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CHAPTER IX

THE COMING OF BONONCINI

THE first season of the Royal Academy finished in triumph for Handel, and when the curtain came down on Radamisto that June night in 1720 London realised that he had created a new and ardent following for good music in the capital. For throughout its run the opera had played to crowded houses. Hundreds of people had been turned away from the boxoffice, and the shareholders in the Academy were cheered with the prospect of immediate dividends.

At this time London was wallowing in financial frenzy. A fortnight before Radamisto finished, the King had given the Royal assent to the South Sea Company Bill for redeeming the country's disordered finance. In his speech to Parliament he acclaimed it as "a good foundation for the payment of national debts." Instantly the shares rushed up to a thousand per cent.1 Minor bubbles sprang up everywhere; endless applications for patents, whereby the exploiters hoped to cadge and catch the public money, were made to Parliament. There was one for trading in hair, another for the universal supply of funerals in Great Britain, one for a wheel of perpetual motion, and one "for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." a

All the shares in the minor bubbles followed those of the great one, to a hectic chorus of fortune-making. All other businesses stood still. Occasionally the gamblers received a mild shock, when a subscription list was opened in the morning in a room taken for the day, and the exploiters of the wildcat scheme disappeared in the evening with the proceeds. But

1 Handel invested some money in the South Sea Company; a receipt form signed by him for money he received therefrom was recently sold in a London auction-room. 2 Justin M'Carthy, "A History of the Four Georges," vol. i. p. 252.

still the public went on. What it lost to an occasional barefaced scamp it hoped to regain on the enterprises of the more plausible scoundrels. Square pieces of card, with the impression in sealing-wax of the Globe Tavern, conveying to their possessors merely the permission to subscribe some time afterwards to a new sail-cloth company not yet formed," were actually sold in Exchange Alley under the title of "Globe Permits" for sixty guineas and upwards.1

London had gone mad. Music was for the moment forgotten. The only entertainment the public wanted was the farce The Stock Jobbers; or Humours of Change Alley, to which the mob flocked the doors of every performance. Staid landed gentry in the far solitudes of the country sold out their family heirlooms, and hurled the proceeds into the jobbers' offices; duchesses parted with their jewels at starvation prices for the same purpose. Any project was good enough. Even the company started for the purpose of "breeding silkworms in Chelsea park" had its adherents. Money was made as the shares in these financial swindles flung upwards, only to be poured out again in a welter of extravagance and profligacy. The profiteer of the period appeared in the park in his carriage mingling with the aristocracy, and a newspaper of the 9th July says satirically: We are informed that since the late hurly-burly of stock-jobbing, there have appeared in London two hundred new coaches and chariots, besides as many more now on the stocks in the coachmakers' yards; above four thousand embroidered coats; about three thousand gold watches at the side of their and their wives; some few private acts of charity; and about two thousand broken tradesmen." a

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Well may Handel have wondered whether there were room any longer for his art in this Babylon. He did not wait to see, for, with the close of Radamisto he departed to Cannons and began preparations for the production of a masque in six scenes and one act, which he called Haman and Mordecai. 1 Thomas Wright, "England Under the House of Hanover," 1848, vol. i. p. 63.

Ibid., vol. i. p. 65.

3 No record exists of the actual date of production, but it was certainly before the new opera season opened in November. The Duke of Chandos is said to have paid Handel £1000 for this masque, but of this, again, there is no record.

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Haman and Mordecai

London with its hubbub, its closed theatres, had failed to interest him, and Pope's words of this masque-which at a later stage was to be renamed Esther-had offered him scope for a setting which would maintain his patronage from the Duke of Chandos. He tried out Haman with full scenery and costume in the Duke's palatial theatre, much as one would try out a modern play at Manchester or Brighton before its production in London. It was a very different work to that which ultimately was to appear as Esther. It may have interested the Duke, but it certainly failed to interest its composer, for after this initial performance he put it away in a drawer, as he had done Acis and Galatea.

Perhaps it would be correct to say that at this time he was more obsessed by the immediate prospects of opera. When the Academy was founded, Lord Burlington had made a special journey to Rome to discover talent. When he imported Giovanni Battista Bononcini, he had, in fact, brought over a rival to Handel, and a dangerous rival. Bononcini was known in most European capitals. His music was real art, ripe with the full passion of the South.

So important was the intrusion of Bononcini into Handel's life that it is necessary to obtain a glimpse of this weird Italian. He had been born at Modena fifteen years before Handel, and had composed his Opera Prima in the same year as Handel first opened his eyes at Halle. At the age of twenty he was a well-known violoncellist at St Petronio, Bologna, and was studying counterpoint under Colonna. As he grew older he roved from one city to another. Just as the eighteenth century opened he was in Vienna, and was twice on the point of getting married. But he strayed out of these love affairs just as casually as he strayed into them. Maybe, like Handel, his Art was his wife and mistress, for he was sincere in his Art. He continued in the course of the sturdy Modenese Guelphs of the sixteenth century, who never loved one woman only for the space of a whole year, but who gave a month to toying with one, and the next month to fooling with another. He departed, in fact, with Signor Giuseppe Malagodi for a tour through the various countries of the Empire, having left in Vienna a written promise of marriage to a lady of that city,

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