The War of the Austrian Succession had degenerated into aimless attrition, with neither side seeing much more advantage in sustaining an expensive and desultory international conflict. If victory festivities were not in order, and if George II’s motives as Elector of Hanover in pursuing the war to preserve his German domains were all too readily appreciated, he could at least now be hailed as the bringer of harmony. As such, in effigy at least, he formed the centrepiece of the amazing confection specially constructed for the open-air spectacle on 27 April 1749.
Its architect was the Florentine Giovanni Nicola Servandoni, scenic artist to the French court (his services in London were perhaps a generous gesture by Louis XV) and best known today as the creator of the grandiose church of St Sulpice in Paris. The ‘Machine’, as it was called, stood at the bottom of the park and represented ‘a magnificent Doric Temple, from which extend two Wings terminated by Pavilions . . . adorned with Frets, Gilding, Lustres, Artificial Flowers, Inscriptions, Statues, Allegorical Pictures &c’ together with Latin inscriptions and twenty-three figures by Andrea Casali, an Italian statuary and painter much in favour with young English patrons of the rococo style. The descriptions only make its essentially ephemeral nature more regrettable, particularly when we read that Servandoni and his Bolognese assistants Gaetano Ruggieri and Giuseppe Sarti had devised a special firework trick whereby eighteen pictures suddenly appeared as ‘Marble Basso Relievos’ then changed colour by means of ‘a great Number of Lampions’ to culminate in the image of the King giving peace to Britannia, Neptune and Mars.
Handel’s instrumental suite of overture and dances was to open the programme, but its rehearsals were not without their difficulties. The whole show was managed by Charles Frederick, ‘Comptroller of his Majesty’s Fireworks as well for War as for Triumph’, and Captain Thomas Desaguliers, Chief Fire Master of the Royal Laboratory. A letter to the former from the Duke of Montague, Master of the Ordnance, anxiously pondered the composer’s orchestral forces. Uncharacteristically, the King had jibbed at there being any music, but ‘when I told him the quantity and nomber of martial musick . . . he was better satisfied, and said he hoped there would be no fidles’. Handel, however, had suddenly decided to cut down the number of trumpets and horns from sixteen to twelve apiece and to introduce ‘violeens’, something Montague was sure would put George out of humour. ‘I am shure it behoves Hendel to have as many trumpets, and other martial instruments as possible, tho he dont retrench the violins, which I think he shoud, tho I beleeve he will never be persuaded to do so.’ We can sympathize with the Duke in having to act as intermediary between two such intransigent characters as the sovereign and the composer.
Further problems were being created by Handel’s unwillingness to release the music for a public rehearsal at Vauxhall Gardens, where Jonathan Tyers had offered to lend his illuminations and servants to manage them for the Green Park fête. Montague, exasperated at Handel’s apparently ‘absolute determination’ on the point, told Frederick: ‘If he wont let us have his overture we must get an other, and I think it would be proper to inclose my letter to you in your letter to him, that he may know my centiments; but don’t say I bid you send it to him.’ This was a covering note to a longer letter written on the same day, in which the Duke artfully stressed the King’s interest in the whole matter, implying that Handel’s consent would best show his duty to his sovereign. The ruse was successful, and after a shuffling of rehearsal dates owing to wet weather and a desire to accommodate the Duke of Cumberland, the music was played to ‘the brightest and most numerous Assembly’, though the General Advertiser noted that ‘several Footmen who attended their Masters, &c thither, behaved very sausily, and were justly corrected by the Gentlemen for their Insolence’.
Five days later off it all went at the showery close of a hot April day, the salute of 101 brass ordnance, the Girandole and Caduceus rockets, the mortars with ‘Air Ballons’, the ‘Magnificent Jet de Feu of forty Feet High’, the 141 large fountains, the explosions of serpents, rain and stars, the Tourbillons, Pots de Brins and ‘Marrons in Battery’. John Byrom, witty bard of ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’ Handel versus Bononcini, sat down under a tree stump to write a line to his wife. ‘It has been a very hot day, but there is a dark overcast of cloudiness which may possibly turn to rain, which occasions some of better habits to think of retiring; and while I am now writing it spits a little . . . 11 o’clock: all over, and somewhat in a hurry, by an accidental fire at one of the ends of the building, which, whether it be extinguished I know not, for I left it in an ambiguous condition that I might finish my letter, which otherwise I could not have done.’ He was better off, he considered, in the park with ‘the mobility’ than in the official stands, where privy councillors had been issued with twelve seats and peers got four. During the fire Servandoni quarrelled with Charles Frederick and drew his sword on him, and was only released from custody the following day after he had asked pardon in the Duke of Cumberland’s presence.
