Ruth Smith
Robin Darwall-Smith’s interesting article about Handel’s performances in Oxford during the ‘Publick Act’ of 1733 (Handel News 74) mentions ‘debate about whether Handel intended to take a Doctorate in Music at Oxford; some sources claimed that he was even offered an honorary doctorate, which he declined’ – whetting the appetite for more information about these sources and this story. The first port of call now for scholars exploring Handel’s career is George Frideric Handel: Collected Documents [HCD], ed. Donald Burrows and others, of which Volume 2: 1725-1734 offers nearly 30 pages of contemporary reportage about Handel’s Oxford sojourn.
The possibility of Handel’s being awarded an Oxford degree was in the air for at least seven years before the Vice-Chancellor invited Handel and his ‘lowsy crew’ to provide entertainment. But according to the editors of HCD there is no record in any Oxford University or college archive of any plan to offer him a degree of any kind, and according to the historian of 18th-century Oxford’s musical life, Harry Diack-Johnstone, the degree of honorary doctorate in music did not then exist at Oxford (‘Handel at Oxford in 1733’, Early Music, 31, 2003, p.257).
The affair of the Oxford degree (not) affords a gleam of light on a subject we know too little about, Handel’s management of his own PR.
For more than three months before his trip to Oxford the London papers intermittently carried announcements of Handel’s supposedly intended degree. Not only did he not publicly deny this fake news, but he apparently adopted and repeated it, for it prefaces a big item in the Daily Advertiser of 20 June 1733 which is so well informed that it can only have originated with him or one of his close associates (perhaps his amanuensis J.C. Smith):
Great Preparations are making for Mr. Handel’s Journey to Oxford, in order to take his Degree of Doctor of Musick: a Favour that University intends to compliment him with, at the ensuing Publick Act. The Theatre there is fitting up for the Performance of his Musical Entertainments, the first of which begins on Friday Fortnight the 6th of July. We hear that the Oratorio’s of Esther and Deborah, and also a new one never perform’d before, called Athalia, are to be represented two nights each; and the Serenata of Acis and Galatea as often. That Gentleman’s Great Te Deum, Jubilate, and Anthems, are to be vocally and instrumentally perform’d by the celebrated Mr. Powell, and others, at a solemn Entertainment for the Sunday. The Musick from the Opera is to attend Mr. Handel; and we are inform’d that the principal Parts in his Oratorio’s, &c. are to be by Signora Strada, Mrs. Wright, Mr. Salway, Mr. Rochetti, and Mr. Wartzs. (HCD 2, p.641)
This accurately reports Handel’s intended Oxford programme, and, apart from ‘Wartzs’ (a misprint for Waltz), it accurately reports on the company Handel had formed for Oxford. Its only slight lapse is its failure to mention the extent of the celebrated Oxford counter-tenor Walter Powell’s involvement. It rightly lists him as organising and singing in Handel’s sacred music, but Powell also took the male alto oratorio roles. In all other respects, the detail and accuracy of this press report suggest that it must have come from Handel himself, and prompt the question: was Handel, far from denying, encouraging belief in the notion, which it starts with, that he had been offered an Oxford degree? If so, he must have been pleased by the way the fake news spread.
Shortly after the Oxford Act, the French author Antoine-François Prévost reported in the first issue of his Le Pour et contre, a journal of the British arts scene and history for French readers, on:
the quite extraordinary ceremony which has just taken place in the University of Oxford, for the installation of the famous musician Handel as Doctor of Music. His is the first instance of this kind. The English are convinced that the best way of encouraging the arts is to award to those who excel the most honourable distinctions. In whatever field, whoever rises above his equals passes for a great man. (HCD 2, pp.670-1)
He amended his report the following week; after a glowing account of Handel’s achievements, he continued:
The University of Oxford, conscious of such merit, offered its highest honours to Mr Handel, with the glorious title of Doctor of Music. The day of the ceremony was to be the 9 July, for which date they had arranged the reception of a large number of other Doctors and Masters of Arts. Mr Handel arrived in Oxford, but they were surprised to see him refuse the mark of distinction which they intended for him. Only such modesty could equal his talents. He did not fail to express his great gratitude to the University, and to contribute to making the ceremony devoted to the others more brilliant [a more accurate account of some of the ceremonial follows]. (HCD 2, pp.672-4)
Handel may have been pleased too with even faker news circulating in his native Germany, the Hamburg Relations Courier reporting in October that:
At the recent great Public Act at the University of Oxford… the University honoured the famous Musician, Herr Handel, a German by birth, who has resided for a considerable time in England, with the Doctorate in Music, and this is the first time that anyone has had this Doctorate conferred. His test-piece consisted of an oratorio, called Athalia, which more than 3700 people, many of them gentlemen and ladies of the highest rank, attended as spectators. (HCD 2, pp.682-3)
Whether or not there is any truth in the idea that Handel wrote Athalia not only to be premiered in Oxford but to gain him a degree there, his whole programme, so carefully specified in a London paper despite being performed in Oxford, suggests a larger purpose: that he was using the Oxford opportunity to give his compositional profile a new definition, and that he was using the London press to publicise it. He was facing competition from the new so-called Opera of the Nobility, which had just poached nearly all his principal singers. He could not know if he would be able to mount another London opera season. Oxford offered scope to programme an intensive week of his other most popular genres to date, oratorio and anthem, and to project himself as the unmatched composer of oratorio.
He succeeded immediately in having his profile as an oratorio composer promulgated. Prévost’s report of the Act in Le Pour et contre mentions that Handel:
has recently introduced to London a new kind of composition, which is performed under the name of ‘oratorio’, a kind of religious cantata divided into scenes, but with no plot or action. Although the subject is religious, the audience is as numerous as at the opera. He brings together all aspects: the sublime, the tender, the lively, the graceful. (HCD 2, pp.672-4)
Handel would surely have been pleased to have his music so described.