George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music

by Paul Henry Lang

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  SHORTLY BEFORE his death, Handel was visited by Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, the celebrated religious leader of a sect of Calvinistic Methodists, the founder and generous supporter of many chapels, and an energetic collaborator of Wesley and Whitefield. In her recollections 121 she says that she visited Handel, whom she seems to have known, at his request. “He is now old, and at the close of his long career; yet he is not dismayed at the prospect before him,” adding that the Reverend Martin Madan “has been with him often, and he seems much attached to him.” There is no proof to support this version of Madan’s role in Handel’s life. During his last days Handel saw few persons outside his valet John Duburk, the two Smiths, Dr. Warren his physician, and James Smyth, a London perfumer who seems to have been an intimate during his last years. Madan, a cousin of William Cowper and a favorite of “the Queen of the Methodists,” was not the type of person to whom Handel would be attracted. Originally a barrister of pronouncedly debonair habits until converted by John Wesley, he became a minister and a fervent worker for the Countess of Huntingdon. A man of extreme views, he later became the centre of a storm when, on “scriptural authority,” he advocated polygamy.

  During the April 6 performance of Messiah, Handel suffered a fainting spell. As we have seen, he executed a final codicil to his will on the 11th; he knew that his final hour was at hand, and it came in the morning of April 14, 1759. We have an account of his last moments by Smyth, who, though not present in the death chamber, was close by. His report is in a letter to Bernard Granville, printed in the Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany (London, 1861).

  According to your request to me when you left London, that I would let you know when our good friend departed this life, on Saturday last at 8 o‘clock in mom died the great and good Mr. Handel. He was sensible to the last moment; made a codicil to his will on Tuesday, ordered to be buried privately in Westminster Abbey, and a monument not to exceed £ 600 for him. I had the pleasure to reconcile him to his old friends; he saw them and forgave them, and let all their legacies stand! 122 sin the codicil he left many legacies to his friends, and among the rest he left me £ 500, and has left to you the two pictures you formerly gave him.123 He took leave of all his friends on Friday morning, and desired to see nobody but the Doctor and Apothecary and myself. At 7 o’clock in the evening he took leave of me, and told me we “should meet again”; as soon as I was gone he told his servant “not to let me come to him any more, for that he had now done with the world.” He died as he lived—a good Christian, with a true sense of his duty to God and man, and in perfect charity with all the world.

  The funeral took place on April 20. According to the London Evening Post “The Bishop, Prebendaries, and the whole Choirs [singers of the Chapel Royal, St. Paul’s, and the Abbey itself] attended, to pay the last Honours due to his Memory; and it is computed there were not fewer than 3000 Persons present on this Occasion.” The English people disregarded Handel’s wish for a private service. Dr. Croft’s Funeral Anthem was sung to a large gathering, an English composer’s tribute to the man who wanted to be buried in Westminster Abbey because “having, with universal Applause, spent upwards of fifty Years in England,” he too had become an English composer.

  XXII

  Handel the man, his friends, his surroundings—Handei the conductor, the entrepreneur, the businessman—Relationship with English musicians —Handel and women; the heroines in his works—Handel and nature, his genre scenes—Spirit of rural England—Handel’s English—Handel’s religion—Impresario vs. creative artist—Deism—Handel’s mutilation of his own scores—Borrowings—The moral issue—“Invention” and “imagination” in the 18th century—Handel’s transplanting technique

  TO WHOM THE ROMANCE OF HISTORY MAKES strong appeal will always be attracted by the story of the musician, reared in the humble atmosphere of the cantor’s guild, who succeeded by sheer force of character and talent in making himself the musical ruler of England. Romance, however, is the wrong word to apply to a life that contains so much that cannot by any stretch of language be called romantic. The story of Handel may perhaps be best described as a stern drama in which the masterful will of a man of genius is in conflict with a variety of forces, which he succeeded in dominating but to which he also in part succumbed. Handel belongs among those who, irked by stability and settled jobs, follow the beckoning of adventure with unconquerable optimism. His ingenuity and confidence would never recognize obstacles. He was intolerant of delay, indifferent to formalities, had a genius for organization and great powers of persuasion, and his driving force was incalculable. Always possessed of a central calm, he found the fortitude, even in the midst of time-consuming and vexatious affairs of theatrical production, to muster the exacting labor necessary for large new works. Bluff, sagacious, immensely persevering, but consistently human alike in his virtues and his failings, he was a real man dealing with a real world. Questions of whence and where did not interest him; he was not a philosopher nor a religious contemplative. It is when he allows his mind to be anchored in earth and humanity that he is most distinctly a poet. To cast his story in a religious-romantic mould is to do his greatness disservice. He had the English spirit: he liked the beautiful but he liked the useful too; nothing was farther from him than l‘art pour l’art. He could have said with Dryden, “my chief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live.”

