CHAPTER XXII THE SECOND FAILURE As soon as the season closed, Handel began the composition. of a secular oratorio, Semele, the words of which had been adapted from Congreve. He composed the first bars on 3rd June, and finished the work on 4th July, probably with every intention of producing it at the beginning of the autumn season. But, as had so frequently happened, the affairs of the nation intervened, and caused him to lay aside this oratorio based on mythology, in order to take an active part in the nation's rejoicing. On the 27th of June the battle of Dettingen had been fought at the little village on the River Main, and it resulted in an English victory. More remarkable, King George himself had led the English troops into battle. The conflict had been so unexpected, and the news of the King's valour more unexpected still, that London was thrown into a fever of excitement. This unsympathetic King, who lolled about in the salons, who talked an improvised English to all the best ladies of the town, this miserable figure, afraid even now of some phantom return of his wife, had shown courage no one believed him to possess. There was no martial bearing about George; he had no liking for things military, nor the breath of cannon. He only sallied into war from some certain sense of duty-a sense more oddly developed in him than in either of the Georges-sitting his horse very badly, till the horse, alarmed by the firing, ran away, and nearly bore him into the enemy's ranks. At least he tried to look the part, and to take his war experiences seriously. When he regained safety he dismounted, and, finding his feet firm on the good earth, exclaimed: "Now I know I shall not run away!" i 1 W. M. Thackeray, "The Four Georges." The Dettingen Te Deum George and Dettingen completely changed the attitude of the English people towards the Court. Quel courage! Quelle bonne chance! His retinue, safely snugged in the Palace while the Royal master was away nearly getting killed, covered him with compliments when he returned at the head of his troops, very smiling and tired of campaigning. The obese little man loved the fêting better than he had loved the smoke of Louis' cannon. He held receptions. He held more receptions. There must be a proper celebration-crowds, the sound of cannon—a procession of course, a procession-and martial music. He sent for the Court musician, Handel. On the 17th of July Handel began his Dettingen Te Deum, and on the 30th he began the Dettingen Anthem. Many of Handel's biographers declare that for the Te Deum he adapted some of the composing of an Italian priest named Urio, who had lived in the seventeenth century. But no definite proof of any kind has ever been discovered. These charges of plagiarism have constantly recurred in the Handel biographies.1 He stole from Bach; Bach stole from him. He stole here; he stole there. He probably did adapt certain airs which were public property at the time. A phrase caught him and ran subconsciously through the weft of the music then in his mind. But that Handel, more gifted with originality than most of the composers the world has known, should prowl about looking for the indifferent work of lesser and unknown people is a foolish charge. His brain was always fertile with more melody than his pen could put to score. When the Te Deum was performed at the Chapel Royal on 27th November it was declared to be one of the most majestic works that ever came from the master. It took rank beside the Funeral Anthem as the greatest composition for public occasion he had produced. Every kettledrum and trumpet that he could press into service had been secured. The music was martial, stately. It moved the King deeply. Could any man, save Handel, have put into the rattle and rumble of drums the glories of Dettingen? What pomp! What 1 Mr P. Robinson, in his admirable work, "Handel and His Orbit," adequately deals with, and largely disproves, the charges of plagiarism brought against Handel by his enemies. It is not proposed to introduce a technical survey of these points into this volume.-Author. clamour! What uplift! And what thoughts passed through George's mind as he listened. The field and the smoke wreaths... the bolting, foolish horse, and his own silly plight-why had he ever come! . . . The break of the French across the river . . . and the howling of the mob in the streets when he returned! Perhaps he had never really appreciated Handel till now. Even the Funeral Anthem had not moved him so much, since he had never understood death, and was most conscious when the Anthem was played in all the state at Westminster that he was a central figure, standing out in the great sounds, and pitied for his loss. He loved pity, because he could pose, through it, as became a King. Handel produced nothing further in 1743. He kept Semele, complete to the last phrase and note, in his drawer for eight months. Illness had begun to attack him again. "Mr Handel has a palsy and cannot compose," wrote Horace Walpole at this season. He remained in London, but the old antagonisms against him were springing up again because he had, by his concerts, drawn patrons from the bastard Italian operas which Lord Middlesex was now providing at the King's Theatre. The competition did not affect Middlesex alone. The pick of Society had backed the noble entrepreneur with their money. Handel was therefore helping to keep the dividends expected from the King's Theatre out of the