tavern which, like so many others in London, maintained a harpsichord for its patrons. ‘It happened one afternoon, when they were thus met together, Mr Weeley, a gentleman of the choir, came in and informed them that Mr Mattheson’s lessons were then to be had at Mr Meares’s shop; upon which Mr Handel ordered them immediately to be sent for, and upon their being brought, played them all over without rising from the instrument’ – a moment of very Handelian impetuosity.

  Richard Brind, the cathedral organist, was a performer of no great distinction, but he had several talented pupils, among them Maurice Greene, who acted as Handel’s bellows blower and introduced him to several of the leading choristers. The alto Richard Elford, originally from Lincoln, was later praised by Croft as ‘fit to be imitated by all that come after him, he being in a peculiar Manner eminent for giving such a due Energy and proper Emphasis to the Words of his Musick, as rendered it serviceable to the great end of its Institution’. His fellow alto Francis Hughes had begun his singing career at Drury Lane in Arsinoe and Camilla before joining the St Paul’s choir. Together with the bass Samuel Weeley, they would take prominent roles in several of Handel’s earliest choral works written to English texts.

  All three choristers took part in the ode Eternal Source of Light Divine, composed for Queen Anne’s forty-eighth birthday on 6 February 1713. Lovers of English Baroque music will be familiar with the great series of odes produced by Henry Purcell for similar occasions in the reigns of earlier Stuart monarchs. The custom, allowed to die only during the latter part of the eighteenth century, produced, amid much that was trivial and sycophantic, some splendidly imaginative solutions to the problem of having annually to reassure the monarch that his or her existence was a thing to be treasured by mortals and by gods. The effect of these pieces is somewhat like the work of contemporary fresco painters such as Thornhill, Verrio and Laguerre, splashy, overblown and surreal in their degrees of flattery.

  Queen Anne’s birthday odes had mostly been supplied by John Eccles, their texts generally provided by the poet laureate Nahum Tate, best known as writer of the excellent libretto for Dido and Aeneas. Before Handel’s the last ode had been provided for 1711: there had been no 1712 ode, perhaps because the Queen was too busy on her birthday welcoming her cousin Eugene of Savoy. No one knows why Handel should have been selected for the unique contribution of 1713. The Queen had all her family’s love of music and, given Handel’s rising popularity among her courtiers, may have wanted something of his for herself. His recommendation might also, like the Silla commission four months later, have had faintly political overtones.

  Tate was not asked for the ode that year. According to Charles Jennens, arranger of Messiah’s text, the author of the seven stanzas, each ending:

  The day that gave great Anna birth,

  Who
fix’d a lasting peace on earth,

  was Ambrose Philips, author of the successful tragedy The Distrest Mother, of a series of pallid neo-Spenserian pastorals and of that truly ineffable line ‘O Property, thou goddess English-born!’. A zealous Whig in the Addison circle, he seems rather an odd candidate for making a triumphant Tory proclamation of the virtues of a peace with France. The style of the piece is exactly what we should expect from a jobbing hack, which in this case Philips was. The birds are called upon to pay ‘their winged homage’, the beasts, in a singular fling of impiety, are made to renounce their natural instincts, Envy conceals her head, blasted faction glides away, and united nations combine to convey to distant climes the news that ‘Anna’s actions are divine’.

  Philips’s allusion to ‘Kind Health’ bringing new life to the Queen is highly topical, since she was severely ill during early February 1713, with a renewed attack of the chronic gout which, culminating in acute erysipelas, carried her off in the summer of the following year. She had to be carried into the Great Presence Chamber at St James’s Palace, where presumably the ode was performed. Those present were determined, whatever Anne’s condition, to mark the royal birthday in style. ‘I never saw it celebrated with so much Luxury and fine Cloaths,’ noted Jonathan Swift, who had made Handel’s acquaintance through his friends Pope and Arbuthnot. Joining Weeley, Elford and Hughes in an exceptional line-up of soloists were the contralto Jane Barbier, an original cast member from Il Pastor Fido and Teseo, and Anastasia Robinson, a soprano who would later join Handel’s operatic company in the Haymarket.

