BIOGRAPHY:Despite fears that Dublin would 'kill him with good living', Handel, a great eater and drinker (though a mystery sexually), thrived to be a composer of colossal output
I HAVE RUBBLE from a wall in the room where Handel worked on Messiah. But a friend, not realising it was Messiah rubble, stubbed his cigarette out on it and threw it in the bin on top of a chicken carcass. I recovered some of it and now keep it safely on the stage of a toy theatre set up for a performance of The School for Scandal. I know that as the rubble was only feet away from Handel as he worked, it's filled with the sounds of Messiah - O death, where is thy sting?.
Messiah was given its first performance in Dublin on Tuesday, April 13th, 1742, at noon. The venue was the New Musick-Hall on Fishamble Street. Handel arrived in Dublin on November 18th, 1741, and didn't leave until August 13th, 1742. Odd to think of him knowing a Dublin winter. He spent a lot of time in Clontarf apparently. He lodged in Abbey Street, where he sold tickets for the concerts preceding Messiah. The season was a great financial success and Handel called Ireland "that generous and polite Nation".
He was a great eater and drinker, and a London observer feared that Dublin would "kill him with good living". And he did have a "violent and universal stroke" while at dinner here. Fortunately, the doctors Barry and Quinn were present, and, "By violent bleeding and other evacuations he was soon perfectly recovered, and never had any return of it".
Before Messiah's premiere there was a tremendous row with Jonathan Swift, the dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, who forbade his choristers to take part, despite having already given permission. He raged: "And whereas it hath been reported that I gave a licence to certain vicars to assist at a club of fiddlers in Fishamble Street, I do hereby declare that I remember no such licence to have been been ever signed or sealed by me . . . intreating my said Sub-Dean and Chapter to punish such vicars as shall ever appear there, as songsters, fiddlers, pipers, trumpeters, drummers, drum-majors, or in any sonal quality, according to the flagitious aggravations of their respective disobedience, rebellion, perfidy and ingratitude."
It all blew over and the performance went ahead. Dr Edward Synge, Bishop of Elphin, studied the audience: "They seem'd indeed thoroughly engag'd from one end to the other. And to their great honour, tho' the young and gay of both Sexes were present in great numbers, their behaviour was uniformly grave and decent, which Show'd that they were not only pleas'd but affected with the performance."
A SECOND Messiah was given on June 3rd, when "in order to keep the Room as cool as possible, a Pane of Glass will be removed from the Top of each of the Windows — N.B. This will be the last performance of Mr Handel's during his Stay in this Kingdom".
Eighty-three years later, in 1824, a harpist, Stumpff, asked Beethoven: "Whom do you regard as the greatest composer that ever lived? 'Handel, before him I go on my knees' - and he touched the floor with one of them". Before this, he had held Mozart and Bach above all others. He said of Bach, "His name ought not to be Bach (brook) but Ocean, so great was his command." But he put Handel at the head.
With Messiah Handel is firing on all cylinders. One jewel after another. Most recordings available are boring. The performances too. Conventional beauty of sound shouldn't be the goal. You need singers with that heartbreaking quality that makes you weep - not always attached to beauty.
The new Naxos recording with the choir of New College Oxford has good things in it. Some of the Airs are sung by boys, the tenor Toby Spence is striking, the choir magnificent, the pacing too.
Extraordinary that a work on such a massive scale was written in 24 days. This wasn't unusual for Handel. He wrote a staggering number of operas, oratorios, odes, anthems and instrumental music at lightning speed. In one year alone, he wrote three of his finest operas, Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano and Rodelinda. With such a colossal output, some of it is a little automatic, and he often borrowed from himself and others to keep up. But every emotion is there, delivered astonishingly.
A real problem in staging the operas now is the absence of castrati - male singers castrated before puberty to preserve the soprano or contralto range of the voice. Many of Handel's major heroic roles were written for them. He was so taken by the castrato Guadagni, he rewrote for him the Messiah airs But who may abide, Thou art gone up on high, and How beautiful are the feet. Although castration was forbidden by the church, castrati were used in the Vatican choir until the early 20th century and were stars on the European stage. Pope Clement VIII said the mutilation was to the glory of God.
There are recordings of the last Vatican castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, made at the end of his career when his voice was unsteady. The recordings are often mocked, but they show the extraordinary emotional nakedness of the voice. How suburban women and countertenors sound in comparison, when they attempt castrato roles. But I think if you heard Maria Callas letting go in Messiah you might get some idea of the impact castrati had. That would be a real jaguar. I suppose castration is a stopping of time. The unknowing sound boys make before the voice breaks is held forever and grows more unearthly. When the operation works.
Without castrati, and with unimaginative directors, Handel's operas are especially vulnerable. They need to be either staged in a rigorous 18th-century manner, with all the ritualised movements, or radically reinterpreted by directors such as David Alden and Richard Jones. When you see their productions you don't think of period at all and are gripped at another level. You could be looking at Shakespeare or Chekhov. So directorial imagination can go far in compensation. But women pretending to be men in these scenarios is still tiresome.
JONATHAN KEATES'S BOOK will tell you a lot about the operas and Handel, and yet it's all a bit worthy and professional. He's like those writers who turn out books on Nietzsche, Proust, Fabergé eggs, and horse racing. He should have tried to get inside Handel's skin more. Handel's sexuality, a subject which is increasingly written about, is dispensed with in a few dull paragraphs, for example.
So what was Handel sexually? He seems a closed book. Since his death in 1759, no evidence of sexual activity has surfaced. Even Beethoven, who seems to have had little, if any, sexual contact with women of his own social world, is known to have frequented brothels - "I am always ready for it. The time I prefer most of all is at about half-past three or four o'clock in the afternoon."
It is claimed that Handel had no sexual desire at all, or that he was one of the other categories. Homosexuality possibly explains the absence of evidence. In a time when it was necessarily underground, to survive, both parties would remain silent. And everyone knows what gossips heterosexuals are.
If he had to have one, my candidate for Handel's lover would be his manservant, Peter Le Blond, because of his name. The name is Blond . . .
Gerald Barry is a composer. His recent one-act opera, The Stronger, will be given its American premiere in November in Miami with the New World Symphony Orchestra
Handel: The Man and His Music By Jonathan Keates Bodley Head. £25