Handel (60 page)

Alive Handel still was and, though by the beginning of 1754 the eclipse was total, he had lost none of his authority in the preparation and direction of the oratorio seasons. The Covent Garden performances, of course, went on attracting a solid following, but more interesting than these in respect of the development of Handel's English reputation are the records of oratorio in the provinces. By now, owing perhaps to an impetus begun by
Athalia
some twenty years before,
Oxford had taken the composer to its heart and his music had found an ardent champion in the Heather Professor William Hayes, who had come out strongly in his favour in a set of published strictures on Charles Avison's
Essay on Musical Expression
(1752), a work designed to establish the primacy of Geminiani's style against the less orthodox but more ‘old-fashioned' Handelian manner. In evoking the spirits of Milton, Poussin and Claude in his praises of Handel, Hayes had touched upon the fundamental element that was beginning to gain the composer a following when in certain respects he no longer needed it. We cannot categorize Handel as a ‘pre-Romantic', whatever that may be, but neither can we ignore that mid-eighteenth-century sensibility in his work, which appealed to the nascent Romanticism of contemporary England and Germany.

The English, in short, were ready for Handel, and Oxford now witnessed regular performances on a par with those in London and featuring such well-known Handelians as Frasi and Beard. At Bath, meanwhile, Thomas Chilcot, one of the most able of younger provincial masters, was dispensing
Judas Maccabaeus
and other pieces to the fashionable ‘hot-waterers', while at Bristol the new music room opened in 1756 ‘with the oratorio of the Messiah'. More significant yet was the annual Music Meeting of the Three Choirs of Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford, the world's oldest surviving musical festival, and a positive and vital force in English music. Here, by the mid-1750s, Handel was part of the staple fare: at the Hereford meeting of 1756, for example,
Samson
,
L'Allegro
and the
St Cecilia Ode
were all given, and the following year Gloucester heard
Acis
and
Messiah
, with ‘Three Trumpets, a Pair of Kettle-drums, Four Hautboys, Four Bassoons, Two Double basses, Violins, Violincelloes and Chorus Singers in Proportion. The Music to be conducted by Dr Hayes . . .'

Meanwhile, as London grew, so did its concert life, and the town rang with Handel. The increase of the cult of ‘feeling' and ‘sentiment' had the practical outcome of encouraging the promotion of various hospital schemes, and what Dublin had been doing for well over a decade was now taken up in the City and Westminster, as each new charitable foundation publicized its endeavours with first-rate music. Boyce directed the band at St Margaret's for the Westminster Hospital and Stanley did the same for the Hospital for Smallpox and Inoculation, but who was the ‘
Widow Gentlewoman
in Great Distress' for whom, presumably with the composer's consent,
an
Acis and Galatea
was given at the Great Room in Dean Street, Soho? We can appreciate the old man's anxiety lest his music fall into improper hands: a letter of Shaftesbury to James Harris, dated 31 December 1757, says, ‘I will give directions for sending the score of Joshua to you at Salisbury. But desire when you deliver it that Mr B . . . may be requested to take care not to dirty or hurt the book; and Farther, that on no account he suffer any copy to be taken of the Chorus's etc. lest it should be performed elsewhere. For this, in justice to Mr Handel, I ought to insist on.'

Apart from
Messiah
, gaining continuously in popularity throughout the decade, the favourites seem to have been
Acis
(variously described as masque, serenata and oratorio),
Esther
,
Samson
and
Judas
.
Alexander Balus
,
Susanna
and
Solomon
were each revived for a single season.
Saul
made its way successfully into the provinces and
Deborah
, perhaps for specially local or topical reasons, was always a draw in Ireland.
Athalia
returned to Covent Garden after a twenty-year absence and even
Joseph
found a niche in the London programmes.
Semele
alone, of all the eighteen English dramatic works, was never brought back during Handel's lifetime after its six 1744 performances. As for the non-dramatic works to English texts, while the
St Cecilia Ode
and
Alexander's Feast
maintained a more or less constant success rate, the fortunes of
Israel in Egypt
rose as those of
Allegro, Penseroso and Moderato
declined – the blooming landscapes of Gainsborough and
The Seasons
giving way, as it were, to the awful and sublime prospects of Blake and Turner.

At nearly every revival Handel made some sort of adaptation or interpolation, based variously on the quality and nature of the performers or on his sense of what the public desired. For many works there can thus be no standard text because of the essentially elastic aspects of the piece as conceived in a practical sense. A modern conductor or editor will prefer to recommend one version as opposed to another, but can scarcely afford to be dogmatic. In at least one case, that of
Esther
, the composer, as we have already noted, seems never to have been satisfied with leaving the work alone and its immensely complex textual history offers a fascinating indication of his approach to an individual composition. With others, however, we are on safer ground. A revival of the extraordinary 1759
Solomon
, for example, in which the work's original shape has undergone a truly Procrustean revision (it opens with the judgement scene, excising practically the entire first act) would simply be an exercise in antiquarian perversity and modern performance has rightly returned us to the 1749 text.

