Handel (15 page)

Philips's allusion to ‘Kind Health' bringing new life to the Queen is highly topical, since she was severely ill during early February 1713, with a renewed attack of the chronic gout which, culminating in acute erysipelas, carried her off in the summer of the following year. She had to be carried into the Great Presence Chamber at St James's Palace, where presumably the ode was performed. Those present were determined, whatever Anne's condition, to mark the royal birthday in style. ‘I never saw it celebrated with so much Luxury and fine Cloaths,' noted Jonathan Swift, who had made Handel's acquaintance through his friends Pope and Arbuthnot. Joining Weeley, Elford and Hughes in an exceptional line-up of soloists were the contralto Jane Barbier, an original cast member from
Il Pastor Fido
and
Teseo
, and Anastasia Robinson, a soprano who would later join Handel's operatic company in the Haymarket.

Philips had perhaps imagined, in writing the ode, that Handel would set the two-line refrain of each stanza to the same music throughout. In fact, the skill with which the composer varies his treatment of it at each appearance is one of the noteworthy features of this engaging piece. The sensitivity with which he handled such banal material looks forward to the extraordinary transformations wrought on some of the less promising oratorio texts of the 1740s. His essentially pictorial imagination fixes on the simplest of images, enriching it with what, for a bare twenty-five minutes of music, is an astonishing array of textures. The piece's organic quality is enhanced by the scoring. It seems a perfectly logical progression from the translucent opening largo, a dialogue between alto and trumpet solos, to the joyous closing antiphonies, in which the trumpet, held back since the first number, returns, and whose double choir effect and reprise of the earlier chorus recall the Venetian
cori spezzati
and the
Sicut erat in principio
trick, surely reflexes from the Italian years.
Much has been made of a Purcellian influence in the ode, but this is never particularly striking. A glance at Purcell and at other English court composers perhaps affected the external structure, in Handel's use of interlocked solo and chorus, and of dance rhythms such as passacaglia, siciliano and minuet. There are more especially Purcellian touches in his next music for English words, written before the ode but performed after it.

Handel composed the
Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate
during January 1713. This and the ode must have been part of a package, both in their different ways intended to celebrate a peace that was almost inevitable, owing largely to the political manoeuvres of the Queen's ministers, Oxford and St John, to the successful propaganda of works such as Swift's
Conduct of the Allies
and to the notably faineant character of English military commitment in Europe following Marlborough's dismissal. To suggest that Handel was in some way party to secret political developments is an exaggeration. It was common knowledge that peace negotiations were pending: the Queen's Speech of 1711 had contained a controversial reference to ‘the opening of the Treaty of a general peace' and though the Whigs had initially combined to carry a motion rejecting the proposals, the government finally won through and the Utrecht conference began on 18 January 1712.

On Handel's part, how would such a public gesture of commitment to the treaty, or to what it represented in terms of current alignments within English national politics, be received by the Elector of Hanover? Officially Georg Ludwig was opposed to the peace: his remonstrance against British perfidy in abandoning a recent agreement to bolster the Netherlands against attacks from France had been made public in 1711. Privately, however, he must have been aware of the advantage to him of a settlement which effectively quashed the threat of a Jacobite invasion of England, supported by French arms, once Anne was dead. Handel was evidently prepared to risk his master's displeasure, as a letter from Christoph Friedrich Kreienberg, Hanoverian Resident in London, makes clear. The arrangement appears to have been that though the composer's dismissal as kapellmeister was inevitable, Georg Ludwig would not necessarily be unhappy if he then offered his services to Queen Anne (Kreienberg says that ‘this was precisely the generous intention of His Highness'). Notice to quit was nevertheless administered a shade too peremptorily for Handel's liking.
A pity, according to Kreienberg, since, as a friend of the Queen's doctor John Arbuthnot,
^*(h)
who ‘has the composer constantly at his house', Handel ‘could have been extremely useful, as he has been on several occasions by giving me information of circumstances which have often enlightened me as to the condition of the Queen's health'. In return, Handel could pass on to Arbuthnot ‘stories about Hanover . . .you will understand the stories to which I refer', subsequently relayed to Anne herself, who was apparently agog for them. Kreienberg ends with the significant detail that he had ‘arranged things so that Handel could write to M. de Kielmansegg to extricate himself gracefully, and I let slip a few words to inform him that, when some day His Highness comes here, he might enter his service'.

