Handel

by Handel- The Man

  There were always enemies to bring him down. Ever since his Haymarket ascendancy in the 1720s he had known opposition, and his famously short temper and peremptory manner with singers and instrumentalists cannot have endeared him to those who preferred wheedling and flattery to an insistence on solid musical standards. Unfortunately, despite the various examples of his having given offence during his London career, we know practically nothing of the actual nature of the quarrel. Who, for example, were the writer and the objects of the unsigned letter to Catherine Collingwood, dated 27 December 1734, among the Throckmorton papers, which says, ‘I don’t pity Handell in the least, for I hope this mortification will make him a human creature; for I am sure before he was no better than a brute, when he could treat civilized people with so much brutality as I know he has done’? And what was the mysterious ‘single Disgust . . . a faux Pas made, but not meant’, referred to by ‘J.B.’ in the London Daily Post for 4 April 1741? This extended defence of Handel constitutes a magnificent appeal to our sense of national honour in according better treatment to the great man in our midst. ‘If we are not careful for him,’ says J.B., ‘let us be for our own long-possessed Credit and Character in the polite World . . . if even such a Pride has offended, let us take it as the natural Foible of the great Genius, and let us overlook them like Spots upon the Sun . . . ’ Those who had taken umbrage apparently sought to sabotage his concert nights even by ripping his advertisements off the walls. The letter closes with a heartfelt plea to Londoners not to turn their backs on him and voices the fear that he was preparing to leave England for good.

  No one seemed to know exactly what he planned to do. Lord Egmont, who went to Allegro e Penseroso on the last night of the season, thought he was ‘intending to go to Spa in Germany’, but in July Dr Dampier, bear-leader to milords on the Continent and an acquaintance of Handel’s, wrote to friends in Geneva, not long after returning to England, indicating that the composer was still in London. In the summer Handel had taken up writing Italian duets, as in Hanover days, though it is not clear whether these were merely musical exercises or written for some specific singers and occasions. But Dampier’s letter also implies that he had refused offers of participation in Lord Middlesex’s new opera venture, set on foot at the King’s Theatre during the autumn and clearly, to Handel’s practised eye, destined to the kind of expensive disaster recipe familiar from the 1730s: ‘the men of penetration give hints that his Lordship’s sole aim is to make his mistress, the Muscovita, appear to great advantage on the stage.’ Horace Walpole was an interested party, through his amorous penchant for Henry Seymour Conway, one of the directors, and wrote anxiously to Sir Horace Mann about ‘the improbability of eight young thoughtless men of fashion understanding economy’. Handel went to the opening night on 31 October, a pasticcio Alessandro in Persia, arranged from the latest Italian successes by Hasse, Pescetti, Lampugnani and others which, as he afterwards told Jennens, ‘made me very merry all along my journey’. A few days later he set off for Ireland.

  His invitation to Dublin came from William, third Duke of Devonshire, who had succeeded Lord Middlesex’s father, the Duke of Dorset, as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in 1737. Horace Walpole described him and his son the Marquis of Hartington as ‘the fashionable models of goodness, though if it were necessary for the good man to be perfect like the Stoic’s wise man, their want of sense and generosity would have rendered their titles disputable . . . The Duke’s outside was unpolished, his inside unpolishable. He loved gaming, drinking, and the ugliest woman in England, his Duchess . . .’ Seeing him taking office under Sir Robert Walpole in 1731, Lord Egmont was reminded of Caligula’s horse being made a consul. But his viceroyalty, continuing Dorset’s benign and sensitive administration of the kingdom, showed him to be far from coarse or stupid. One historian called him ‘the most magnificent of the viceroys of this kingdom since the time of the great Ormond; for he expended his private revenue not only in a splendid stile of living, but also in works of public utility’. The request made to Handel, whom he may have met at Aachen or Tunbridge as a fellow spa-fancier, touched on both aspects. It was a feather in Dublin’s cap to acquire one of the leading masters of the age and it was a distinct asset to the wealth of charitable enterprises which characterized the life of the city.

