Handel (16 page)

These works, published in 1716, were dedicated to Baron Kielmansegg, whose influence with the King owed something to the fact that the Baroness was one of George's two mistresses. The other, on whom the King fathered two illegitimate daughters, was Melusine von der Schulenburg, whose younger child Petronilla Melusine, later wife of the letter-writer Lord Chesterfield, was one of Handel's pupils. Rapidly running to fat, the Baroness soon earned the nickname of ‘the Elephant', while Melusine, tall and stick-thin, was known as ‘the Maypole'. The pair were not unreasonably accused of exploiting their roles as royal odalisques via a network of patronage, jobbery and corruption, but Kielmansegg himself remained above reproach in the unenviable role of a
mari complaisant.
He may have been helpful to Handel in encouraging the King to order the payment, during October 1715, of arrears in salary due to the composer from his period of employment in Hanover three years earlier.

Kielmansegg seems also to have been involved in the episode most famously linked to the canard of a ‘reconciliation' between Handel and King George I. The circumstances surrounding the commissioning and performance of the pieces known collectively as the
Water Music
on Wednesday, 17 July 1717, are still far from clear. By now a serious rift had developed between the monarch and his son George, Prince of Wales, their differences fomented by the latter's wife Caroline, with her taste for intrigue among the political factions within the Whig administration. The Prince and Princess, almost childishly excited by the influence they seemed to exert on the parliamentary cadres, set up an alternative court at Leicester House (in what is now Leicester Square) and quarrelled with the King over the most trifling of issues. The Prince, unlike his father, enjoyed public appearances, Caroline, in contrast to the royal mistresses, was stylish and attractive, and the pair were eager to gain public approval in a city whose inhabitants had little enthusiasm for the new dynasty or else privately espoused the Jacobite cause.

The Hanoverians would have remembered with pleasure the boating parties on the lake at Herrenhausen, the electoral summer palace, just as they would have recalled similar water-borne serenades in Venice, where the family kept a palace and rented boxes at the various opera houses. In 1715, when relations between the King and his son were less strained, the Prince and Princess had taken to the river on 12 July and George had joined them for another trip on the following day. The pattern of these two trips was repeated the following year, when they brought their children with them. On the 1717 outing the Waleses were notable by their absence, and it is quite possible that the King, conquering his reluctance to court popularity, intended the occasion as a propaganda exercise, showing Londoners that he was now thoroughly at ease in his new realm and not disposed to contest his position with a fractious heir apparent.

Fond of attending Heidegger's novel if slightly disreputable winter masquerades, which alternated with opera nights during the season, George had the idea of getting him to provide a summer river concert on a similar subscription basis. Kielmansegg, as intermediary, forced to bring back reasonable economic objections to the scheme from Heidegger,
undertook to lay on the entertainment himself, and at eight in the evening the King ‘took Water at Whitehall in an open Barge' accompanied by a seraglio of ladies and set off towards Chelsea, followed by a second barge ‘wherein were 50 Instruments of all sorts, who play'd all the Way from Lambeth (while the Barges drove with the Tide without Rowing, as far as Chelsea) the finest Symphonies, compos'd express for this Occasion by Mr Hendel; which his Majesty liked so well, that he caus'd it to be plaid over three times in going and returning. At Eleven his Majesty went a-shore at Chelsea, where a Supper was prepar'd, and then there was another very fine Consort of Musick, which lasted till 2; after which, his Majesty came again into his Barge, and return'd the same Way, the Musick continuing to play till he landed.' In fact, the royal party took up three barges and a smaller oared vessel called a shallop, while the orchestra took over a barge belonging to one of the City livery companies. Tide timetables for 17 July suggest that at least two performances of the
Water Music
could easily have been accommodated within the voyages between Whitehall and Chelsea. The musicians alone cost Kielmansegg £150 and his wife was the hostess at the supper party at Lady Ranelagh's villa, standing in what are now part of the Royal Hospital grounds.