The two canticles were given in St Paul's at the thanksgiving service on 5 July. Three public rehearsals, the earliest of them in March, had been trailed by the London papers, whose reporters afterwards noticed the presence of ‘many Persons of Quality of both Sexes'. Efficient Tory news management gave the peace celebrations the highest possible profile, but the Queen, who had announced the news of the treaty's signing to Parliament on 7 April, did not attend. ‘I find myself soe much tyerd with the little fatigue of yesterday', she wrote to Oxford, ‘that it will be impossible for one to undertake that of going to St Paul's; but however I think both Houses should go thither and I will perform my devotions at St James's and be contented without a sermon. It is really very uneasy for me that I cannot go, which I hope all my friends believe.' Whigs meanwhile stayed away in droves, ‘since it would have been preposterous, if not a mocking of Religion, for Men to return Almighty God Thanks for a Peace, which they had endeavoured to prevent, and still disapproved'.

Among them was the former Lord Chancellor, William Lord Cowper, whose mother Sarah sneeringly referred in her diary to ‘the Church Opera . . .finish'd at the Cathedral of St Paul'. What she and Queen Anne did not hear was once again music of tremendous authority and distinction, which must have given substantial pause to the composers present at the occasion.
Handel resorted to the comparatively rare expedient in contemporary English church music of introducing oboes and a flute into the score, and saving the trumpets and timpani in the Te Deum, despite festal associations, for a spectacular appearance some three-quarters of the way into the piece. Much more important than these factors, in view of his later development, is his free handling of the chorus. The temptation in both pieces must have been to divide the verses into distinct solo and choral episodes, but in the Te Deum Handel avoids this in favour of a far more complex fusion of the two, seen at its best in the cumulative treatment of the several lines in the ‘Glorious company of the apostles' section, where the chorus represents ‘the holy church throughout all the world' and in the highly dramatic ‘When thou took'st upon thee', in which the solo lines jarring and bumping against each other for ‘the sharpness of death' are overwhelmed by the choral ‘Thou didst open the kingdom of Heaven to all believers'. This sense of the choir as an involved participant, anticipating the uses Handel made of it in his mature oratorios, is clinched by the ending of the Jubilate. After a vividly Purcellian opening, with solo and chorus accompanied by trumpets and drums, the music grows more inward and subdued, the intimate dialogue of its duet and trio numbers matched by learned counterpoint and some thoughtful word-painting in the chromatic staircase of ‘his truth endureth from generation to generation'. None of this prepares us for the opulence of the final Gloria and Amen, the resourceful calibration of their dramatic climaxes surely owing something to Handel's careful assessment of acoustic possibilities – and limitations – within the new St Paul's.

The commissions for both the ode and the two canticles were perhaps obtained through the good offices of somebody in the Burlington circle, possibly the Dowager Countess herself, as one of the bedchamber women who had managed to weather the storms occasioned by the Queen's transfer of favour from the Marlboroughs to the Mashams. Anne's granting of a £200 pension to Handel, though a royal breach of the law (foreigners were not permitted to receive such emoluments) was probably not, as has been suggested, a snook cocked at the Elector so much as an oblique compliment to the man on whom the Queen had already, in her mind at any rate, settled the succession.

At a quarter to eight in the morning of Sunday, 1 August 1714 Anne died, at the age of forty-nine. In the last stages of her long illness (of which Arbuthnot wrote to Swift ‘I believe sleep was never more welcome to a weary traveller than death was to her') she had handed the white staff of Lord Treasurer to the Duke of Shrewsbury,
a symbolic rebuff to Jacobite hopes. The kingdom was put in readiness to welcome the Elector: the ports were closed, regiments were moved to London and a watch was set on suspected persons, while the horses and arms of Papists throughout the nation were commandeered, a naval squadron was sent to Holland to escort King George I of England, Scotland and Ireland to his new realm, and James Craggs, shortly to be made secretary of state, was despatched to Hanover with news of the great change. In London preparations were afoot to receive not just the monarch himself, but his son Georg August and daughter-in-law Caroline of Brandenburg Ansbach, together with their children.

With the Tories no longer in the ascendant, what was Handel's place in the new order of things? King George was politically shrewd, equipped with an excellent memory and had been efficiently briefed by diplomats and secret agents over the past few years on the shifting landscape of party interests and intrigues. Whigs great or small were now to receive their various rewards in a comprehensive overhaul of the royal household, civil service and government departments. The ex-kapellmeister, having written three works – a fourth if we count
Echeggiate, festeggiate
– in praise of the shabby peace treaty and received a handsome pension for his pains, might reasonably have expected a cold shoulder from the nascent Hanoverian regime or even the loss of his emolument altogether.

