Robin Darwall-Smith
In 2019 Oxford will celebrate the 350th anniversary of the inauguration of Christopher Wren’s early masterpiece, the Sheldonian Theatre. Although it was built primarily as a venue for university ceremonies, from the first it led a parallel life as a concert hall, and eminent musicians visiting Oxford, such as Joseph Haydn or Jenny Lind, have performed there – as did Handel.
Handel’s visit to Oxford on 5-12 July 1733 coincided with the University’s ‘Publick Act’. This was a grand festival in which benefactors to the university were commemorated, honorary degrees conferred, and grand Latin orations delivered. The Act had been in abeyance for some years, and special efforts were made to ensure that this would be a special occasion: Handel was invited to Oxford by the Vice-Chancellor of the University.
Handel offered Oxford a rich bill of fare. The ‘Utrecht’ Te Deum and Jubilate were heard in the University Church on 8 July, and Acis and Galatea in Christ Church Hall on the morning of 11 July; while in the Sheldonian Theatre, Handel performed two older oratorios, Esther (on 5 and 7 July), and Deborah (on 12 July), but also offered there on 10 and 11 July the first two performances of a new work, Athalia.
There is debate about whether Handel intended to take a Doctorate in Music at Oxford: some sources claimed that he was even an offered an honorary doctorate, which he declined. Even if that story is mere gossip, Handel never did take a doctorate from Oxford (or, indeed, Cambridge), although he would have had every opportunity to do so in 1733. It has even been suggested that Handel might have preferred to remain ‘Mr. Handel’, to stand apart from such musical doctors as Maurice Greene, whose works he considered inferior.
Handel’s visit to Oxford was rather a daring venture. Even in the 1730s the University of Oxford had a reputation as a haven of Jacobites, and Handel was not only a German, but also a German with close links to George II. The splendidly splenetic Oxford diarist Thomas Hearne, whose support for ‘James III’ had led to his dismissal from his university offices, certainly had no time for Handel. In his diary on 6 July he muttered about ‘Handel and (his lowsy Crew) a great number of forreign fidlers’. Others grumbled at the prices of tickets for Handel’s concerts: a satirical play from later in 1733, The Oxford Act, includes among its characters music-obsessed Fellows and undergraduates bankrupted by attending Handel’s concerts.
Nevertheless, Handel did choose a nicely ambiguous subject for his Oxford oratorio, for the plot of Athalia, about an apostate usurper being overthrown by the rightful (and orthodox) heir, could be read in two very different ways. Loyal Hanoverians could recall the overthrow of the Catholic James II, and the protection of the Protestant religion under the first two Georges; while Jacobites might yearn for the time when George II would be sent back to Germany, and James II’s son re-installed as Britain’s rightful monarch. But Handel had his own ambiguities: for all his close links to the House of Hanover, perhaps his greatest English librettist, Charles Jennens, was a non-juror, opposed to the Hanoverian succession.
Whatever controversies may have been aroused by Handel’s visit to Oxford, he left behind many admirers there. The most notable was the Professor of Music, William Hayes, who established a strong performing tradition of Handel. In 1749, to mark the opening of the Radcliffe Camera, Hayes arranged a Handel festival, giving performances of Esther and Samson, and also Messiah, which until then had never been heard outside Dublin or London.
The tale of Handel’s 1733 Oxford trip might seem now more than an interesting interlude in his life as a whole, were it not for an important accident of history. The Sheldonian Theatre is now arguably the only building standing – and standing in substantially the same condition – in which Handel premiered one of his oratorios.
On 8 June 2019 the Oxford Bach Choir will therefore make its own contribution to the 350th anniversary of the opening of the Sheldonian Theatre by performing Athalia there with its Principal Conductor Benjamin Nicholas, thus offering lovers of Handel’s music the very rare opportunity to hear one of his works performed in the very space in which it was first heard, under the composer’s direction, over 280 years ago.
Note
Further information on Handel’s visit to Oxford may be found in, among other places, Susan Wollenberg’s Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2001), pp. 23-29.
Robin Darwall-Smith is Archivist of University and Jesus Colleges, Oxford