by Jonathan Keates
During the autumn of 1738, the wit and socialite Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote to her friend, the Countess of Pomfret, then living in Paris, with the latest gossip from London. Harriet Herbert, daughter of Lord Powis, had ‘furnished the tea-tables here with fresh tattle for this last fortnight’ by seeking out a vicar ‘to marry her the next day to Beard, who sings in the farces at Drury Lane’. The intended husband was none other than the young tenor, John Beard who had sung for Handel during the 1734-7 Covent Garden seasons which included the premieres of Ariodante, Alcina and Atalanta. Whatever his gifts (later deployed so effectively in the composer’s English oratorios) Lady Mary was unimpressed. ’Since the lady was capable of such amours I did not doubt if this were broke off she would bestow her person and fortune on some hackney-coachman or chairman’. Only half joking, the writer suggested poisoning Lady Harriet’s tea ‘and offered to be at the expense of arsenic and even to administer it with my own hands’ so as ‘to save her from ruin and her family from dishonour’.
The marriage went ahead and Lord Powis’s family made life duly miserable for his erring daughter. Mary Wortley Montagu, herself never quite respectable enough, hence the keener to stand on her dignity as an earl’s daughter, was only articulating the standard prejudice of her social echelon. Musicians, for all their talents, were deemed unfit to wed scions of the aristocracy and the Beards’ union was an outrage, pure and simple. What Handel himself thought of the alliance – or misalliance – is so far unknown. Music, for much of the eighteenth century, was what would nowadays be termed a service industry, its product delivered within a context of deference and flattery which reduced the composer’s role to that of an artificer or functionary, like a pastry cook, a groom or a gamekeeper. In this respect, however, Handel’s status was exceptional for its period. While he relied, during his years in London, on royal favour, pensions and salaries, we can make too much of this dependent position and too little, correspondingly, of the altogether more nuanced role he designed for himself as a working musician with his own carefully crafted niche in London society.
Family background was significant. His mother Dorothea Trust was the daughter of a distinguished Lutheran pastor and his father Georg Handel, though a blacksmith’s son, had become eminent throughout Germany as a surgeon and consultant physician. Late in his career Dr Handel acquired a coat of arms, featuring a boy carrying a medical flask. The device figured on the composer’s signet ring and is visible, now somewhat faintly, on the ledger stone beneath his monument in Westminster Abbey. Thus armigerous (to use a term from his own era) Handel could reasonably claim to be acknowledged as a gentleman rather than an artisan.
This distinction played its part in his Italian journey between 1706 and 1710, several key aspects of which foreshadow his career in England. His singular gift for networking brought him into early contact with various of Italy’s most prominent cultural patrons, enabling useful links with composers, singers and instrumentalists. He was not tied, on the other hand, to specific employers or court establishments and his respective sojourns in Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice were self-financed. Where the cantatas written for Marquis (later Prince) Francesco Maria Ruspoli are concerned, the word ‘service’ in relation to Handel needs to be used with caution. Their connexion was more obviously that between a discerning enthusiast and a talented visiting artist, whom he was happy to provide with every material comfort, than an orthodox affair of aristocratic condescension rewarding a servile artisan.
In Rome Handel stayed in Ruspoli’s residence, Palazzo Bonelli, and accompanied him, in due season, to his country villas at Vignanzello and Cerveteri, where they went stag-hunting together in the nearby forests. If proof were needed that both marquis and composer felt perfectly at ease with this arrangement, it lies in Alessandro Piazza’s painting of Ruspoli reviewing a regiment he had recently raised in the Pope’s service. Handel features here as a distinguished spectator wearing a gold-trimmed coat, with a smart tricorne hat tucked under his arm. This is emphatically not a servant’s livery but an elegant outfit of the kind he would wear forty years later for Thomas Hudson’s swagger likeness now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Arriving in London in 1710 Handel adopted the same lifestyle that had served him so well in Italy. He developed links with the court and the Chapel Royal and lived for a time in the Piccadilly palazzo of Lord Burlington, the age’s most illustrious patron of the arts. Networking skills were as useful as they had been in Rome, bringing Handel into contact with such choice spirits as Alexander Pope and John Gay, both of whom contributed to the libretto of Acis & Galatea, and, most importantly, with Dr John Arbuthnot, Queen Anne’s physician, a lover of music and dilettante composer. The point specifically made by Sir John Hawkins in the memoir of Handel included in his General History of Music is that he was not treated, while under Burlington’s roof, as a mere household musician but instead ‘left at liberty to follow the dictates of his genius and invention…at dinner he sat down with men of the first eminence for genius and abilities of any in the kingdom’. Hawkins was writing at least a decade after the composer’s death, but we have no reason to doubt this account. Handel had clearly begun as he meant to go on, nurturing a semi-detached relationship with those wielding power and influence while simultaneously maintaining a measure of professional mobility and independence.