The titles of two of Handel’s pieces in the Fireworks Music suite, ‘La Paix’ and ‘La Rejouissance’, suggest that they may have been intended to accompany the display itself, though there is no evidence that this was finally the case. The programme described the six movements as an overture, and such, apparently, they were, cast by the composer in the grandest French manner familiar to us in other Baroque dance sets such as Bach’s first orchestral suite. Reworking earlier sketches he devised a grandiose opening in the traditional mode of dotted slow section followed by fugal allegro, an ideal amalgam of simple basic ideas with a confidence in their maximum effectiveness that can only belong to Handel. A gentle, almost sly contrast is offered by the succeeding bourrée, and still more by the warm serenities of ‘La Paix’, in that lilting triple time he had already so memorably linked with ‘lovely Peace’ in Judas Maccabaeus. ‘La Rejouissance’ is what its title implies, a jubilant rejoicing played three times over by varying instrumental groups, and the work ends with a brace of minuets.
Far from losing interest in orchestral music, as has been suggested, Handel seems, during this period, to have tackled it with renewed originality. Few of his instrumental pieces outside the Opus 6 concertos can quite rival the imaginative power in remodelling earlier material, which irradiates the three concertos for double wind and strings written presumably for the 1747–8 oratorio performances – ‘Jehovah crown’d’ from Esther, ‘Io seguo sol fiero’ from Partenope and ‘See, from his banks’ from Belshazzar are electrifying in their new guises – but the clutch of organ concertos published by Walsh in 1761 as Opus 7 shows a continuing readiness to treat the form with as much freedom as it would allow.
Like the Opus 4 concertos, these relate directly to individual performances, exhibiting Handel’s talents as a keyboard virtuoso, but linked with the world of the oratorios by an increased grandeur and boldness of design. The fourth, for instance, starts with a darkly coloured D minor adagio, with divided cellos augmented by bassoons, culminating in a cadenza that perhaps reflects only part of what the composer gave his audience. The clouds are packed away, however, with the sprightly second movement, based on a piece from Telemann’s Musique de Table and a textbook example of Handel the borrower at work on tightening up the musical structure throughout. The B flat concerto which begins the set opens, on the other hand, with two magisterial elaborations, strongly contrasted in treatment, on ground basses, recalling similar pieces among his solo keyboard works, but given greater amplitude by the participation of the orchestra. The whole set represents a fascinating glimpse of Handel’s consistently untrammelled attitude to instrumental forms as an adjunct to his vocal works.
He was freely self-critical as regarded such pieces. Walking one day in Marylebone pleasure gardens (in the area now occupied by Harley and Wimpole Streets) he asked his friend the clergyman Dr Fountayne for his opinion of a new composition the band was playing. After listening for a while, Fountayne answered: ‘It is not worth listening to – it is very poor s
tuff.’ ‘You are right,’ agreed Handel, ‘it is very poor stuff. I thought so myself when I had finished it.’
The Fireworks Music was brought out again on 27 May as part of ‘a Grand Performance of Vocal and Instrumental MUSICK’ under the composer’s direction in the chapel of the newly-built Foundling Hospital in Lamb’s Conduit Fields (now Coram’s Fields). The royal charter for the hospital’s foundation was granted in 1739 to Captain Thomas Coram, whose dogged determination to better the lot of London’s pauper children by setting up a charitable institution, where they could be fed, clothed and educated, had succeeded in getting a large orphanage built for the purpose on land to the north of Gray’s Inn on the fringes of Bloomsbury. Georgian England was a curious mixture of cynical coarseness on the one hand and profoundly, often romantically humanitarian sentiments on the other, but though the latter were now deeply engaged in the scheme, the foundation still desperately needed funds. It is no surprise to find the painter William Hogarth among the hospital’s patrons and only natural that Handel, with typical liberality, should now follow suit in helping the work along. On 7 May he was present at a Governors’ Meeting, which enthusiastically accepted his offer of a charitable concert and elected him to the board. It was to be a lasting and fruitful association, even though Handel at first declined the governorship ‘for that he should serve the Charity with more Pleasure in his Way, than being a Member of the Corporation’.
