Handel

by Handel- The Man

  To support such a vast, unsupportable charge!

  Retrench, or ere long you may set your own dirge.

  As if these testimonies were not enough, his erstwhile friend the scene painter Joseph Goupy published a caricature of him, entitled The Charming Brute in which a monkey and a racehorse listen to a pig playing the organ (decorated with hams and dead fowl) among a litter of musical instruments and oyster barrels. The cause of Goupy’s attack, for which Handel expunged the artist’s name from his will, was a dinner in Brook Street at which the composer had apologized for the frugal fare, promising Goupy that he would treat him with a better meal when he had more money to hand. After dinner Handel excused himself from the table and was so long away that Goupy, bored with waiting, wandered into the next room, from which a window giving on to the adjacent parlour showed him Handel guzzling off ‘claret and French dishes’.

  The style of living at Brook Street was plain but not mean. Judging by the details of the inventory made at his death, the furniture had got a trifle shabby, and his ‘family’ of servants seems only to have consisted of two men, an uncle and nephew, whose names, Peter Le Blond and John Duburk, suggest that they were probably of Huguenot origin. Hawkins praises him for not having kept a carriage – he used to hire ‘a chariot and horses’ when he went into the city to see his broker Gael Morris at Garraway’s or Batson’s coffee house, or to bank his takings – but how many London musicians, we may wonder, had their own equipages?

  His stormy temper remained a force to be reckoned with. Burney recalls that ‘at the close of an air, the voice with which he used to cry out, “Chorus!” was very formidable indeed; and at the rehearsals of his Oratorios, at Carlton House, if the Prince and Princess of Wales were not exact in coming to the Music-room he used to be very violent . . . if the maids of honour, or any other female attendant talked during the performance, I fear that our modern Timotheus not only swore, but called names; yet at such times, the Princess of Wales, with her accustomed mildness and benignity, used to say, “Hush! hush! Handel is in a passion.”’

  They relished his wit as much as his passion. Once, auditioning an ambitious chorister, he asked him, ‘This is the way you praise God at Worcester?’ ‘Yes,’ replied the unsuspecting victim. ‘God is very good,’ the answer came back, ‘and will no doubt hear your praises at Worcester, but no man will hear them at London.’ In Dublin no less a master than his friend Matthew Dubourg was teased, as Burney tells us: ‘having a solo part in a song, and a close to make, ad libitum, he wandered about in different keys a great while, and seemed indeed a little bewildered, and uncertain of his original key . . . but, at length, coming to the shake, which was to terminate this long close, Handel, to the great delight of the audience, and augmentation of applause, cried out loud enough to be heard in the most remote parts of the theatre: “You are welcome home, Mr Dubourg!”’

  ‘Social affections’ had brought him friends among the nobility as well as ‘within the pale of his own profession’, and his summers seem by now to have established a fairly regular pattern in alternating visits to the country estates of his aristocratic acquaintance with trips to the watering places in search of elusive cures for his recurrent rheumatic ailments. In Kent he could journey over from Tunbridge to stay with Sir Wyndham Knatchbull, in Dorset he might be the guest of Lord Shaftesbury at St Giles before going on to Salisbury to call on James Harris, and in the north Midlands he was a welcome visitor at Calwich Abbey, Staffordshire, home of Mrs Delany’s brother Bernard Granville, where he is said to have worked on his oratorios in the rococo ‘fishing temple’ on an island in the lake. In the same county was Teddesley Hall, where, according to uncorroborated tradition, he used to play in the amateur concerts of its squire Fisher Littleton. Further afield he spent time with Jennens at the newly rebuilt Gopsal, and at Exton in Rutland we catch a glimpse of him during June 1745, on his way to Scarborough.

  Exton belonged to Lord Gainsborough, whose sister was Shaftesbury’s wife and whose brother James Noel wrote describing a performance of Comus got up to celebrate a family anniversary while Handel was a house guest. The Noels opted for Milton’s original masque, with one or two modifications, rather than the recent theatrical version by Arne and Dalton; their favourite composer’s presence was a stroke of great good luck. ‘As Handel came to this place for Quiet and Retirement we were very loath to lay any task of Composition upon him. Selfishness however prevailed; but we were determined at the same time to be very moderate in our requests. His readiness to oblidge soon took off all our apprehensions upon that account. A hint of what we wanted was sufficient, and what should have been an act of Compliance he made a voluntary Deed.’