Where he eventually chose to settle permanently in London was in itself a social signifier, implying that he had arrived in more senses than one. His working life during the 1720s revolved around the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, so he might have been expected to find a home in the neighbouring complex of streets stretching westwards to Saint Martin’s Lane and north to Soho Square. The area, favoured by musicians, painters and sculptors, was popular also with the town’s well-established Italian community, many of whom worked in different capacities at the theatre.
Instead Handel made what was clearly a calculated decision to live at several removes from this creative quarter. Taking a lease on a newly-built house in Brook Street, Mayfair, he joined a very different community, a select grouping of nobility, gentry and army officers which gave the area a social tone it has never since lost. Admittedly the house itself, whatever its handsome exterior, needed to function as something more than an elegant retreat from operatic stresses and contentions at the Haymarket. One of its parlours would become the composer’s work room. Space was doubtless needed for storing music and making copies for performance and a further area could be used for rehearsals.
Number 25 Brook Street doubled nevertheless as a gentleman’s residence, where Handel lived in relative affluence with a ‘family’ of servants, his art collection and a cellar of good wine to accompany those elaborate meals his erstwhile friend Joseph Goupy would deploy to such malicious effect as accessories in his satirical etching ‘The Charming Brute’. The house was one of a whole range of status indicators which set ’Mr Handel’ at a distance from other London musicians, bringing him closer, instead, to the world of that loyal echelon of genteel admirers, collaborators and commentators which included figures such as Mary Pendarves, Lord Shaftesbury and, most crucial of all, Charles Jennens.
The rhythms and protocols of Handel’s life in England blended easily with those followed by this circle. By no special irony his worsening state of health during the late 1730s coincided with a growing vogue in smart society for the different kinds of therapy offered by spas and thermal establishments. His 1737 visit to the curative springs at Aachen, reported by English newspapers and so engagingly evoked in John Mainwaring’s biography, was followed by trips to Bath, Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells. Journeys like these could well be extended to include a stay at a friend’s country house. The Italian villeggiatura at Marchese Ruspoli’s castle in Lazio was reproduced at, for example, Exton in Rutland, where in 1745 Handel, en route to drink the waters at Scarborough ( then more popular as a spa than a seaside resort) was welcomed by Lord Gainsborough and obliged his host with some musical numbers for a family performance of Milton’s Comus.
A letter from Gainsborough’s brother James Noel is our chief source for this occasion. ‘As Handel came to this place for Quiet and Retirement’ he writes, ‘we were very loath to lay any task of Composition upon him. Selfishness however prevailed; but we were determined at the same time to be very moderate in our requests. His readiness to oblige soon took off all our apprehensions upon that account. A hint of what we wanted was sufficient, and what should have been an act of Compliance he made a voluntary Deed’. Language and tone here are instructive, presenting the composer as the honoured guest, whose choice of Exton for ‘Quiet and Retirement’ is to be properly respected and whose readiness to comply with the family’s ‘very moderate’ requests thus appears a mark of genuine condescension.
Their house guest was, after all, the modern Apollo, revered as such by visitors to Vauxhall Gardens, where his statue had been placed six years earlier as a species of tutelary spirit. The sculptor Louis-Francois Roubiliac contrived a stunning synthesis of antique and contemporary in his image of the lyre-plucking god of music, with a putto for his amanuensis, as nobody else but Handel, nonchalant in smart Georgian undress, a turban to keep his head warm, one slipper off and the knee-buttons on his breeches unfastened. Roubiliac’s proto-Romantic impulses would find still freer play in his Westminster Abbey monument, with its dramatic juxtaposition of the modern composer and another celestial avatar in the shape of psalmist King David as a bardic harper.
Handel’s request to be buried in the Abbey, with money set aside for a monument, can be seen as a final gesture in his lifelong self-presentation in the guise of the artist as gentleman. Does this aspect of his career especially matter, sub specie aeternitatis? I think it does, more especially since there has been an understandable revolt against earlier ideas of him as the maverick freelance going it alone without salaried posts or official commissions. This necessary revisionism in its turn, however, requires adjustment. How the world saw him and on what terms he was prepared to confront it clearly mattered to Handel both personally and professionally. Without snobbery or toadying he could hold his own among noble and ‘polite’ Handelists like Shaftesbury and the Harris brothers and enjoy the advantages of their encouragement and active collaboration. The aesthetic taste and discernment of a figure like Charles Jennens in helping to shape works as original in concept as Saul, Messiah or Belshazzar was the most obvious advantage reaped from such a milieu. That Handel was careful not to be just another among that ‘lousy crew…. of foreign fiddlers’ Thomas Hearne accused him of bringing to the Oxford Act of 1733 is quintessential to his unique experience as a musician in the broader context of his period.