  Handel always royally assumed the privileges of a great man. Patient at one moment, irascible at the next, resolutely courageous in the face of threats, he was an optimist with a fearless propensity for taking chances, always summoning the energy to extricate himself when his hopes proved elusive. Indeed, his was a philosophy of risk and leadership. It may perhaps be said that Handel’s life was from beginning to end a magnificent gamble, and his works were merely the most serious gamble of all. He took a long series of dangerous corners and took them in his own way. As a composer-entrepreneur he ignored many of the accepted rules of the game, yet most of the men and women who worked with him, after some initial bewilderment, fell under his spell and into his difficult, exacting step. He never bothered to explain himself, and the varied episodes of his career, bracing though they are as studies of valor in action, are teasing in the final questions they pose. The numerous Handelian anecdotes are no substitute for more illuminating self-confessions when a tricky biographical landscape is surveyed. Besides, the proportion of truth to legend in these anecdotes is far smaller than is generally the case. Here is a man who in a peculiar sense made the musical theatre his home, but divest him of the footlights, follow him home in a London street—how does he look then? Formidable in power and even more so when left out of it, he won resounding triumphs and courted egregious disaster. He is as difficult to appraise as the nation whose spirit he so superbly embodied. Is there a final sense to be made of him? No man could have chatted and played more genially in Mary Delany’s or Susanna Cibber’s music room, but no man was more rigorous in barring his threshold to others. He was a solitary man, hard to know and hard to portray, but what most eludes description is the singularity of his essential being.

  Carefully reasoned scholarly essays are gradually displacing those legends which inevitably adhere to the name of a man so remarkable in character and achievement and so studiously secluded from the public eye. There are few historical characters who display so little of their secret thoughts, and few who make us more inclined to believe that the inner man differs markedly from the outer. We know what he looked like, what he liked to eat and drink, what he wore, and what jokes he made, and whenever he lost his temper we are told about it. Further, it would not be difficult to compile from his known utterances, few as they are, some sort of philosophy of life of which no one need be ashamed. The bones of his life are thus easily resurrected, but the life they supported is a very different matter. Sincere and forceful as he was in his actions, Handel never cast aside his reserve, and his works remain the chief key
with which he chose to unlock his heart. He lived until 1759, but a span of seventy-four years is inadequate to suggest his output of energy; his recreation was a change of work. But vitality alone does not constitute greatness, and quantity, though evidence of vitality, is not quality. During those many years he enjoyed few idle moments, and his competitors and adversaries certainly enjoyed no quiet ones. Burney recalled that Handel worked so incessantly that he had no time “to mix in society, or partake of public amusements.” But he took everything seriously; above all he took life seriously. No one knew better what a struggle life is, how the consequences of the smallest weakness can snowball, and how constantly one must be on guard in order to prevail. In the end, when all the material has been sifted and ordered, when scholarship has drawn its inferences and framed its inductions, the mind is left overwhelmingly aware of something transcendent. In Edward Arlington Robinson’s words,

  There are eomplexities and reservations

  Where there are poets, for they are alone,

  Wherever they are.

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  WE HAVE vivid records of the impression Handel made on a number of observers. He was a tall man, always well dressed though not ostentatiously so. We know that in his younger years, before he became corpulent, he was considered handsome, but to the irreverent eyes of contemporaries his later massiveness was obvious and ridiculous. Nevertheless, the gluttony attributed to him, as in Goupy’s famous caricatures (see above, p. 244), is questionable. Handel was a very large man who needed considerable food; he insisted on a bountiful table and was something of a gourmet. But had he been a real glutton he would have been a gouty invalid, as were so many of his English contemporaries in comfortable circumstances, instead of living to the ripe age of seventy-four at a time when average life-expectancy was considerably below that. The portraits and busts124 usually show him in repose, and what strikes one above all in these likenesses is the fixed look of the eyes, eyes of a calm and fearless arrogance, with a look of determined remoteness. In ordinary unconvivial society, and when not under the stimulus of excitement, he was distinguished by his dignity and ceremonial manner. Or as Dr. Johnson would have said, he was “knowing and conversible.” A cultivated man of the world, well read, he could hold his own in discussions, and he was a connoisseur of painting.125 But when affronted he could burst out violently (Burney attests that Handel could swear fluently in five languages), for like many men of genius he was of an autocratic disposition, intensely jealous of his independence, and his self-confidence was like a rock.