Whatever additions were made cannot,
of course, have been Handel's own, though he must certainly have authorized them, and it was in the crucial capacity of intermediary between the blind composer and his audience that the talents of John Christopher Smith came fully into play. The new numbers, including such pieces as ‘Wise men flatt'ring', initially designed for a 1758
Belshazzar
but later coming to rest in
Judas Maccabaeus
, and ‘Lost in anguish, quite despairing' for the 1755
Theodora
, were derived from earlier Handel works on which Smith set his own imprint, that of a musician more closely in touch with newer mannerisms but far more limited in the actual extent of his gifts. It is quite easy, simply by listening to this music, to know that what we are in fact hearing is not quite all by Handel himself, and nothing more blatantly proclaims this than
The Triumph of Time and Truth
, the third and last incarnation of
Il Trionfo del Tempo e della Verità
, produced as a novelty in the Covent Garden season of 1757 and revived the following year.

The Triumph
is fascinating for several reasons. On one level it develops the tendency of Smith and Handel in reworking earlier material to concentrate on music from the Italian years, which Londoners were unlikely to know. On another, though its ad hoc quality recalls
Deborah
and
The Occasional Oratorio
, it noticeably lacks the sense of homogeneous control which, whatever their faults, permeates those two works. Most important of all, it provides one of the clearest illustrations in all music of the fact that, however powerful the modern arguments in favour of vernacular words for local audiences, the sound and syntax of an original text dictate the composer's disposition of melody, harmony and phrase lengths in communicating his awareness of its meaning to the listener. Handel wrote extensively in two modern languages (his German compositions are few in number) and the tones and rhythms of Italian and English ordained distinctive idioms. Except in one or two isolated cases, such as ‘La mia sorte fortunata' in
Agrippina
, pressed comfortably into service as ‘Freedom now once more possessing' in
Jephtha
, the Italian airs do not easily carry English texts and the awkwardness of Morell's words in conjunction with the vocal lines of
Il Trionfo
is manifest throughout. Together with Smith's well-grounded but earthbound muse and the additional numbers from the 1707 and 1737 versions,
The Triumph of Time and Truth
, however engaging, represents the
reductio ad absurdum
of the Baroque synthetic principle, a pasticcio in the fullest sense of the word. Mrs Delany, whose instinct was generally right, told her sister ‘it did not please me as usual'.

Judas
and
Messiah
wound up a successful season, at the end of which Handel was able to bank the impressive sum of £1,200, evidence that the oratorios were rather belatedly finding their market. Elsewhere in London their commercial bullishness was being exploited: the New Theatre in the Haymarket presented
Acis and Galatea
for the benefit of child prodigy Jonathan Snow, probably the son of Handel's trumpet soloist Valentine, and two months later the evergreen serenata featured again, this time at Ranelagh House, ‘for the Benefit of the
Marine Society
, towards cloathing Men and Boys for the Sea to go on Board his Majesty's Ships . . . Tea, Coffee, &c. included as usual.' The latter performance was conducted by Stanley, also at the keyboard for a
Samson
evening at the Great Room in Dean Street, Soho, for Frasi's benefit. Despite the high fees she commanded (six guineas for a Foundling
Messiah
) the soprano's debts were a continuing problem and ultimately forced her to flee the country.

Throughout most of 1758 Handel's general state of health seems to have been fairly good. We know from an entry in the diary of the barrister John Baker that the tradition of domestic rehearsals at Brook Street continued and the same source later shows that the composer had not relinquished his summer visits to the spas. On 26 August Baker, newly arrived at Tunbridge Wells, noted, ‘Handel and his Dr Murrell, Taylor the oculist . . .' Morell was doubtless there as much in the capacity of assistant as friend; Taylor was the quack John ‘Chevalier' Taylor, whose attempt at restoring Handel's eyesight, however predictably unsuccessful, was puffed as a triumph in verses in the
London Chronicle
describing the Muses' appeal to Apollo on the blind composer's behalf.

The following year's oratorio season, however, with revivals of
Solomon
,
Susanna
and
Samson
, must have proved especially strenuous and the
Whitehall Evening Post
of 7 April 1759 announced Handel's intention of ‘setting out for Bath, to try the Benefit of the Waters'. The journey was never even begun. A
Messiah
on the previous night had taxed him severely:
he was ‘apparently in great suffering; but when he came to his concerto he rallied, and kindling as he advanced, descanted extemporaneously with his accustomed ability and force; of a most dignified and awe-inspiring port'. Handel went home, took to his bed and never rose from it again. Early in the morning of 14 April, he died at the age of seventy-four.

His last moments are best recalled for us in a touching letter by his friend James Smyth, a perfumier living in nearby Bond Street, who was to have accompanied him to Bath. His account, written to Mrs Delany's brother Bernard Granville, merits quoting in full.

The reference to ‘a good Christian, with a true sense of his duty to God and man' reminds us that Handel's religious beliefs had not waned with the years. Some weeks before his death he had been visited by two distinguished evangelicals, Selina, Lady Huntingdon, and the MP Colonel Martin Madan, the former celebrated as ‘the Queen of the Methodists', the latter one of those kindly spirits who was subsequently to thicken the spiritual gloom of the poet Cowper, and both of them no doubt hoping for some last-minute tremors of guilty renunciation as Handel prepared to face his God. Lady Huntingdon, who had apparently known the composer in her youth, wrote in her diary: ‘He is now old, and at the close of his long career; yet he is not dismayed at the prospect before him. Blessed be God for the comforts and consolations which the Gospel affords in every situation, and in every time of our need. Mr Madan has been with him often, and he seems much attached to him.'