  Philips had perhaps imagined, in writing the ode, that Handel would set the two-line refrain of each stanza to the same music throughout. In fact, the skill with which the composer varies his treatment of it at each appearance is one of the noteworthy features of this engaging piece. The sensitivity with which he handled such banal material looks forward to the extraordinary transformations wrought on some of the less promising oratorio texts of the 1740s. His essentially pictorial imagination fixes on the simplest of images, enriching it with what, for a bare twenty-five minutes of music, is an astonishing array of textures. The piece’s organic quality is enhanced by the scoring. It seems a perfectly logical progression from the translucent opening largo, a dialogue between alto and trumpet solos, to the joyous closing antiphonies, in which the trumpet, held back since the first number, returns, and whose double choir effect and reprise of the earlier chorus recall the Venetian cori spezzati and the Sicut erat in principio trick, surely reflexes from the Italian years. Much has been made of a Purcellian influence in the ode, but this is never particularly striking. A glance at Purcell and at other English court composers perhaps affected the external structure, in Handel’s use of interlocked solo and chorus, and of dance rhythms such as passacaglia, siciliano and minuet. There are more especially Purcellian touches in his next music for English words, written before the ode but performed after it.

  Handel composed the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate during January 1713. This and the ode must have been part of a package, both in their different ways intended to celebrate a peace that was almost inevitable, owing largely to the political manoeuvres of the Queen’s ministers, Oxford and St John, to the successful propaganda of works such as Swift’s Conduct of the Allies and to the notably faineant character of English military commitment in Europe following Marlborough’s dismissal. To suggest that Handel was in some way party to secret political developments is an exaggeration. It was common knowledge that peace negotiations were pending: the Queen’s Speech of 1711 had contained a controversial reference to ‘the opening of the Treaty of a general peace’ and though the Whigs had initially combined to carry a motion rejecting the proposals, the government finally won through and the Utrecht conference began on 18 January 1712.

  On Handel’s part, how would such a public gesture of commitment to the treaty, or to what it represented in terms of current alignments within English national politics, be received by the Elector of Hanover? Officially Georg Ludwig was opposed to the peace: his remonstrance against British perfidy in abandoning a recent agreement to bolster the Netherlands against attacks from France had been made public in 1711. Privately, however, he must have been aware of the advantage to him of a settlement which effectively quashed the threat of a Jacobite invasion of England, supported by French arms, once Anne was dead. Handel was evidently prepared to risk his master’s displeasure, as a letter from Christoph Friedrich Kreienberg, Hanoverian Resident in London, makes clear. The arrangement appears to have been that though the composer’s dismissal as kapellmeister was inevitable, Georg Ludwig would not necessarily be unhappy if he then offered his services to Queen Anne (Kreienberg says that ‘this was precisely the generous intention of His Highness’). Notice to quit was nevertheless administered a shade too peremptorily for Handel’s liking. A pity, according to Kreienberg, since, as a friend of the Queen’s doctor John Arbuthnot,*(h) who ‘has the composer constantly at his house’, Handel ‘could have been extremely useful, as he has been on several occasions by giving me information of circumstances which have often enlightened me as to the condition of the Queen’s health’. In return, Handel could pass on to Arbuthnot ‘stories about Hanover . . .you will understand the stories to which I refer’, subsequently relayed to Anne herself, who was apparently agog for them. Kreienberg ends with the significant detail that he had ‘arranged things so that Handel could write to M. de Kielmansegg to extricate himself gracefully, and I let slip a few words to inform him that, when some day His Highness comes here, he might enter his service’.