  Handel’s route to the coast took him through Cheshire, where he may have visited his friend Charles Legh, at Adlington, whose splendid timber-framed mansion between Wilmslow and Prestbury still contains the organ in the gallery on which the composer is said to have played. Legh, an ardent Handelian, later published a hunting song, ‘The morning is charming,’ in the Gentleman’s Magazine, which included the lines:

  See, see where she goes, and the hounds have a view,

  Such harmony Handel himself never knew

  originally set by Ridley, the Prestbury parish organist. Handel presented his own setting to Legh in 1751 and it was subsequently incorporated in Stanley’s dramatic pastoral Arcadia. Did Handel recall that other occasion, forty years before at Rome, when he had put his own name to music in the ‘old fool’ Cardinal Pamphilj’s cantata?

  It was customary to board the Irish packet boats at Parkgate on the Dee, then still navigable though silting up apace. A new quay allowed ships of up to 350 tons to anchor alongside and the place was developing as a fashionable seaside resort. Dr and Mrs Delany, taking ship in 1754, found it so crowded that they only just managed to get the last bed, but they, like everyone else, had to await a favourable wind. So, of course, did Handel, who now found himself delayed for several days and spent them profitably at Chester, where he stayed at the Falcon in Northgate Street. Someone who saw him for the first time here was the young Charles Burney. ‘I was at the Public-school,’ he later recalled, ‘. . . and very well remember seeing him smoke a pipe, over a dish of coffee, at the Exchange-Coffee-house; for being extremely curious to see so extraordinary a man, I watched him narrowly as long as he remained in Chester . . .’ Burney’s music master Edmund Baker, the cathedral organist, rustled up a scratch choir to try out some of Handel’s new choruses for him, but one of them, a printer named Janson, proved sadly inadequate to the task. ‘Handel let loose his great bear upon him; and after swearing in four or five languages, cried out in broken English: “You shcauntrel! Tit you not dell me dat you could sing at sight?” “Yes, sir,” says the printer, “and so I can, but not at first sight.”’

  The Parkgate-to-Dublin crossing, taking fourteen hours with a fair wind, was notoriously perilous and the four weekly packets were manned by an exiguous crew of a master, three sailors and a boy. Handel reached Ireland safely, however, on 18 November 1741, the event being duly chronicled in the Dublin Journal. The paper pointed out that he was ‘known . . . particularly for his Te Deum, Jubilate, Anthems, and other Compositions in Church Musick of which for some years past have principally consisted the Entertainments in the Round Church’. This was St Andrew’s, scene of the annual concerts in aid of Mercer’s Hospital, who announced in the same issue that divine service would be performed at the church on 10 December, with Handel’s music and a sermon by Dr Delany. Minutes of a meeting by the hospital governors on the same day noted that ‘Mr Putland, Dean Owen, & Docr Wynne be & are hereby desir’d to wait on Mr Handel & ask the favour of him to play on the Organ at the Musical Performance . . .’

  There were several charitable societies in the city, and their concerts formed part of a lively and sophisticated musical scene, supported by an aristocracy many of whom were enthusiastic amateur performers. Master of the State Music in Ireland until 1727 had been Johann Sigismund Kusser, whom Handel had known both in Hamburg and in London, and he was followed by the violinist Matthew Dubourg. It was Dubourg’s job to provide the royal birthday ode for the Lord-Lieutenant at the Castle, but he was generally better known as a soloist than a composer. Once he visited an Irish country fair at Dunboyne, disguised as a wandering fiddler, but all his attempts at rough playing could not conceal his sweetness of tone ‘and
the audience crowded so about him, that he was glad to make his escape’. Francesco Geminiani too, though ultimately passed over as Kusser’s successor on the grounds that he was a Catholic, visited Dublin in 1737 and later returned to spend the last years of his life there.

  From his lodgings in Abbey Street Handel now took subscriptions for six concerts to be given ‘in the New Musick-Hall in Fishamble street’ first opened two months earlier. Allegro e Penseroso was given with three concertos on 23 December, and the Dublin Journal reported ‘a more numerous and polite Audience than ever was seen upon the like Occasion. The Performance was superior to any Thing of the Kind in this Kingdom before; and our Nobility and Gentry to show their Taste for all Kinds of Genius, expressed their great Satisfaction, and have already given all imaginable Encouragement to this grand Musick.’