  Their reluctance to put upon Handel says much, both for the intelligent kindliness of the Noels towards someone they might otherwise have been disposed to patronize as a mere musician, and for the esteem in which he was now held. Comus was put together by the enthusiastic summer house party in the space of five days, but rain forced them to perform indoors, though ‘we contrived however to entertain the Company there afterwards with an imitation of Vaux Hall: and in the style of a newspaper, the whole concluded with what variety of fireworks we could possibly get’. It must all have been tremendous fun, and Handel’s three agreeably lightweight pieces, only discovered in 1969, conjure up an appropriate atmosphere of festive conviviality.

  Scarborough, becoming fashionable as a bathing resort, was also noted for its spa waters, particularly effective in cases of chronic constipation. Neither the sea nor the springs, however, did much for Handel’s health. James Harris’s brother William, meeting him in the street soon after his return to London in August, noted his anxiety in this respect, and two months later Jennens told Holdsworth that he thought Handel was going mad, an opinion shared by some of his rural hosts. By the end of October Shaftesbury was writing to Harris that ‘poor Handel looks something better. I hope he will entirely recover in due time, though he has been a good deal disordered in his head.’

  Disorders of a more general kind had come upon England with the hoisting, in July 1745, of a rebel standard at Moidart in the Highlands of Scotland by Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender. Initial panic gave way to a suspended apprehensiveness mingled with bulldog pugnacity. Despite the Pretender’s advance (through the largely Catholic preserves of the north-west) as far as Derby, nobody in the south seems seriously to have considered the likelihood of a wholesale Stuart restoration. Hogarth painted the guards marching to Finchley and Handel wrote ‘A Chorus Song . . . for the Gentlemen Volunteers of the CITY OF LONDON’, ‘Stand round, my brave boys’ to words by John Lockman, first sung at Drury Lane on 14 November after a performance of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse and repeated the next night ‘by particular desire’. A bellicose patriotism, of a sort the nation had not properly known since the days of Purcell’s ‘Britons, strike home’ and the wars of King William and the Duke of Marlborough, was the mood of the hour, and London’s musicians were quick to sense it. The spirit of Jenkins’s Ear and Dettingen, the realization that England’s future lay in the prosaic expediencies of Hanover rather than in a dubious popish nostalgia for exiled Stuarts, had already begun to be heard in works such as Arne’s Alfred, culminating serenely with the robust yet always elegant ‘Rule, Britannia’, and in the gradual appearance, at theatres and concerts during the early 1740s, of the tune that eventually became the National Anthem. A letter published in Common Sense during 1738 had suggested that ‘the learned Doctor Greene’ compose a nationally inspiring tune, adding that ‘it is not from the least Distrust of Mr Handel’s ability that I address myself preferably to Doctor Greene; but Mr Handel having the Advantage to be by Birth a German, might probably, even without intending it, mix some Modulations in his Composition, which might give a German tendency to the Mind, and therefore greatly lessen the National Benefit’.

  It has been suggested that Greene really was the creator of ‘God save the king’ and that ‘Stand round, my brave boys’ was Handel’
s rival riposte to it. Someone else who showed that a foreigner could seize the moment was the composer of La Caduta dei Giganti, the opera chosen to open the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket on 7 January 1746 (it had earlier been closed ‘on account of the rebellion and popular prejudice against the performers, who being foreigners, were chiefly Roman Catholics’). Christoph Willibald von Gluck had newly arrived in London in the suite of the Austrian nobleman Prince Lobkowitz, scion of a family well known in Viennese musical annals. La Caduta was the first of two operas he gave at the Haymarket and was intended as a direct compliment to William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, now in command in Scotland.

  Gluck stayed in London until the spring of the next year, and though Handel was unimpressed by La Caduta dei Giganti (he told Mrs Cibber that Gluck knew no more about counterpoint than his cook) the two performed together at a benefit concert for the Decayed Musicians at the King’s Theatre and became acquainted. Handel advised the young master not to take so much trouble over operas for the English. ‘Here in England’, he said, ‘that is mere waste of time. What the English like is something they can beat time to, something that hits them straight on the drum of the ear.’ Burney rightly detected a Handelian influence on the style of Gluck’s later operas and the tenor Michael Kelly recorded a tribute which, allowing for a little Hibernian embroidery, reflects an obvious debt: Gluck showed him Handel’s portrait, saying: ‘There, Sir, is the portrait of the inspired master of our art; when I open my eyes in the morning, I look upon him with reverential awe, and acknowledge him as such . . .’ Handel need not have worried about the approach of a potential rival; neither of Gluck’s two London operas (the second, Artamene, was given on 4 March) made much of an impression on audiences or musicians.

