Athalia

It is evident, therefore, that Handel's main object in going to Oxford at all was to replenish his depleted coffers, while the University authorities induced him to come purely with the notion of making a celebration of what was in the ordinary way a very dull proceeding.

So Handel with his company reached Oxford on 4th July, and immediately went into rehearsal. On the following day he listened to the speeches all the morning, including an oration in lyric verse on "The Praise of True Magnificence" from Lord Guernsey, a student at the time, and a son of the Earl of Aylesford. His relative was Charles Jennens who, a few years later, provided Handel with some of the best libretti he ever had.i

At five o'clock the same day Handel opened his programme with a performance of Esther.

Oxford, which was the home of the arts, knew little of Handel beyond the copies of his music which Walsh poured into the city. It is doubtful if a dozen people in the place had ever seen him. Rumour had torn his name, his very genius, this way and that. Yet Handel's arrival at Oxford might have been the triumphant entry of a king. The crowds were tremendous, all the roads leading to the city were packed with dusty, eager travellers bent on the same errand. Even the accommodation at the hostels ran out, and people slept in the streets. "The Persons of Quality and Distinction who are come hither on this occasion," wrote the local paper, Read's Weekly Journal, on 14th July, "make a very grand appearance, and are greater in number than ever was known before; the little hutts of the neighbouring villages are mostly filled with the Gentlemen of Cambridge and Eton, there being no accommodation in this or the Towns within five or six miles about us."

Handel had brought down in his pocket a surprise for these people of Oxford in the shape of a new oratorio, Athalia. Samuel Humphreys prepared the libretto from Racine's story.

1 On the death of Handel, Christopher Smith, his amanuensis, gave to Jennens a set of the Master's concert scores, numbering over a hundred volumes. These Jennens passed on to the Earl of Aylesford, whose son, this same young Lord Guernsey, in due time owned them on succeeding to the title, a happy souvenir of his oration before Handel.

Apparently Handel had composed it quietly without any intention of producing it at the King's Theatre. As a matter of fact, he finished the composing just a month before he went to Oxford, from which it is scarcely imagination to suppose that, in return for the honour of a Degree, he intended to give the University people a new and special work. Even when the question of the fees he would have to pay annoyed him so that he told Oxford politely that it could keep its honour, he still presented the city with Athalia. But he made the city pay for it. He sold the seats at 5s. each, and came back from Oxford very considerably richer than he went there. A truly Handelian stroke!

His intention was to produce Athalia at Oxford on the 9th, but as "the ceremony of conferring the Degrees on the gentlemen engag'd the Theatre to a very late hour of that afternoon Mr Handel's new Oratorio call'd Athalia was deferr'd till this day (10th July) when it was performed with the utmost applause." 1 As well it might, for Athalia contained some of the richest jewels of his composing. The opening lines sung by Strada were a wonderment in melody such as that newly-built theatre had not earlier known. Then followed the chorus "The rising world Jehovah crown'd," which was the greatest triumph in oratorial chorus Handel had yet

reached.

sung by a chorus of virgins, moved many in the audience to

tears.

Handel gave Athalia five times in Oxford during the visit, and packed the theatre to the walls on each occasion. He performed Esther three times, Deborah once, a Te Deum twice. Never had Oxford heard the like in music; it pressed him to return. And yet how some of them hated him for no other reason than because he was of German birth! Thomas Hearne of St Edmund's Hall wrote that Handel "and his lousy crew, a great number of foreign fiddlers" had come down. He resented any foreigner in the place, and he re1 Read's Weekly Journal, 14th July 1733.

Ariadne

sented more than anything Handel charging 5s. for a seat; for he referred to it in his diary day by day, and ended up with a note "His book (not worth 1d.) he sells for 1/-." Not that Hearne was alone. Pamphlets attacking Handel and "his foreign crew" began to appear. All this upheaval was, nevertheless, mere turbulent froth, a prejudice against his foreign singers. In a short time the city was seething with a controversy that might have been as spirited as that which had surged about Faustina and Cuzzoni if Handel had not gone back to town at the end of the week. What would have happened if he had paid their fees and taken his Degree it is hard to say. There would have been a University scandal; they would have burned his effigy and carried his head-or a masque of it-on a pike. The oddest thing about the visit, when all is said and done, is that Handel, being short of a bass-Montagnana having now deserted to the "Opera of the Nobility "— dug out his cook Waltz, forgave him for ever performing in Arne's pirate version of Acis, and took him to Oxford to sing as his leading bass.

When Handel reached London again he arranged with Heidegger that their partnership should continue for another season. Colman, who wrote the words of the next opera, Ariadne, which Handel began composing in October, had received a letter from that rolling-stone Owen MacSwiney, then at Bologna with Walpole, that he had discovered a fine castrato in Giovanni Carestini, who might very conceivably fill the place left by the secession of Senesino. Carestini's voice, originally a soprano, had fallen to the fullest, finest and deepest contralto ever perhaps heard. Oddly enough, he had first appeared on the stage in a performance of Bononcini's Griselda, and he came to London now to try to save the Handel ship from foundering. Like all the castrati whose perfections of singing brought worshippers to their shrines, Carestini had his conceits. If he was not so great a monument of vanity as Senesino, he was scarcely more generous in his loyalty to those who employed him.

Handel completed the setting of Colman's Ariadne in October, but did not produce the opera until the end of

1 Grove's "Dictionary of Music."