Handel (43 page)

As though this were not enough, Handel, so Newburgh Hamilton told Lord Strafford, had been caught in the continuing crossfire between George II and the Prince of Wales. ‘The P— design'd to have a concert every friday night & desir'd Mr Handel to make one, which he readily agreed to; but it came to the K—'s ears, & he sent Mr Handel an order, not to go near the P: I did not believe it, till I had it this morning from his own mouth.' Dependent on the continuance of long-standing royal favour, he can honestly have had no choice. His sole practical consolation lay in the benefit concert given at the Haymarket on 28 March, featuring a new version of
As pants the hart
, selections from
Deborah
and
My heart is inditing
, and at which Lord Egmont, counting ‘near 1,300 persons besides the gallery and upper gallery', estimated that ‘I suppose he got this night 1,000 pounds'.

Almost opposite his house in Brook Street, however, was an alley whose name, Poverty Lane, may currently have held a certain menacing significance. He was always prosperous, his financial affairs (including buying and selling shares) generally well managed, but the realities of being a poor musician in a city already bursting with musical life were seldom far away. Early in 1738 the flautist Carl Friedrich Weidemann, Richard Vincent, Covent Garden's principal oboist, and Michael Festing, leader of the Vauxhall band and noted for ‘good sense, probity, prudent conduct, and a gentleman-like behaviour', standing together at the door of the Orange coffee house in the Haymarket, noticed two boys leading milch-asses up the street and recognized them as the children of the oboe virtuoso Johann Christian Kytsch, who had recently died in poverty in nearby St James's Market. It was this sight that prompted the three instrumentalists to conceive of a fund ‘for the support of decayed musicians and their families', raised from among a society whose first meetings were at the Crown and Anchor tavern during the spring of that year. Early subscribers included Arne, Boyce, Greene, Roseingrave and Stanley, and of course Handel himself, and the scheme gave birth to what eventually became the Royal Society of Musicians.

Even if London was niggard of material benefits to Handel, it was ready to pay him honours of a more grandly abstract kind. Vauxhall Gardens, in Upper Kennington, had now been opened for six years, under the discriminating ownership and management of Jonathan Tyers and offering the kind of masked summer entertainment known as a
ridotto alfresco
. The silver season tickets were designed by Hogarth and the smart company, often led by the Prince and Princess of Wales, walked among the lantern-decked groves, took refreshments (including the famous wafer-thin slices of ham, through which it was reputedly possible to read a newspaper) in the pavilions and grottoes hung with special paintings by Francis Hayman (one of which represented ‘Two Mahometans gazing in wonder at the beauties of the place') and listened to the band in the New Music Room, later known as the Rotunda, its interior design clearly influenced by the type of theatrical scene painting familiar to Handel's opera audiences.

With their dark walks and wildernesses and triumphal arches framing a painting of the Ruins of Palmyra, the twelve acres of Vauxhall, stretching from the river into the Kennington hayfields,
and coyly blending London artifice and rural nature, became the classic embodiment of Georgian pleasure-seeking, and figure largely in the novels, letters and diaries of the period. They also reflected significant trends in contemporary English taste, since the artists whose work adorned the gardens in the early years were nearly all members of a group, centred upon Hogarth, which gathered at Slaughter's coffee house in St Martin's Lane. Patronized by the Prince of Wales and identified with the anti-Walpole opposition of the 1730s, the Slaughter's set included such pioneers of English rococo as the engraver Hubert Gravelot, the plasterer William Collins, and the sculptors Henry Cheere and Louis-François Roubiliac.

The initial idea for a statue of Handel among the Vauxhall groves was perhaps Tyers's own, and it seems reasonable to assume that either he or Gravelot, whose engraved decorations for the
Alexander's Feast
portrait had recently appeared, or maybe even the Prince himself, brought Handel and Roubiliac together. The result, in any case, was spectacular, not merely because this was the first such tribute to a living man in the annals of contemporary sculpture but because Roubiliac, whose three other Handel portraits include the superb Windsor bust of 1739 and the Westminster Abbey monument so admired for its fidelity by Hawkins, is arguably the only artist to have caught something of that mixture of ease and alertness so essentially the composer's. Of the paintings, only Philippe Mercier's vision of him, shiny-nosed, unshaven, turban rakishly pushed back over his cropped head as he sits with his oblong manuscript sheets before him, gives us a human glimpse. Otherwise he is the bob-wigged porker of Balthasar Denner, the obese pudding face of Bartholomew Dandridge, or the elegant bourgeois of the likeness commissioned by Charles Jennens from Thomas Hudson in 1756.