George and his son and daughter-in-law (now styled Prince and Princess of Wales) were too fond of music, however, to let Handel slip into oblivion once they themselves were settled in London. The attachment to Germany, which remained powerful in the dynasty until the twentieth century, a link correspondingly resented and misunderstood by its British subjects, would surely have strengthened the bond between the King and a successful young Saxon master establishing himself with such resourcefulness and panache on the London musical scene. Far from grudge-bearing or disfavour, what now began to develop among the royal trio, freshly arrived from Hanover, was an atmosphere of protective loyalty towards Handel, a devotion that passed down subsequent generations and is thoroughly creditable to the family.

The gradual process of assimilating Handel into the life of the new court began with the inclusion of his church music in services at the Chapel Royal of St James's Palace at which royalty was present.
An unspecified Te Deum, possibly the ‘Utrecht' shorn of any political associations, was reported by the
Weekly Packet
, a journal noted for its inaccuracy, in the 25 September–2 October issue. On Sunday, 17 October a Hamburg newspaper noted a Te Deum sung ‘with another excellent thanksgiving piece with music composed by the famous musico Mr Handel' to celebrate the safe landing at Margate of Caroline, Princess of Wales, and her two eldest daughters. This setting of the canticle may have been the so-called ‘Caroline' Te Deum HWV 280, an attractive work on a more intimate scale than the ‘Utrecht', using slightly smaller forces and paying a more conscious homage to Purcell's setting of the same text. Its expansive central aria ‘When thou tookest upon thee', for alto with a solo flute adding shimmer to the string accompaniment, was the last music Handel wrote for Richard Elford, who died a few days later of an unspecified fever at his house in Westminster, aged thirty-eight. ‘His voice had all the Advantages Man could wish for, or Nature bestow,' ran an obituary in the
Post-Boy
, ‘which, together with his excellent Acquirements of Manner and Judgement, render'd him the most complete and agreeable Performer produced in this Age.' For Handel, who could never quite get the singer's name right, always Germanizing it as ‘Elfurt', ‘Eilfort' or ‘Eilfurt', he was the first of that memorable sequence of vocal performers around whom the composer created music designed both to enhance their specific talents and develop these to mutual advantage. Anna Strada, John Beard, Susanna Cibber and the singing actress Kitty Clive would all benefit from this relationship, as, however reluctantly and ungratefully, would the divas and castrati engaged for his successive operatic seasons.

Writers on Handel have made much of the supposed disfavour under which the kapellmeister now laboured with his royal master. The idea that he was compelled to appease George I for having spent some three years away from Hanover is obviously fanciful. It has justly been pointed out that economic reasons connected with George's commitment to the war made it necessary for him to reduce the Herrenhausen musical establishment and that there would thus have been little for Handel to do there beyond composing duets for Princess Caroline or writing instrumental pieces. Further confirmation that Handel was acceptable to the new establishment at St James's came with the arrival in London during 1714 of two other musical foreigners, the stellar violinists Francesco Maria Veracini and Francesco Geminiani.
Veracini gave solo performances between the acts at the opera, but his compositions and performing style were not to the audience's taste and he soon left, to return in 1735 as leader of the Haymarket band and composer of various operas, among them an Italianate version of
As You Like It
, which Burney calls ‘wild, awkward and unpleasant'. He was a vain, eccentric and difficult character, with little tolerance of other musicians, but though he criticized Handel he was not ashamed to take part in recitals at court with him, and his fine Opus 1 violin sonatas of 1721 have enough in them to suggest that the two masters paid due attention to each other's work. Geminiani commanded a comparable respect from string players as the pupil of Corelli's who had most successfully absorbed his teacher's traditions, both as player and writer for the instrument. In certain respects the music of his sonatas and concertos seems as much a determined effort not to emulate his great German contemporary as to renew Corellian models; such a dogged independence won him the advocacy of Charles Avison, one of Handel's severest critics. His regard for Handel as a performer, however, was considerable (the two may have met at some stage on the Italian journey) and to the King's request that he give some of his violin sonatas before a select court audience he assented on condition that Handel was the accompanist.