pockets of those who, in earlier times, had been his hosts. The cabal against him grew in strength as the winter progressed, and when, on the 10th February 1744, he produced Semele, he had an angry Society ranged in line against him. If Semele was rather stupid in its story, Handel had at least given it some glorious airs. "Where'er you walk," had a grace which has held it high in popularity for nearly two centuries, since it bears all the delightful atmosphere of some of the best themes in Acis and Galatea. "O Sleep, why dost thou leave me?" is a little jewel, clean cut and haunting. "Now Love, that everlasting boy" is the essence of all living, all happiness. And yet Semele was only performed four times, and, oddly enough, is almost unknown in this country, in spite of the fact that, from beginning to end, it is Handel at his best, both in Christopher Smith's Paradise Lost chorus and aria. Its comparative failure in 1744 was due mainly to the attitude of Society. "There was no disturbances at the Playhouse," wrote Mrs Delany after her visit to the theatre, a remark significant in its suggestion.1 Mrs Delany remained one of Handel's strongest supporters. Lady Brown, on the other hand, was conniving with her social set to ruin Handel by giving concerts and functions, graced by wanton extravagance, on the very nights chosen by Handel for his concerts, in order to keep people away from his theatre. Mrs Delany was talking about him, always talking about him. He spent evenings at her house, brought his singers and entertained her guests. She was never patronising; on the contrary, she yielded the patronage to Handel. She even went to the extent of compiling a libretto, which she hoped that Handel would set, for just after the production of Semele she wrote to Mrs Dewes: "How do you think I have lately been employed? Why, I have made a drama for an oratorio out of Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' to give Mr Handel to compose to; it has cost me a good deal of thought and contrivance. . . I begin with Satan's threatening to seduce the woman, her being seduced follows, and it ends with the man's yielding to the temptation; I would not have a word or a thought of Milton's altered, and I hope to prevail with Mr Handel to set it without having any of the lines put into verse, for that will take from its dignity." If she ever gave the libretto to Handel, he successfully buried it without taxing her susceptibilities unduly. His amanuensis, Christopher Smith, produced a version of Paradise Lost after Handel's death, and for which parts of Mrs Delany's libretto may have been used. He possibly composed the music, or he may have dished it up from Handel's works, as he did two other operas, not a note of which he wrote himself, but the music he duly placed to his own credit. No one knew the music of Handel so well as he, since, in making the famous concert copies of each work, he had scored them all out in that elegant handwriting, and with an ink that defies all time. It was therefore a comparatively easy matter for Smith, loyal as he was to Handel in his memory 1 Mrs Delany," Life and Correspondence," vol. ii. in every other respect, to pick as he chose after the master had passed into the serenity of the Abbey at Westminster, although he had considerable musical gifts himself. The comparative failure of Semele found Handel with another work ready in Joseph, an oratorio based on words by James Miller. Was it some portent that the opera circle at the King's Theatre was breaking, or a premonition of disaster to himself, that made Handel work so feverishly? Something drove him from one work to another with a fierceness that could never last. Joseph was not a success, although it contained a few beautiful arias, for some of which Handel had secured a new contralto in Signora Galli, who had made her début in Italian opera at the King's Theatre shortly before. What a meteoric life was Galli's! Joseph was merely a prelude to what she was to achieve in London. When later Handel produced his Judas Maccabæus she was encored every night. She was a thin Italian figure when she came; her singing had a natural beauty and little cultured execution. Under Handel, she rose to become one of the best contraltos London possessed, and she stayed with him up to his last oratorio, Jephtha. She sang the old warrior out. But she grew fat. She became waspish in temper till only Handel could manage her. The few good looks she had betook themselves off and left a hulking, heavy figure that lumbered on to the stage, and lumbered off again. She publicly snubbed duchesses and "the quality," who wished to honour her socially, a woman once cultured and careful, who flung money away on whims and fancies, believing that her voice of gold, and the lure of it, would last for ever. Such was Galli. Ultimately she lived with Miss Ray the actress, and was with her when some ill-conditioned lover, named Hackman, shot at and killed her, and then turned his pistol upon himself so slightly that he lived to be hanged for murder. Then Galli gravitated downhill. The old Italian pride would not break even under the lash of poverty. She tried to sing, and when the public laughed at a voice that had withered with the day, she crept away broken and hurt, yet ready to make a fresh attempt to get back. She was one of those slaves whom music treats too hardly. In her later years she sang "He was despised," and the Earl of Mount |