  Handel himself had prepared a topical confection to suit the mood of the times, in a new piece to be given at Covent Garden, the theatre that now became his permanent London auditorium. There was no attempt at an oratorio season during the winter and spring of 1745–6, presumably because of the national emergency, but it was precisely these special circumstances which called The Occasional Oratorio into being. The disappointed subscribers from last season could take up their unused tickets for these performances (on 14, 19 and 26 February) – an honourable concession of Handel’s, amply compensating for the sharp practice over Deborah ten years before, supposing anyone remembered that.

  A friend of Thomas Harris’s wife wrote to her after attending a rehearsal, noting diplomatically that the oratorio was ‘extremely worthy of him, which you will allow to be saying all one can in praise of it. He has but three voices for his songs – Francesina, Reinholt and Beard; his band of music is not very extraordinary – Du Feche [Willem De Fesch] is his first fiddle, and for the rest I really could not find out who they were, and I doubt his failure will be in this article. The words of his Oratorio are scriptural, but taken from various parts, and are expressive of the rebels’ flight and our pursuit of them. Had not the Duke carried his point triumphantly, this Oratorio could not have been brought on.’

  A calculated risk, therefore, based on hopes of a speedy victory for the Hanoverian forces led by Cumberland and Wade. The Occasional Oratorio was put together in something of a hurry, with a text based on Milton’s psalm paraphrases and passages from Spenser by Newburgh Hamilton, and music relying heavily on borrowings from Handel’s earlier works and such former quarries as Stradella’s sere-nata Qual prodigio and Telemann’s Musique de Table. Part III of the piece was originally introduced by the opening movement of the first of the Grand Concertos and contained three choruses and an aria from Israel in Egypt. Handel could have flung anything into the brew, ‘Son confusa pastorella’, ‘The flocks shall leave the mountains’, ‘Honour and arms’, without it really making very much difference to the overall quality and nature of the work.

  In recent years the undervaluing of Deborah has been commensurate with overestimations of The Occasional Oratorio. The sum total of the piece, a tissue of ripe Handelian cliché, adds scant lustre to the composer’s name. Jehovah, invoked by Hamilton and Handel, turns into a mitred pluralist in lawn sleeves being plied for patronage over the port by a brace of sycophantic prebendaries. A great deal of trumpeting (ten numbers – the heaviest use of the instrument in any Handel work) creates a certain sameness of mood, limiting harmonic interest in several of the choruses, though Handel pulls himself sufficiently together in the bass air ‘To God our strength sing loud and clear’ leading to the chorus ‘Prepare the hymn, prepare the song’ to produce a single movement of brilliant colour and suppleness, in which solo trumpet and oboe converse over arpeggiando string accompaniment during the aria, whose sprightly middle section ushers in the choral entries. Otherwise triteness and prolixity, in the featureless attitudinizing of ‘Jehovah is my shield, my glory’ or the note-spinning passage work of ‘Prophetic visions’, all too easily invade the oratorio.

  A redeeming moment or two occur. This is, after all, Handel and nobody worse. The best number in the whole work is the soprano’s glittering ‘When warlike ensigns wave on high’ from Part III, a happy reminiscence, in its first section, of the mood of ‘Let the bright seraphim’, and containing what is perhaps the longest and most carefully worked second part (there is no da capo indication) in any of the composer’s airs. The structure in this unusually interesting piece is thus wholly episodic. A G major evocation of battle (mercifully, in this context, without real trumpets) is followed by nine bars of modulation through E minor and B minor as the words describe ‘the frighted peasant’ who ‘sees his field for corn an iron harvest yield’, to a delightfully witty ebullition of country dance by the strings, subsequently woven above one of those bagpipe drones Handel could never resist. Echoes of these last ideas (the main melody, used again in Theodora, is borrowed from Musique de Table but made almost unrecognizable by what Handel does with it) are developed in the final section, where by breaking them up against the words ‘Be calm and Heaven will soon dispose to future good our present woes’ and leaving the vocal line resting on mere fragments of the original bass, he is able to suggest the clangour of war dying away, only to resume everything in the air within the eighteen-bar orchestral ritornello that concludes it.