Besides its extraordinary precision of detail, in the wide-nostrilled retroussé nose, the slightly protruding underlip, the baggy eyes and that most emphatic Handelian facial feature, the bushy black eyebrows, Roubiliac's portrait, in its sinuous rococo compositional lines, captures with an engaging sense of humour those qualities of mingled grandeur and intimacy reflected in the music. The composer is presented as Apollo plucking a lyre, while a putto, leaning on a viola da gamba at his feet, notes down what he plays. Yet this is an Apollo in the crumpled informality of Georgian undress, with a floppy turban,
loose dressing gown, breeches unbuttoned at the knee and one slipper off. The statue is an ideal image of nonchalant genius and a perfect expression of what Handel's presence in England really meant to contemporaries who liked music enough to understand him.

Carved in Roubiliac's workshop in St Martin's Lane ‘out of one entire Block of white Marble', it received a place of honour ‘in a grand Nich erected on Purpose', where it was ‘set finely off by various Greens, which form, in Miniature, a sort of woody theatre'. Ferried over the river on 27 April, it encouraged the inevitable crop of magazine verse, such as that of ‘a Gentleman of Oxford' who wrote:

Listening throngs in the capricious Vauxhall weather were always able to hear his concertos, which formed a staple of the band's repertoire, though he never wrote any of them specifically for the gardens themselves. As we have already noted, the recent oratorio performances often featured organ concertos in which Handel himself was the soloist, and Walsh now published, in October 1738, the set of six works for harpsichord or organ subsequently labelled the Opus 4 Organ Concertos. The second of these had already appeared the previous month in Walsh's anthology
The Lady's Entertainment
, and he warned the public that ‘a mangled Edition' of the concertos was in the press. All six had, of course, already been heard before, but the issue of Opus 4 is something of a landmark in English musical history, introducing to a wider public a form Handel had more or less invented.

His keyboard virtuosity had been celebrated since his Roman contests with Domenico Scarlatti, but we must not imagine him playing in London the sort of massive German instruments for which Bach was currently writing. Pedal boards on English organs were comparatively rare, and the many sets of lessons and voluntaries published by eighteenth-century organists in London and the provinces assume the use of the manuals alone. The instrument Handel used at Covent Garden had one manual and seven stops, and he was to recommend an almost exactly similar instrument to Charles Jennens in 1749 as ‘every thing that is necessary for a good and grand Organ'.
The two-manual instrument he presented to the Foundling Hospital chapel had, of course, more stops but still no pedals.

Hawkins, who had heard him play at oratorio performances, praises his ‘amazing command of the instrument, the fullness of his harmony, the grandeur and dignity of his style, the copiousness of his imagination, and the fertility of his invention'. His custom was apparently to introduce each concerto with a voluntary, ‘the harmony close wrought, and as full as could possibly be expressed; the passages concatenated with stupendous art', and this improvisatory element was carried over into the concerto itself. The result is inevitably that what has come down to us is, in several cases, not the entire work as originally given, and one of the features of Handel's art most admired by his contemporaries is now lost to us more or less irrevocably. Burney tells us that, after his blindness came on, he played several of his old concertos from memory, giving the ritornellos to the band, who waited for the shake at the end of his improvisations ‘before they played such fragments of symphony as they found in their books'.

As we have already noted in the case of Opus 3, Handel never regarded the concerto form as rigidly sacrosanct. Where he was concerned, it was an opportunity for the band to show its qualities of well-drilled virtuosity and in his organ concertos this extreme freedom in the disposition of movements, which makes many of his instrumental works closer to dance suites than to the orthodox models of Vivaldi, Telemann and Bach, relates perfectly to the ‘ad libitum' spontaneity of the solo line. Each concerto, each movement indeed, holds its surprises, reworking material from earlier pieces and moulding conventional forms to offer new solutions. No. I in G minor, for instance, begins in traditional
larghetto e staccato
overture style, but soon breaks up into a species of commentary by the soloist against a background of orchestral interjections recalling the original opening, to be followed by the dazzling brilliance of Handel's longest concerto movement, a 158-bar allegro. No. 4 in F cradles, between its extrovert outer movements, the delightfully suave andante (the composer specifies ‘Open Diapason, stopt Diapason & Flute' with strings alone) in which the organ and the band sport with each other, though seldom actually interchanging material.