  The season had begun auspiciously, and Handel was able to write exultantly to Jennens that the subscription scheme was a triumph ‘so that I needed not sell one single Ticket at the Door . . . the Musick sound delightfully in this charming Room, which puts me in such Spirits (and my Health being so good) that I exert my self on my Organ with more than usual Success . . . I cannot sufficiently express the kind treatment I receive here, but the Politeness of this generous Nation cannot be unknown to You, so I let You judge of the satisfaction I enjoy, passing my time with Honour, profit, and pleasure.’ The Duke of Devonshire attended all the performances with his family and was prepared to ask the King to extend the royal permission apparently necessary for Handel’s stay in Ireland so that more concerts could be given.

  No sooner was the first series, including Acis and Galatea, the Cecilia Ode and Esther, finished than ‘the Desire of several Persons of Quality and Distinction’ thus brought about a second. Patrons had been asked to bring their coaches and sedan chairs down the street to avoid crowding and were assured that ‘as there is a good convenient Room hired as an addition to a former Place for the Footmen it is hoped that Ladies will order them to attend there till called for’. Advertisements for the printed wordbooks were tagged with ‘Price a British Six-pence’, reflecting the ever-sensitive issue of the Irish coinage.

  Alexander’s Feast and Imeneo, presented in concert performance as ‘a new Serenata called HYMEN’, were offered in March and everything seemed to run smoothly, though a solitary fly in the ointment had presented itself early in the new year of 1742 in the form of an extraordinary injunction from the dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dr Jonathan Swift, to his sub-dean and chapter. The great satirist was now verging upon insanity and in the first version of his order (later much toned down) we can sense the famous saeva indignatio beginning almost to overpower his reason. ‘And whereas it hath been reported’, he thunders, ‘that I gave a licence to certain vicars to assist at a club of fiddlers in Fishamble Street, I do hereby declare that I remember no such licence to have been ever signed or sealed by me . . . intreating my said Sub-Dean and Chapter to punish such vicars as shall ever appear there, as songsters, fiddlers, pipers, trumpeters, drummers, drum-majors, or in any sonal quality, according to the flagitious aggravations of their respective disobedience, rebellion, perfidy and ingratitude . . .’ He had, in fact, granted his licence the day before, and the matter was further complicated by the fact that certain of the St Patrick’s vicars choral also sang at the rival establishment of Christ Church, whose dean, Charles Cobbe, had made no objection.

  All was smoothed over, however, by 27 March, when the Dublin Journal featured what must be one of the most famous of all musical advertisements. ‘For Relief of the Prisoners in the several Gaols, and for the Support of Mercer’s Hospital in Stephen’s Street, and of the Charitable Infirmary on the Inns Quay, on Monday the 12th of April, will be performed at the Musick Hall in Fishamble Street, Mr Handel’s new Grand Oratorio called the MESSIAH, in which the Gentlemen of the Choirs of both Cathedrals will assist, with some Concertoes on the Organ, by Mr Handell.’ Tickets cost half a guinea each, with the bonus of a free rehearsal ticket. The paper reported the rehearsal on the 9th, ‘to a most Grand, Polite and crouded Audience’ and noted a request for ladies to come to the first night ‘without Hoops, as it will greatly encrease the Charity, by making Room for more company’. Gentlemen were subsequently asked to appear without swords.

  The first night of Handel’s Messiah took place on Tuesday, 13 April 1742 and it need hardly be said that the work was an unqualified success. The newspapers rose to superior heights of Hibernian eloquence: ‘Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crouded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestick and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.’ With his usual generosity Handel allotted his share of the proceeds (£400 from an audience of about 700) to be divided equally between the society ‘for the benefit and enlargement of poor distressed prisoners for debt in the several Marshalseas of the City of Dublin’, the Charitable Infirmary and Mercer’s Hospital, and all the other performers followed suit.