  In purely formal terms ‘When warlike ensigns’ is one of the most absorbing proofs of Handel’s mastery of design, just as The Occasional Oratorio offers some of the most blatant evidence of his faith in expediency and rapid results when he felt the occasion called for them. The oratorio was not, as it turned out, more than a mere succès d’estime, though the splendid march in the overture became a deserved favourite. Cumberland, in the wake, as it were, of London’s musical and theatrical plaudits, trounced the contumacious Highlanders at Culloden on 16 April, and in July another of Handel and Lockman’s patriotic ballads, ‘A Song on the Victory over the Rebels . . . Sung by Mr Lowe in Vauxhall Gardens’, appeared, beginning

  From Scourging Rebellion, and baffling proud France;

  Crown’d with Lawrels, behold British WILLIAM advance

  and urging us

  Commanded by WILLIAM, strike next at the Gaul,

  And fix those in Chains who would Britons enthrall,

  set to a tune recalling ‘Volate amori’ in Act I of Ariodante.

  Lady Brown and her satellites had also been routed, and Handel had little to fear from the Haymarket operas, now carried on via a subscription scheme undertaken by Lord Middlesex and his noble syndicate. Shaftesbury told James Harris, on 20 January 1747, that ‘Mr Handel called on me tother day. He is now in perfect health and I really think grown young again. There is a most absurd and ridiculous opera going forward at present and as it is not likely to meet with success he is delighted.’ This was Fetonte by Domenico Paradies, better known as a keyboard master, on which Burney drily comments: ‘Unluckily, neither the composition, nor performance of Phaeton had the Siren power of enchanting men so much as to stimulate attention at the expence of reason.’ The directors had also got hold of a far abler hand
in the person of the Catalan composer Domenico Terradellas, one of the finest of Durante’s pupils at Naples and a sensitive writer for the voice. The following year, what is more, London was to be visited by its first Italian buffo troupe, giving performances of the comic operas that were becoming so important a feature of Neapolitan theatrical life. Though these made no obvious impression on Handel, he had the opportunity of hearing the young Gaetano Guadagni, later to be the last of his great castrato stars and, as creator of the title role in Gluck’s Orfeo, linking one composer to the other through the medium of a vocal style owing much to the English love of dramatic directness and simplicity.

  A slightly shaky start was given to the 1747 oratorio season by the magnetic fascination for ‘the town’ of the trial of the obese turncoat Lord Lovat, with whom even the most mawkishly sentimental Jacobites found it hard to sympathize. Revivals of The Occasional Oratorio and Joseph and His Brethren gingered up the excited Handelians for the new work on which the composer had been engaged during the previous summer and which Shaftesbury, who expected that it would ‘both give delight to the lovers of harmony and profits to the fountain whence it flows’, had presumably heard in rehearsal.

  Judas Maccabaeus, with Messiah and Samson the most consistently successful of all Handel’s vocal works, had its première on 1 April. Beard and Reinhold figured, as usual, in the principal tenor and bass parts, Judas and Simon, and the soprano was the accomplished Elisabetta de’ Gambarini, herself a composer, to whose collection of keyboard lessons and songs Handel subscribed the following year. The mezzo, Caterina Galli, was already an established singer of male roles at the King’s Theatre, though it was Handel’s oratorio that was to bring her genuine celebrity. ‘There was something spirited and interesting in her manner,’ says Burney, ‘however, she was little noticed by the public till she sung in Handel’s oratorio of Judas Maccabaeus, when she acquired such favour in the air “Tis liberty alone” that she was not only encored in it every night, but became an important personage, among singers for a considerable time afterwards.’ Her reputation may later have suffered from her role as go-between in the sensational affair between Lord Sandwich’s mistress Martha Ray and Captain Hackman, which ended with the former being murdered by the latter as she left the theatre, but Galli soldiered on in increasing poverty, with concert engagements as late as 1797 and dying in 1804 – ‘the last of Handel’s scholars’ as the Gentleman’s Magazine puts it.