Handel (61 page)

He left the world, however, as he had dwelt in it, a Lutheran communicant within the Church of England. The papers were so quick to report his death that they hustled the notice in a day early – ‘the great musician' . . . ‘the famous musician' . . .‘greatly regretted' etc. – but, as Smyth noted, he died on Saturday the 14th. Though the
London Chronicle
reported that he was to be buried in the Foundling Hospital graveyard, close to Coram himself, Handel had already recorded a wish for a funeral and interment in Westminster Abbey, and on the evening of the 20th the ceremony was carried out. ‘On Friday Night the Remains of the late Mr Handel were deposited at the Foot of the Duke of Argyle's Monument in Westminster Abbey, the Bishop, Prebendaries, and the whole Choir 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 Bishop was Dr Zachary Pearce of Rochester, who held the Deanery of Westminster
in commendam
: he was a noted preacher, but no funeral address appears to have survived. The Abbey's Clerk of Works observed that the grave lay ‘8 feet from the Duke of Argyle's Iron Railes . . . N.B. There may be made very good graves on his Right and Left by Diging up a Foundation of an old Staircase; Room at the feet . . .' The undertaker was a Mr Gordon and the spare room at Handel's feet was used over a century later for no less a celebrity than Charles Dickens.

Appropriately, he had been placed near Argyle, ‘Red John of the Battles', a former governor of the Royal Academy of Music and, like the Duke's, his monument was the work of Louis-François Roubiliac. The two memorials make an interesting contrast: it is plain that the sculptor's sympathies were more with the musician than with the warrior. This is an older Handel than the lyre player of Vauxhall, but an image no less strikingly intimate and alive. The age's budding romanticism shows in the bardic figure of the cloud-born David, while the trumpet and gamba are throwbacks to rococo decoration, but the essential vitality of the man himself is superbly captured in the
dégagé
yet flamboyant full-length standing effigy, significantly without a wig. In the floor beneath, a leger stone features the coat of arms granted over sixty years earlier to Dr Georg Händel in his medical capacity, featuring a boy carrying a urine sample in a flask, a similar image forming the crest – ultimate proof, should it ever have been demanded, of his son's status as a gentleman.

Handel's second name was given on the monument as Frederick, but the codicils of his will indicate that his preferred anglicizing was ‘Frideric' and so for us it should ideally remain. The original will, a brief enough document, had been made on 1 June 1750. Handel left all his clothes and £300 to his manservant Peter Le Blond and a year's wages to the rest of his household. Other bequests were made to German relatives, including the wife of his cousin Georg Taust, pastor of Giebichenstein and a great-nephew in Copenhagen, with the residue of the estate going to ‘my Dear Niece Johanna Friderica Floerken of Gotha in Saxony', the sole executrix. The larger of his two harpsichords, ‘my little House Organ' and all his manuscripts went to Johann Christoph Schmidt and the only other English legatee was James Hunter, a scarlet-dyer of Old Ford.

The first of the four codicils, made six years later, shows his finances in better shape, with increased legacies to everyone except Hunter, and the names of Thomas Morell and Newburgh Hamilton included. The Huguenot merchant George Amyand, later MP for Barnstaple, now figures as coexecutor, with a £200 bequest. Some nine months later, however, Le Blond died and Handel transferred his share in the inheritance to his nephew John Duburk. In the same year a third codicil gave the Covent Garden theatre organ to John Rich and a fair copy of
Messiah
score and parts to the Foundling Hospital,
in whose possession they still are. Two portrait studies by Balthasar Denner (who had earlier painted Handel himself ) were left to Jennens and the landscapes attributed to Rembrandt were presented to Bernard Granville.

It is the last codicil, made on Handel's deathbed and witnessed by Thomas Harris and his fellow lawyer John Hetherington, which best bears witness to the extent of the composer's generosity. His total estate was computed at some £20,000, a handsome reward for all the monetary hiccups of the 1730s and the erratic box office of the oratorios. The Decayed Musicians' charity, which he had always ardently supported, got £1,000, and the loyal violinist Matthew Dubourg was also remembered. Two widows, Mrs Palmer of Chelsea and Mrs Mayne of Kensington, each received small bequests, and Mrs Delany's friend Anne Donnellan was left fifty guineas. To the Brook Street maidservants Handel left ‘each one years wages over and above what shall be due to them at the time of my death', while Mr Gowland, the apothecary of New Bond Street, whose services must have been much in demand during these final years, was recompensed with £50.

There is absolutely no evidence, either in the will or the codicils, of any intention by Handel to cut out Johann Christoph Schmidt altogether as a beneficiary. It is true that the two had quarrelled while at Tunbridge Wells, but this was probably the result of one of Handel's volcanic explosions of temper. A reconciliation, however, was effected easily enough by John Christopher Smith, by the pardonable use of moral blackmail. ‘About three weeks before Handel's death, he desired Smith junior to receive the sacrament with him. Smith asked him how he would communicate, when he was not at peace with all the world, and especially when he was at enmity with his former friend; who, though he might have offended him once, had been faithful and affectionate to him for thirty years. Handel was so much affected by this representation, that he was immediately reconciled . . .'