Another instrumental collection,
seven sonatas registered in Walsh's cash book on 7 October 1738 and published the following year, was partly based on Handel's felicitous arrangements of music from the Chandos Anthems, whose autographs show absorbing evidence of the work thus carried out. These Opus 5 trios, incorporating a certain amount of new music and making use of some of the dance movements composed for Sallé and her company in 1734–5, are lighter in mood than their Opus 2 forerunners, perhaps reflecting a specific request from Walsh himself.

During the summer Handel had been at work on a new oratorio, to a text by Charles Jennens, probably the work referred to in a letter sent three years previously from composer to librettist, thanking him for ‘the inclosed Oratorio', and continuing, ‘I am just going to Tunbridge, yet what I could read of it in haste, gave me a great deal of Satisfaction. I shall have more leisure time there to read it with all the Attention it deserves.' The subject chosen was the story of David, Saul and Jonathan, beginning with an ‘Epinicion, or Song of Triumph for the Victory over Goliath and the Philistines' and ending with a paraphrase of David's lament over the dead king and his son, which opens the second book of Samuel. It had provided themes for several seventeenth-century Italian oratorios, for one of Johann Kuhnau's biblical keyboard sonatas, for Purcell's dramatic
scena
,
ln Guilty Night
, focusing upon Saul's visit to the Witch of Endor, and for Charpentier's magnificent sacred opera
David et Jonathas
, written in 1688 for the students of the College Louis le Grand and featuring several fascinating though entirely coincidental parallels with Handel's treatment of the same material. Interestingly, Porpora had created a work using a related biblical story in his
Davide e Bersabea
, produced by the Opera of the Nobility in 1734, and it was perhaps this which prompted Jennens to turn to a similar subject for Handel.

Often represented by writers on the composer as a crabby, snobbish fusspot, Jennens was in fact one of his most sympathetic and discerning admirers. A wealthy bachelor deriving his income from the Birmingham iron foundries established by his grandfather, he lived partly at Gopsal, near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire, and in London, where his princely lifestyle was the theme of malicious and exaggerated gossip. Was it really the case, as his enemy the Shakespeare scholar George Steevens, would have us believe, that ‘in his youth he was so remarkable for the number of his servants,
the splendour of his equipages, and the profusion of his table, that from this excess of pomp he acquired the title of
Solyman the Magnificent
'? According to the same scarcely reliable source, ‘so enamoured . . . was our
Magnifico
of pomp, that if his transit were only from Great Ormond-street, Bloomsbury, where he resided, to Mr Bowyer's, in Red Lion-passage, Fleet-street, he always travelled with four horses, and sometimes with as many servants behind his carriage. In his progress up the paved court, a footman usually preceded him, to kick oyster shells and other impediments out of his way.'

He was certainly a man of deep culture, issuing the earliest variorum editions of Shakespearean texts (for which Steevens attacked him) transforming his Leicestershire mansion into a fine Palladian house and assembling a library of Italian opera scores, which Handel would find useful in his continuing trawl for musical ideas. Jennens was a dedicated enthusiast for the composer's work. ‘Everything that has been united with Handel's music', he once wrote, ‘becomes sacred by such a union in my eyes.' Sensitive, shy and given to melancholy, he shared this particular passion with his great friend Edward Holdsworth, whose travels in Italy as a tutor to the sons of the nobility on the Grand Tour made him an ideal agent for obtaining copies of the latest operatic successes. When Holdsworth died unexpectedly, Jennens erected a memorial tempietto to him in the Gopsal grounds, topped by a statue of Religion. Both men were nonjurors, members of that body of disaffected Anglicans for whom conscience made it impossible to support the Hanoverian succession to the British crown. Holdsworth himself had been fingered by government agents as a suspected Jacobite.