  He could be obstinate and unyielding, and as Hawkins says, he “had a fixed resolution never to admit a rival,” but there was a largeness and loyalty about him that prevented him from indulging in pettiness. Most of the time he was good-natured, full of humor, kindliness, and charity, and no fact concerning the inwardness of his private life is better established than his delight in children. He was always attentive and generous to his family. When he learned that a relative by marriage, a widowed Frau Händel living in the old family home in Halle, was being charged rent, he instructed his brother-in-law, Michaelsen, to permit her to live there free. Never vindictive, he was also a realist. Owen Swiney, who absconded with the box-office receipts of Teseo in 1713, thereby causing an almost catastrophic financial difficulty, became, twenty years later, a useful business associate. The same is true of the exasperating singers who, after joining the competitors’ camp, were readmitted to his company. Of his humor Burney said: “Had he been as great a master of the English language as Swift, his bon mots would have been as frequent, and somewhat of the same kind.” Burney also quotes “an Irish gentleman, Dr. Quinn,” whose veracity he respected, as a person who in Dublin “had the pleasure of seeing and conversing with Handel.” Dr. Quinn relates that “Handel, with his other excellences, was possessed of a good stock of humour, no man ever told a story with more. But it was a requisite for the hearer to have a competent knowledge of at least four languages: English, French, Italian, and German; for in his narrative he made use of them all.” In small and congenial gatherings he was amiability itself, not disdaining to accompany amateur singers and playing the harpsichord hours on end. Mary Delany (then still Mrs. Pendarves) described such an occasion in a letter to her sister, Ann Granville, in 1734. “Mr. Handel was in the best humour in the world, and played lessons and accompanied Strada and all the ladies that sang from seven o’clock till eleven.”

  He was definitely partial to the ladies, who wholeheartedly reciprocated. Of George II’s five daughters the three older princesses, Anne, Amelia, and Caroline, were his pupils and faithful auditors. Anne, the Princess Royal, his favorite pupil, was a musician of near-professional capabilities. She was a good singer and harpsichordist and well versed in composition. After her marriage to William of Orange she formed a little orchestra, which she directed from the harpsichord in frequent palace concerts. The admiration was mutual, and the Princess often used her influence to help Handel in difficult situations. We have seen Susanna Cibber’s warm friendship for Handel, and Mary Delany idolized the composer throughout a long life. Mrs. Delany, previously Mrs. Pendarves, was born Mary Granville in 1700 and died, with faculties unimpaired, at the age of eighty-five. She first heard Handel play when she was ten.126 Always surrounded by distinguished people, she corresponded with many, among them with Swift during his last sane years. Interested in science, letters, and art, and a great music-lover, she acquired a certain fame with an art form of her own devising: the representation of flowers in “paper mosaics,” of which there is a large collection in the British Museum, praised by no lesser judges than Sir Joshua Reynolds and Horace Walpole. Her admiration for Handel was unbounded. She even “made a drama for an oratorio out of Milton’s Paradise Lost, to give Mr. Handel to compose to.” It was tactfully passed over by Handel.

  Handel grasped without effort the social as well as the economic and esthetic aspects of his surroundings, an important ingredient of his success being that he was not only a composer but a man of the world, a Londoner who knew his town in success and failure. Everything essential to the pattern of contemporary life found some counterpart in his experience.

  Since English men of letters enjoyed social privileges and all sorts of important appointments, they were more or less actively engaged in political intrigue, like the clergy, and this unfortunately left its mark not only on their dealings, which were often unscrupulous and even vicious, but also on the quality of their works. Most of Handel’s friends were Whigs, but his principle was always to stay out of politics and not to join positively any of the sets into which the literati were divided. It was nevertheless unavoidable that Handel, a public figure, a German like the unpopular King, should be drawn, if innocently, into political maneuvers.

  It is characteristic that Handel’s charitable activities and contributions increased with his affluence, though, as we have seen, he was ready to lend a hand even when his personal fortunes were at their lowest. His awareness of supreme capacity made him sometimes intolerant of criticism and impatient of opposition, and in the hurry of events he sometimes judged amiss, acted hastily, even unjustly. But throughout he was borne up by the consciousness of high purpose and unfailing resource. For all his inconsistency, he never changed his aim; he only modified his methods to suit a changing world.

  Handel’s was an era when the whims of the singers had to be obeyed. In Italy, and in the musical colonies established by Italians, if a singer did not like an aria it had to be changed, and the composer usually submitted every number to the appropriate members of the cast for their approval. Even such powerful personalities as Legrenzi or Scarlatti had difficulty in asserting themselves. Not so Handel; he knew better than anyone since Lully how to enforce the composer’s rights and wishes. Hawkins puts this amusingly: “In his comparison of the merits of a composer and those of a singer, Handel estimated the latter at a very low rate.” Mainwaring reports that “the perfect authority which Handel maintained over the singers and the ba
nd, or rather the total subjection in which he held them, was of more consequence than can well be imagined.” During rehearsals he could be a tyrant, giving offenders a fearful tongue-lashing. He “subdued the humours” of the capricious singers “not by lenitives but by sharp corrosives,” says Mainwaring. These “corrosives” could take the form of bodily threat. His first biographer tells the story of Handel seizing the recalcitrant Cuzzoni “by the waist, and if she made any more words, swore that he would fling her out of the window.”