The concert featured selections from Solomon and a special anthem skilfully compiled from items in the 1737 Funeral Anthem and Susanna (a chorus cut before the first performance) and ending with the Hallelujah Chorus. This is particularly significant as the harbinger of those Messiah performances at the Hospital from 1750 onwards which, every year until Handel’s death, brought increased popularity to the oratorio and may be said to have established its primacy with English audiences. So conscious, indeed, were the governors of the work’s drawing power that they tried to secure exclusive rights to it by a petition to Parliament. Handel’s fury, expressed in his outburst: ‘For what shall the Foundling put mine oratorio in the Parliament! The Devil! mine music shall not go to the Parliament!’ is meekly rendered in the committee minutes as ‘the same did not seem agreeable to Mr Handel for the present’, though he did leave a score and parts to the hospital in his will, and obviously meant well by Coram’s foundation from first to last.
In September 1749, Johann Jakob Heidegger died, aged eighty-five, at his house in Richmond. His ‘well-known Character’, said the General Advertiser, ‘wants no Encomium; of him, it may be truly said, what one Hand received from the Rich, the other gave to the Poor’. Handel, linked in perpetuity to Covent Garden, had had no connexion with his old impresario and business partner for several years, but the death of the man who had helped to present his earliest London successes must have made him feel his age. Earlier in the year Lord Shaftesbury had written of the composer as ‘the old Buck . . . excessively healthy and full of spirits’, and his indefatigable resource now addressed itself to the novel exercise of writing incidental music for a play by the young novelist Tobias Smollett. ‘I have wrote a sort of Tragedy on the story of Alceste, which will (without fail) be acted at Covent Garden next Season,’ Smollett told a friend, ‘and appear with such magnificence of Scenery as was never exhibited in Britain before.’ If it had ever got off the ground, the project, including Handel’s sumptuous symphonies, airs and choruses, and sets by Servandoni himself, must indeed have marked an epoch in English theatrical production, but alas, nothing came of it, and though the music and scenes survived, the play disappeared altogether. The cause, according to Sir Walter Scott in his Lives of the Novelists, was a quarrel between Smollett and Rich, whom the irascible doctor-turned-writer had already satirized in his poem ‘Reproof’.
Handel solaced himself for these reverses by attending picture auctions and making several purchases, including the large landscape of the Rhine attributed to Rembrandt but probably by the Dutch artist’s pupil Philips van Koninck, which he subsequently left to Bernard Granville. The oratorio season was in any case about to start, with revivals of Saul and Judas Maccabaeus, and an entirely new piece written during the previous July to a text by Thomas Morell and premièred on 16 March 1750. Morell himself recalled that ‘the next I wrote was Theodora . . . which Mr Handell himself valued more than any Performance of the kind; and when I once ask’d him, whether he did not look upon the Grand Chorus in the Messiah as his Master Piece? “No,” says he, “I think the Chorus at the end of the 2d part in Theodora far beyond it. He saw the lovely youth &c.”’ The work took its place immediately among the roster of his distinguished box office failures. Beyond a solitary revival in 1755 it received only four performances in Handel’s lifetime and he himself was inimitably dry in his resignation to the debacle. ‘The 2d night of Theodora was very thin indeed,’ says Morell, ‘tho’ the Princess Amelia was there. I guessed it a losing night, so did not go to Mr Handell as usual; but seeing him smile, I ventured, when “Will you be there next Friday night,” says he “and I will play it to you?” I told him I had just seen Sir T. Hankey, “and he desired me to tell you that if you would have it again, he would engage for all the Boxes.” “He is a fool,” answered Handel, “the Jews will not come to it (as to Judas) because it is a Christian story; and the Ladies will not come, because it is a virtuous one.”’ To the requests for free tickets for a Messiah performance later in the year he exclaimed: ‘Oh your servant, meine herren! you are damnable dainty! you would not go to Theodora – there was room enough to dance there, when that was perform.’