The autograph manuscript of the
Water Music
is lost and Handel himself was almost certainly not responsible for its subsequent division into three suites, the form in which it is now most often performed. Some of the movements were doubtless already in existence before the commission arrived. Wishing to please his Hanoverian master, the composer may well have sought to replicate the kind of extended orchestral collections then popular in Germany, in which a French overture introduces a sequence of dance numbers. Such works formed the staple repertoire of the court band at Herrenhausen. Their idiom is markedly Gallic in its tuneful charm and rhythmic variety, and so too is that of the
Water Music
. A diversity of key and orchestration among the three suites as we now know them makes plausible the suggestion that they may have been designed for separate moments during the evening, though finally the whole series, as we have seen, was played at a stretch and then given twice more.

Handel's choice of mood, colour and tonality creates a potent contrast. King George's cousin and friend, the Duke of Orleans, now Regent of France for the infant Louis XV, had been a pupil of Marc-Antoine Charpentier,
the most versatile French composer of his generation, who gave him a list of his ideas on tonal ‘affects', under the heading ‘
Energie des Modes
'. It is interesting to match this, as one of many examples of the importance attached to key signature by Baroque musicians, with a piece which, more than many others, shows Handel's familiarity with the French idiom. Horns, oboes and bassoons are blended with strings for the opening group of pieces, in F major. Charpentier thought this key to be ‘
furieux et emporté
' but any musical carrying-away is with all the serenity appropriate to the royal embarkation. From the outset Handel's delicacy as an orchestrator makes him alert to the beauties of varied sonority and echo effects in the resonant clarity of a summer evening on the river. For Charpentier D major was ‘
joyeux et très guerrier
', and Handel's colourful splash of trumpets, horns, woodwind and strings in the second group must have seemed an entirely suitable tribute to a seasoned campaigner from his master of horse, which Kielmansegg was. For the final collection, in G,
doucement joyeux
is the perfect definition. With flutes and recorders shading the melodies, the pieces form an elegant anthology of French ballroom music, while a pair of more homely English intruders make their presence felt in the hobnail-booted jollity of the two country dances.

The King's arrival in 1714, though it may not have brought Handel into any sort of disfavour, left him in effect without a job. George inherited the court and chapel establishments created during Anne's reign, and Handel was destined never to occupy any of the offices filled by composers such as Croft and Eccles. Burlington's patronage seems to have been more like the friendship of an influential host than the sort of supply-and-demand relationship exemplified by Prince Ruspoli or the Neapolitan nobility. The Italian opera at the Haymarket folded after the 1717 season and, apart from the
Water Music
, there were no other commissions forthcoming for Handel. In November, to make matters somewhat harder, as
The Political State of Great Britain
reported, ‘on the 15th, in the Morning, dy'd the Baron de Kilmanseck, Master of the Horse to his Majesty . . .a Gentleman of Parts, who had a good Taste of Literature and Learning, and great Skill in Musick and Painting, and who was a great Encourager of Arts and Sciences'.

It is possible that at this juncture Handel may have entertained serious thoughts of becoming a resident composer on the payroll of a noble household,
a dignified and lucrative professional outlet for a young musician. Several of his associates took on such work: Nicola Haym, for example, had been composer and performer in the family of the Earl of Bedford in Bloomsbury and Covent Garden, and Bononcini was to become the protégé of the eccentric Henrietta Spencer, Duchess of Marlborough. Handel's fellow artist at the Britton concerts, Johann Christoph Pepusch, had meanwhile secured the plum post of music master in one of the age's grandest establishments, the household of James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon and later Duke of Chandos.

A member of a clan of minor Herefordshire gentry who, much later in the century, could claim kinship with Jane Austen through the antiquarian Egerton Brydges, Carnarvon had made his fortune as paymaster of the English armies during the Spanish Succession war. He was a shameless believer in nest-feathering through skilful farming of national resources, and used public funds to buy shares and pension rights, speculated in silver, took
douceurs
from Austrian and Dutch diplomats, and fiddled the clothing contracts for the Portuguese army. Estimated to have made nearly £600,000 out of the office from 1705 onwards, he took care, on Godolphin's fall five years later, to curry favour with Harley while not losing touch with the Marlboroughs. In all this, however, he was no worse, if certainly no better, than any high-ranking government official of his day or any other.

