King's Theatre Reopened Handel opened his season at the King's Theatre in November, but contented himself with revivals till 5th January 1745, when he produced his secular oratorio Hercules. He had composed Thomas Broughton's adaptation of Sophocles whilst waiting for Jennens to send the acts of Belshazzar to him, but Hercules was never for a moment in favour, and after a few performances it was withdrawn. On 27th March Belshazzar took its place, and was thought so little of that, in order to keep faith to some extent with his subscribers, Handel had to revive Semele, Joseph and Saul. But the whole season failed to recoup his bare expenses, and he closed the theatre on 23rd April, having given only sixteen out of the twenty-four concerts for which he had contracted. The future was black in the extreme; it is doubtful if Handel, in those days of 1745, could imagine any future, the whole town seemed to have turned once more against him. "I went last Friday to Alexander's Feast," wrote the Countess of Shaftesbury on the 13th of March, "but it was such a melancholy pleasure, as drew tears of sorrow to see the great, though unhappy, Handel, dejected, wan, and dark, sitting by, not playing on, the harpsichord, and to think how his light had been spent in being overplied in music's cause." 1 As soon as he reopened the King's Theatre the cabal broke out afresh. Every form of social entertainment was purposely held on the nights of his concerts, to lure his patrons away. They tore down his posters. His theatre was picketed with rowdies who caused the same disturbances as they had done when he occupied Lincoln's Inn Fields. Young bloods thought it the height of good sport to go down to the theatre doors and roar like maddened bulls when the chairs and carriages were arriving Whatever mental torment Handel endured at this period he kept it to himself. He wrote no angry letters, gave no rebuke to the libels that were turning the town against him. If he passed his friends in the street it was not in pique, but because he would walk for hours seeing nothing but his thoughts. The world was spinning about him like a crazy top, but he kept his balance. His bank balance was nil, his singers 1 Malmesbury Papers. clamouring for money, yet he knew no plaint, no call for quarter. The big, ambling figure was seen coming down Piccadilly—a little bent the giant had become now-but with the same pride and his courage still unbroken. In Hercules and Belshazzar he had given the town some of the best composing of his life, and it returned only a new zeal to destroy him. No genius of any age could hope to achieve against such a concentration of enemies. Then came the inevitable result. His head was going. Rheumatism or more probably, neuritis―tore at his limbs. He did not sleep. Every movement brought to his lips a smothered groan of pain. Some said he was going mad, and his enemies knew that he was finished. When Handel vanished from London to the seclusion of Tunbridge Wells, they realised that they could search about for a new victim as sport for their loose sense of humanity. Handel had crashed for the second time. The town said it was his finale! CHAPTER XXIII THE TIDE TURNS HANDEL was seen again in London in August 1745, and London was astounded. He appeared in Brook Street as if he had risen from the dead. But what astonished London still more, was that he had leased Covent Garden for the ensuing spring. How had he done it? Whose money was he going to waste now? So they asked across the dinner tables. Not that he had recovered; but the first urge of the new life, which the enforced rest had given him, was to bring him back to his work. He was still disordered in his head, and not until October was he clear of the trouble.1 Yet the old warrior was full of battle. His veins warmed to a passionate heat. Though he talked about his ailments with the inquietude of an ageing man, they in no way impinged upon his desire to work, and to achieve in a city that had beaten him to his knees. career. The salvation of Handel at this stage was, as it always had been, complete belief in his output. That belief alone kept him from drawing away, a broken figure, at various crises in his That is where the man was as great as his music, and so few of the masters have possessed a courage equal to their chords. They dropped into dissolute existence, starved and gloried in a vagrant art, and died of empty stomachs, some of them, because they did not possess that complete mental courage which fought for survival. They struggled; a few died miserably, like martyrs. More gloriously than some martyrs. But Handel never meant to be killed. Hudson, in his portraits, has put in the severity of that under-lip. They could smash his health, shun his music, but not by endless 1 Malmesbury Papers. manœuvre could they change his fighting personality an iota. He was sixty years of age, and a game sixty. Not the sixty that acquires a gentle indolence by looking at its birth certificate, and slides, fruitful no longer, into that calm inertia, which is an unspoken invitation to Death. Hardly had Handel returned to London than Prince Charlie, the Pretender, landed in Scotland with hopes of an army. He became a personified rumour. He swept through the towns, the lowliest villages-a rumour. He would storm the country-for was not this fellow bound for Westminster ? He would flick the Hanoverian George off his throne like a fly from a paper. Jacobitism was a secret creed which would stir in the people like a soul returning to a lifeless body. The rumours frightened London. The Guards were turned out and sent to Finchley. There would be siege, starvation. There was a run on the shops; a greater run on the banks. Many of the aristocracy departed as far South as they dared. London never knew such upheaval. It had no order, no organisation which would be of any service on the arrival of an armed force against the capital. And that foolish fellow, the invader, was trying to swing his magic personality across a few glum Scotsmen. The King exclaimed: "Pouf!" He held more receptions. Had not the mischievous horse at Dettingen nearly pitched him into a worse mess than this could ever become? If he had still possessed a Queen he would have walked up and down the room-as he always did when talking to her-and declaimed on the vanity of the upstart. Instead, he told his lesser queens all about it, and was supremely content. But when the danger came nearer, he packed up all his valuables into endless crates and prepared to depart to Hanover. His son's defeat of the Pretender alone made him alter his mind. The rebels reached Derby. Then the change in the plans of the raiders kept the King firm to his capital. London liked his courage, and a wave of confidence in him passed through the town. Hysteria disappeared like mist before the late sun of a February morning. There would be no raid, no siege, no plundering, no George trussed like a skinny fowl beneath a Jacobite thong. The verve of the people caught Handel. He The Occasional Oratorio composed, with that magic quickness so truly his own, The Occasional Oratorio. Some of it was borrowed from his failure, Israel in Egypt, and he interwove in the new work a few of his best moods from the Coronation Anthem. For the rest, he composed over thirty new numbers, one of which was a song, in which he used the opening bars of Arne's "Rule Britannia." He produced the complete work for three performances in February 1746, giving free tickets to such of his patrons to whom he had not fulfilled his obligations in the matter of the number of concerts held during the previous season. His tremendous overture in The Occasional Oratorio was a worthy sop to throw to his faithful adherents, and it repaid them for their loyalty. Even George was regaled by the strident call of victory in this pæan of thanksgiving. If it had not been too late to turn from the errant little dancers, the bright eyes lifted to his beneath the high coifs in the salons, he might even yet have tried to live up to Mr Handel. But his day was too far spent. The little dim of evening had begun to steal across those sweet pastures of his life which his fretful feet had found so often. If The Occasional Oratorio made no loss, the free seats Handel had given to those subscribers of the previous season to whom he felt himself to be honourably in debt, precluded all possibility of profit. The work, however, brought to him fresh interest from the nation. This man at least could understand the joy of the people, and could put it to chords. The enmities began to die down automatically. The man who had composed a nation's thanksgiving could not be decently dragged through the mud any longer. Scarcely had the work been forgotten than the overthrow of Prince Charlie at Culloden on 16th April roused the nation to fresh frenzy. The young Duke of Cumberland, said London, had acquitted himself well. He had shattered the forces of the Pretender beyond all reconstruction; he had removed for ever that menace that had once threatened the homes of London. He had done his work well, the glorious victor; he had butchered every living thing that might have been in contact with Charlie. There were no half-measures with him; |