  The singers at the first Messiah included Christina Maria Avolio and Mrs Maclaine, wife of an organist assistant, all of whom the composer had brought with him to Dublin, and a group of male soloists from the two cathedral choirs. Perhaps the most interesting member of the line-up was the contralto Susanna Maria Cibber, sister of Thomas Arne and shortly to embark on a career as one of the greatest tragic actresses on the London stage. For her the visit to Ireland was a sort of artistic convalescence from a grotesque adultery case in which her husband, Theophilus Cibber, attempted to sue the man with whom he had hitherto complaisantly tolerated her affair. Her engagement with James Quin to act in Dublin in the same season as Handel’s concerts must have created an atmosphere akin to that of a modern civic festival, later enhanced by the arrival of Arne himself and his wife, and of the young David Garrick, whose performance of Hamlet at the Smock Alley theatre Handel is said to have witnessed.

  Susanna was now twenty-eight and Handel was fifty-seven. His great personal fondness for her was no doubt paternal rather than romantic, but its practical effects are shown in the way he carefully shaped certain roles to suit her gifts as a musical actress. Burney tells us that ‘her voice was a thread, and her knowledge of Music very inconsiderable; yet, by a natural pathos, and perfect conception of the words, she often penetrated the heart, when others, with infinitely greater voice and skill, could only reach the ear’. Thomas Sheridan, the Irish actor-manager, wrote: ‘. . . it was not to any extraordinary powers of voice (whereof she has but a very moderate share) nor to a greater degree of skill in musick (wherein many of the Italians must be allowed to exceed her) that she owed her excellencies, but to expression only; her acknowledged superiority in which could proceed from nothing but skill in her profession.’ No wonder that at a Messiah performance Dr Delany was so moved by her singing of ‘He was despised’ that he rose from his seat among the audience crying, ‘Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee!’

  The Dublin choir probably featured sixteen men and as many boys (no women) and the orchestra, led by Matthew Dubourg, consisted of a string band reinforced at certain points by oboes and bassoons, and additional parts for trumpets and drums. Apart from the leader, the players’ names are unknown to us, but Handel himself was of course at the keyboard to direct the performance. He was presumably the soloist in the organ concertos included in the second Messiah evening on 3 June, when ‘in order to keep the Room as cool as possible, a Pane of Glass will be removed from the Top of each of the Windows – N.B. This will be the last Performance of Mr Handel’s during his Stay in this Kingdom.’

  Handel had written Messiah in less than a month, starting work on 22 August 1741, completing the outline score on 12 September and rounding off the achievement two days later. The text was prepared for him by Charles Jennens, who wrote that July to Edward Holdsworth: ‘Handel says he will do nothing next Winter, but I hope I shall perswade him to set another Scripture Collection I have made for
him, & perform it for his own Benefit in Passion week. I hope he will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah . . .’ The necessary persuasion may have taken place during a stay in the country: at Snitterton near the Derbyshire spa of Matlock, tradition has always maintained that Handel began work on Messiah at the manor house, then belonging to Jennens. However impatient the latter may sometimes have appeared in his dealings with the composer, he was a discerning librettist and one of the reasons for the oratorio’s universal appeal is his skill and artistry in the selection and arrangement of the scriptural texts. More than simply a set of pious extracts taken from a wide variety of Old and New Testament sources, they are here and there discreetly rewritten by Jennens (‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’, for example, is a conflation of words from the book of Job and St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians) and laid out in such a way as to form continuous sequences grouped around three central themes, illustrated by the quotations prefixed to the complete text. Part I deals with the prophecy of Christ’s coming and the nativity, Part 2 with Jesus’s sacrifice for mankind and Part 3 with the Christian soul’s victory over death.

  This scheme, with its careful balance of openings and conclusions, and the interlocking subjects of its airs and choruses, gave Handel the perfect basis on which to construct a work whose powerful architecture gives its utterances indestructible authority. The manuscript is, as ever, vividly evocative of the actual processes of composition, blots, thumb-marks, scratchings, second thoughts and all, but though three and a half weeks is a rapid enough gestation period, it is unremarkable by Handelian standards – Solomon, even grander in scale, took twenty days and the first draft of Theodora was finished in nineteen – and anecdotes of the elderly master refusing food, weeping into the semiquavers and having angelic hallucinations are mostly pious moonshine. Ferocious concentration and excitement there undoubtedly were, however, side by side with an unshakeable faith and an evident concept of the work in its entirety, illustrated for us by the tonal unities governing the piece.