The result was not only an earldom and a dukedom within six years of the King's accession, but a burst of opulence without serious parallel in the aristocratic life of the period. Though never as grand as Blenheim or Castle Howard, the house Brydges built for himself at Cannons, on the fringes of Edgware, was sufficiently magnificent to be taken, despite all the author's denials, as the original of Pope's ‘Timon's Villa', that ghastly monstrance of conspicuous waste, which provides the dominant image in the first of the
Moral Essays.
Colonial connexions made during Brydges's paymastership enabled him to stock his eighty-three-acre pleasure grounds (including fish ponds and a wilderness) with exotic fauna such as flamingos, eagles, storks, mockingbirds and macaws. Guests were entertained, in what was really a museum of Augustan good taste, with a choice library and picture collection, and an exceptionally fine table – drinks included arrack, usquebaugh, Hereford redstreak cider,
Nottingham beer, ‘Kill Priest' and ‘Barbados Mordelleeno'.

The enormous household was divided into five tables in the servants' hall, one each for the Offices, Kitchen, Farmyard, ‘Gentlemen of the Horse' and Musicians. We know the salaries of most of these people: while Pepusch, for example, got £100 a year, Joseph Cox the stablehand only got £2, and so did a dairymaid with the wonderful name of Eliza Squelch. There were several musicians on the establishment, some of whom appear to have doubled as domestic servants. George Monroe, later organist at St Peter Cornhill and keyboard player in the Goodman's Fields theatre band, started his career as a page at Cannons, where he was taught by Pepusch and Handel. A certain Gherardo, ‘one of my Musick', accompanied Carnarvon's son on the grand tour, with the significant recommendation that ‘he shaves very well & hath an excellent hand on the violin, & all necessary languages'.

Handel is unlikely to have wanted to serve Lord Carnarvon on quite such a humble basis, but the Earl was an affable, generous employer, noted for his loyalty and attentiveness to those under his patronage. Added to which, he had spent two years in Germany as a student at the Duke of Brunswick's academy in Wolfenbüttel, during which time he made useful connexions in neighbouring Hanover. Doubtless these, as much as Carnarvon's love of music, helped to forge a link between the English aristocrat and the German composer, though Handel never joined the Cannons household and it is noteworthy that Carnarvon referred to him as ‘Mr Handel', implying respect rather than an assumption of social superiority.

Recommendations were hardly necessary. Carnarvon and Burlington were acquainted, and the Earl was on good terms with Arbuthnot, Swift and Pope. The pomp and grandeur of Cannons was the subject of continual comment by these and other writers, but Carnarvon was obviously pleased with his achievements. A fine new chapel was being built, with a ceiling by the Trevisan artist Antonio Bellucci and specially designed windows, though until it was finished services took place in the nearby parish church of St Lawrence, Whitchurch, and it was for this that Handel now furnished eleven new anthems. Writing to Arbuthnot, Carnarvon, delighted with the result, says: ‘Mr Handle has made me two new Anthems very noble ones & most think they far exceed the two first. He is at work for 2 more & some Overtures to be plaied before the first lesson.
You had as good take Cannons in your way to London.'

What used to be called the Chandos anthems have recently been rechristened the Cannons anthems, since Carnarvon did not acquire his dukedom until two years after they were composed. Set mainly to psalm texts, their music, consolidating on the experience acquired while Handel was writing his earlier English canticles, is an effective mixture of original work with recycled material from the
Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate
and the
Caroline Te Deum
. He seems to have written them in pairs, a newly composed anthem alongside one using already existing music. Since the choir at St Lawrence's was considerably smaller than that of the Chapel Royal, Handel placed more emphasis on solo episodes, with the various choruses as vocal ensembles, accompanied by a small band with perhaps one player per part. Because Carnarvon is said to have disliked the alto voice, solos are awarded only to treble, tenor and bass.

Throughout the anthems the choral writing displays an imaginative resourcefulness and the exhilarating rhythmic pulse of the opening numbers of ‘Let God arise' or ‘O praise the Lord with one consent', with its chorale-like use of Croft's ‘St Anne' tune, is totally infectious. In the solo items a much quieter, more restrained hand is at work, and though at times a hint of embarrassed self-consciousness sets in, almost as if religious decorum is getting the better of the composer, these movements in general form apt islands of introspection within each work.