Tag: Performance in Oxford 1733

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Handel’s Management of his PR

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.

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Bringing Athalia Home: Handel and the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

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