The monument was erected, the bequests duly realized (there was a squabble in October 1759 between Amyand and the Tausts as to the size of their legacy) and the mourning muses meanwhile hurried to assume their stations.
The
Gazeteer
, the
London Evening Post
and the
Whitehall Evening Post
syndicated their epitaph, by a certain ‘H—y' of Lincoln's Inn, with its bathetic concluding couplet:

The
Public Advertiser
ventured an acrostic:

Worthiest of all poetic tributes was ‘The Tears of Music' by John Langhorne, issued in 1760 but surely written as a genuinely heartfelt response to the news of the composer's death, and attempting to reproduce the overwhelming effect of the oratorios upon a refined sensibility:

Dead as Handel now was, the bizarre dispositions of Fate had determined that his reputation was to thrive as never before. The oratorio concerts had become an established feature of the London season and John Christopher Smith, keeper, as it were, of the Handelian seal, took over at the Foundling Hospital, assisted at Covent Garden by John Stanley. On his father's death in 1763 he inherited the great collection of autograph manuscripts which, in return for a pension from George III, he left to the Royal Library and which were later transferred to the British Museum.

His audience was a public very different from that which insensate Italophilia had driven to scorn and rejection of the composer decades before. London's moral and aesthetic climate had changed in the atmosphere of the shock dealt by the news of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, assisted by the rise of Methodism and by a sensibility tending away from artifice and decoration towards illusions of spontaneity. Handel now became the favourite of those in search of the natural and the sublime, and a visit to the oratorio was a mark of good taste in polite society. It was during this period that the custom initiated by George II of standing during the Hallelujah Chorus became widespread and the gradual process began of transforming Handel into something little short of seraphic.

A typical enthusiast was Anna Seward, ‘Swan of Lichfield' and friend of Dr Johnson, who wrote of the composer as ‘pre-eminent, incomparable, transcendent, unrivalled, unequalled', and observed with some justice that ‘in music, when it marries immortal verse, and then only is it truly sublime, Handel stands approachless as Shakespeare himself in grandeur and variety'. She seems to have been undisturbed by what perplexed others, the relationship of oratorio to the eighteenth-century notion of kinds and a prevailing sense of its impropriety if performed in a church, and was moved to describe William Cowper as a ‘vapourish egotist' for having presumed to censure such performances in his poem ‘The Task'.

‘A religious service instituted in honor of a Musician and performed in the house of God', wrote Cowper to his friend John Newton, ‘is a subject that calls loudly for the animadversion of an enlighten'd minister.' Newton, a rabid evangelical with little apparent feeling for the arts,
duly responded with a series of fifty sermons on
Messiah
, ‘Expository Discourses, on the Series of Scriptural Passages, which form the Subject of the Celebrated Oratorio of Handel', though his admonitions failed to check the work's rising popularity.

Perhaps the most extraordinary manifestation of Handel enthusiasm in the provinces was the series of performances in aid of the charitable foundations set up by the Reverend William Hanbury at Church Langton in Leicestershire. Hanbury's diffuse account of the charity is in fact a slab of autobiography, from which the author emerges as an eccentric, vainglorious bore with a talent for making enemies. While we may sympathize with him for the loss of his pet dogs, one of whom was choked to death with a table fork by a sadistic gamekeeper belonging to a Mrs Byrd on whose land he had trespassed, we can only gape at his grandiose schemes, which included redecorating the church, installing a new organ, appointing an organist and setting up a school where thirty-six poor boys were to be taught reading, writing, ‘to cast accompts, and sing psalms'. To this were later to be added a printing office, a hospital, a picture gallery, professorships in grammar, botany, music, poetry and antiquity.

Despite increasing quarrelsomeness between Hanbury, the charity trustees and the villagers, the musical events went ahead as planned and the vicar seems to have been aided in the whole enterprise by the dogged determination that derives from a complete lack of any sense of humour. The performers included some of the best London voices and instrumentalists, and Hanbury is deathlessly hyperbolic in his accounts of them – ‘Swarms of footmen, horses, coaches, chaises, &c . . . a most, brilliant appearance . . . company came pouring in . . . music most affecting . . . tears seen trickling down the faces of many' and so on. The oratorios themselves included
Messiah
,
Judas Maccabaeus
and
Samson
, and though at first given in the parish church were later transferred to a specially constructed concert hall. It need hardly be added that Hanbury's description includes strictures on the tardy arrival of the conductor, no less than Dr William Hayes himself, in whose magisterial riposte, showing up the village Maecenas as ungrateful, litigious and little better than a liar, Hanbury met his match.

The summit of eighteenth-century Handel worship and an event that set what was ultimately a dangerous example to succeeding English Handelians was reached in 1784 with the grand celebration in Westminster Abbey designed to commemorate the supposed centenary of the composer's birth and detailed for us in its various stages by Charles Burney,
whose handsome commemorative volume contained illustrations by his sons and a sonorous dedication by Dr Johnson to King George III. There were five concerts in all, spread over a three-week period from the end of May to the beginning of June, the last two being laid on by special command of the music-loving King and Queen. The programme for the first was orthodox enough, including the
Dettingen Te Deum
and selections from the Funeral Anthem, but the second, ‘judiciously calculated to display his abilities in
Secular
and
Dramatic
Music', may have raised a few eyebrows, for though it took place in the Pantheon, specially decorated and enlarged for the occasion, the items made up a complete Handelian shop window, placing ‘Sorge infausta' from
Ariodante
side by side with ‘Ye sons of Israel' in
Joshua
, and ending, after favourite numbers from
Rodelinda
and
Alcina
, with the Coronation Anthem
My heart is inditing.
The final concert was a repeat performance of
Messiah
, first given a week earlier, and the whole festival produced the impressive sum of £12,736 12s. 10d, of which over half was presented to the Society for Decayed Musicians and the Westminster Hospital.