  The two canticles were given in St Paul’s at the thanksgiving service on 5 July. Three public rehearsals, the earliest of them in March, had been trailed by the London papers, whose reporters afterwards noticed the presence of ‘many Persons of Quality of both Sexes’. Efficient Tory news management gave the peace celebrations the highest possible profile, but the Queen, who had announced the news of the treaty’s signing to Parliament on 7 April, did not attend. ‘I find myself soe much tyerd with the little fatigue of yesterday’, she wrote to Oxford, ‘that it will be impossible for one to undertake that of going to St Paul’s; but however I think both Houses should go thither and I will perform my devotions at St James’s and be contented without a sermon. It is really very uneasy for me that I cannot go, which I hope all my friends believe.’ Whigs meanwhile stayed away in droves, ‘since it would have been preposterous, if not a mocking of Religion, for Men to return Almighty God Thanks for a Peace, which they had endeavoured to prevent, and still disapproved’.

  Among them was the former Lord Chancellor, William Lord Cowper, whose mother Sarah sneeringly referred in her diary to ‘the Church Opera . . .finish’d at the Cathedral of St Paul’. What she and Queen Anne did not hear was once again music of tremendous authority and distinction, which must have given substantial pause to the composers present at the occasion. Handel resorted to the comparatively rare expedient in contemporary English church music of introducing oboes and a flute into the score, and saving the trumpets and timpani in the Te Deum, despite festal associations, for a spectacular appearance some three-quarters of the way into the piece. Much more important than these factors, in view of his later development, is his free handling of the chorus. The temptation in both pieces must have been to divide the verses into distinct solo and choral episodes, but in the Te Deum Handel avoids this in favour of a far more complex fusion of the two, seen at its best in the cumulative treatment of the several lines in the ‘Glorious company of the apostles’ section, where the chorus represents ‘the holy church throughout all the world’ and in the highly dramatic ‘When thou took’st upon thee’, in which the solo lines jarring and bumping against each other for ‘the sharpness of death’ are overwhelmed by the choral ‘Thou didst open the kingdom of Heaven to all believers’. This sense of the choir as an involved participant, anticipating the uses Handel made of it in his mature oratorios, is clinched by the ending of the Jubilate
. After a vividly Purcellian opening, with solo and chorus accompanied by trumpets and drums, the music grows more inward and subdued, the intimate dialogue of its duet and trio numbers matched by learned counterpoint and some thoughtful word-painting in the chromatic staircase of ‘his truth endureth from generation to generation’. None of this prepares us for the opulence of the final Gloria and Amen, the resourceful calibration of their dramatic climaxes surely owing something to Handel’s careful assessment of acoustic possibilities – and limitations – within the new St Paul’s.

  The commissions for both the ode and the two canticles were perhaps obtained through the good offices of somebody in the Burlington circle, possibly the Dowager Countess herself, as one of the bedchamber women who had managed to weather the storms occasioned by the Queen’s transfer of favour from the Marlboroughs to the Mashams. Anne’s granting of a £200 pension to Handel, though a royal breach of the law (foreigners were not permitted to receive such emoluments) was probably not, as has been suggested, a snook cocked at the Elector so much as an oblique compliment to the man on whom the Queen had already, in her mind at any rate, settled the succession.

  At a quarter to eight in the morning of Sunday, 1 August 1714 Anne died, at the age of forty-nine. In the last stages of her long illness (of which Arbuthnot wrote to Swift ‘I believe sleep was never more welcome to a weary traveller than death was to her’) she had handed the white staff of Lord Treasurer to the Duke of Shrewsbury, a symbolic rebuff to Jacobite hopes. The kingdom was put in readiness to welcome the Elector: the ports were closed, regiments were moved to London and a watch was set on suspected persons, while the horses and arms of Papists throughout the nation were commandeered, a naval squadron was sent to Holland to escort King George I of England, Scotland and Ireland to his new realm, and James Craggs, shortly to be made secretary of state, was despatched to Hanover with news of the great change. In London preparations were afoot to receive not just the monarch himself, but his son Georg August and daughter-in-law Caroline of Brandenburg Ansbach, together with their children.