That small circle who really appreciated what the composer was attempting to do saw the point of the oratorio at once and took it to their hearts. Shaftesbury told James Harris: ‘I can’t conclude a letter and forget Theodora, I have heard it three times and will venture to pronounce it, as finished, beautifull and labour’d a composition as ever Handel made. To my knowledge, this took him up a great while in composing. The Town don’t like it at all, but Mr Kelloway and several excellent Musicians think as I do.’ Joseph Kelway was Mrs Delany’s music teacher and she herself adored the piece. ‘Don’t you remember our snug enjoyment of Theodora?’ she wrote to her sister Ann, who herself declared: ‘Surely Theodora will have justice at last, if it was to be again performed, but the generality of the world have ears and hear not.’
Too true, alas. But why did it fail? Not solely because of the Jews staying away, or because of the current earthquake scares in England, reaching their peak in the hysteria caused by the Lisbon disaster of 1755 but already having an effect on wayward London audiences. Handel may have been right in attributing his setback to the nature of the story, for among his religious English vocal works it is the only one not related to a biblical source and the only one dealing with virgin martyrdom in a way more obviously related than anything else he ever wrote to the specifically Catholic world in which the oratorio form had been nurtured. Contemporary Protestantism had little truck with the world of persecuted saints, while feeling naturally at home with the warriors, prophets and kings of the Old Testament. In some ways Theodora is the most un-English of Handel’s late works: in every way it is a creation of unquestionable sublimity.
It is emphatically not devoted, however, to extolling frigid female virtue in a fashion calculated to deter the beau monde of mid-eighteenth-century London. Its point of departure was in fact one of those Restoration essays in prurient titillation which, like Dryden’s play on a similar theme, Tyrannick Love, were designed to tickle jaded palates by lacing religion with sex. Morell based his libretto on The Martyrdom of Theodora and Didymus by Robert Boyle, author of The Sceptical Chymist and formulator of the celebrated physical law, who had written his sententious little novel as a neurotic reaction to his disturbed private life. The historical Theodora, also known as St Dorothy, was a victim of Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians in the early fourth century. In Handel’s oratorio Valens, the Roman governor of Antioch, condemns her to
serve as a prostitute in the temple of Venus, but she seeks imprisonment and death instead, and after a temporary rescue by her lover Didymus, he and she go towards a glorious martyrdom.
Boyle’s novelette is reminiscent of the Edwardian hostess whom one of her guests described as ‘stumbling upwards into fatuity’, and Morell was inevitably hampered by its more rambling excursions into moralizing. The composer evidently found the business of transmuting his text into a workable and convincing artistic whole an increasingly fascinating exercise, and the autograph manuscript of Theodora is one of the most absorbing in the entire British Library Handel collection. A mass of coffee-coloured blots, pencilled cuts and sealing-wax marks bears witness to his preoccupation, both before and after the first performance, with getting the work across in a way that should not obscure his essential concept of it.
What this was emerges irresistibly from the score, whose character dwells, not on simpering religious kitsch, but on the enduring human values which invigorate martyrdom and suffering in any great cause. It is not that Handel explicitly plays down the Christian element but that he emphasizes the universality of his theme by giving music of immense verve and charm to his pagan Romans, in much the same spirit as animates the Baalites in Athalia or the Philistines in Samson. The protagonists here, Theodora herself, Irene her fellow Christian, Didymus and his noble comrade in arms Septimius, impress by their mingled toughness and tenderness, by their imagination and enthusiasm. The Christians, above all, are treated quite unsentimentally and their choruses have the lambent intensity of a conviction which needs no priggishness or dogma to sustain it. Whereas the Romans, in ‘Forever thus stands fix’d the doom’ and ‘Venus laughing from the skies’, bounce along in insouciant dance rhythms, Theodora’s friends follow more complex musical paths in Handel’s loftiest choral tradition, capturing the spirit of the entire work – and perhaps the composer’s own philosophy – in ‘He saw the lovely youth’, Handel’s own favourite among all his choruses. A tightly knit dramatic description, the piece, portraying Christ’s raising of the widow’s dead son in Luke VII:xi, begins with slow, lugubrious chromaticisms against a fragmented accompaniment, abruptly changes minor to major as the youth revives and closes with a jubilant evocation of the mother’s pleasure at her child’s recall to life.
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