Bankruptcy and paralysis—visit to Aix-la-Chapelle—the last operas—Vauxhall Gardens—Handel's "borrowings"—visit to Ireland—Messiah and other oratorios.

The collapse of the Opera left Handel not only bankrupt, but with seriously endangered health. In April 1737 it had been announced that he was "indisposed with the rheumatism," from which he made a slight temporary recovery; but before the season was over it became clear that he was suffering from paralysis. "His right arm was become useless to him," says Mainwaring, "and how greatly his senses were disordered at intervals, for a long time, appeared from an hundred instances, which are better forgotten than recorded." With some difficulty his medical advisers persuaded him to go to the sulphur bath of Aix-la-Chapelle, where, according to Mainwaring, he submitted to prolonged and drastic treatment. His cure was considered remarkably rapid, and the nuns (presumably nursing sisters) who heard him play the organ within a few hours of leaving his bath ascribed it to a miracle. "Such a conclusion," observes our clerical biographer, "in such persons was natural enough."

It has been asserted that during his stay at Aix, Handel composed a cantata for the five-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Elbing, a town in East Prussia between Danzig and KÖnigsberg. A German researcher about 1869 appears to have discovered documents at Elbing mentioning the cantata, with the name of the poet and that of a local singer, Jean du Grain, who composed the recitatives; Handel "of London" was said to have composed the choruses. No trace of the music has survived, and there seems to be no evidence whatever to connect this work with Handel's visit to Aix. Nor is it possible to suggest any reason why the authorities of this remote place should have applied to Handel for a composition.

According to Mainwaring, Handel stayed six weeks at Aix; the London papers announced his return on November 7, 1737. The management of the Opera had now been taken over by Heidegger, but the death of Queen Caroline on November 20 caused all theatres to be closed from that date until the end of December. It was announced in the papers that the Opera would reopen on January 10 with a new oratorio by Handel, called Saul, but this performance did not take place, and the theatre actually reopened on January 7 with his new opera Faramondo. This opera was the first work that Handel had undertaken after his return to London, but its composition was interrupted by that of the Funeral Anthem for the Queen. Although she died on November 20, Handel did not receive the King's command to write the anthem until December 7, as George II was strangely undecided in making arrangements for the funeral. It was finally fixed for December 17, and a special organ was hurriedly built for it in Henry VII's chapel at Westminster Abbey. Handel's anthem was performed by 80 singers and 100 instrumentalists. Queen Caroline had been one of his most faithful friends, and his gratitude and affection for her found utterance in music which Burney placed "at the head of all his works for expression, harmony and pleasing effects."

It was at ten at night on Christmas Eve that Handel finished the score of Faramondo; on Boxing Day he began the composition of Serse. Faramondo had only six performances, and Serse did not appear on the stage until April 15, when it ran for five nights only. It is remembered now, if at all, by the fact that the first song in it is the so-called "celebrated Largo," but the opera as a whole is of curious interest. "He was neither in health, prosperity, or spirits," says Burney, "when it was composed; appearances remain in his foul score [i.e. rough copy] of a mind disturbed, if not diseased. There are more passages, and even whole pages, cancelled in this score, than in any one of all his former operas." Serse, it must be explained, is a comic opera, and the only comic opera that Handel ever wrote. What induced him to attempt this style it is difficult to conceive. It is of course true that the failure of Handel's earlier operas was largely due to the success of The Beggar's Opera (1728), and of other comic entertainments which succeeded it—Hurlothrumbo (1729), Pasquin (1736) and The Dragon of Wantley (1737). A new type of comic opera had arisen in Italy too, and comic intermezzi were first seen in Italian grand opera in London in January 1737, although it was not until 1748 that a real company of Italian comic-opera singers came over to England. But what is more important to notice is that the whole style of Italian opera was changing during the second quarter of the century. Handel had continued to develop his own style, based on the grand manner of old Scarlatti, but Handel's operas were practically unknown outside London and Hamburg; in Italy, Scarlatti's style had already become old-fashioned before his death in 1725, and opera was moving on towards the lighter and flimsier manner of Galuppi, who first came to London in this year of Serse, 1738.

In choosing the libretto of Serse, Handel seems to have been making a desperate attempt to keep up with the taste of the day. Humour he had in plenty; one has only to recall Acis and Galatea. But the humour of Serse, diverting as it is to the modern historical student, is neither the musical nor the dramatic humour of 1737; the plot bears no resemblance whatever to the Neapolitan comic operas of Vinci and Pergolesi, but rather recalls the very early operas, based on Spanish comedies, composed by Alessandro Scarlatti in the 1680's. Serse was revived a few years ago in Germany, considerably cut about and reduced to one act, in which arrangement it had some success; but we can well understand its complete failure on its first London production.

The only satisfaction which Handel received in that unfortunate season of 1738 was the proceeds of his benefit concert at the Haymarket on March 28, organised for him by his friends, apparently rather against his own wish. According to Burney the net receipts were £800; Mainwaring puts the figure at £1,500. Even if we accept Burney's estimate, the sum is remarkable, and particularly so in view of the known hostility of a large section of society towards the composer. It can only be supposed that Handel's physical and mental collapse had been grave enough to awaken a wide-spread sense of pity for his misfortunes. Another mark of popular appreciation was the erection of a statue of Handel, executed by Roubiliac, at Vauxhall Gardens, in recognition of the pleasure which his music had afforded to the frequenters of that famous resort. This piece of "laudable idolatry," as Burney calls it, was thus described by a contemporary journalist: "Mr. Handel is represented in a loose robe, sweeping the lyre, and listening to its sounds; which a little boy sculptured at his feet seems to be writing down on the back of a violon-cello. The whole composition is in an elegant taste." Commissioned by an impresario who had made a fortune out of the use of Handel's music, it now appropriately adorns the vestibule of Messrs. Novello's music-shop in Wardour Street.

Charles Jennens, writing to his cousin Lord Guernsey on September 19, 1738, remarks that "Mr. Handel's head is more full of maggots than ever." Towards the end of July he had begun the composition of Saul, for which Jennens had provided the libretto three years before. It is evident that Handel intended to startle his audiences with his new oratorio scheme. He had ordered a new organ for the theatre at a cost of £500, constructed so that he might have a better command of his performers, and he had also acquired another instrument, which Jennens calls a "Tubalcain"—in other words a set of bells played from a keyboard—which he intended to use in the scene in which the Israelites welcome David after his victory over the Philistines. It is curious that Handel should have dramatised the insanity of Saul just after he had himself recovered from mental derangement.

No sooner was Saul finished (September 27) than Handel, four days later, began the composition of Israel in Egypt. Saul was first performed on January 16, 1739, and enjoyed a moderate success, but Israel (April 4) was a failure, even after it had been shortened and made more attractive by the insertion of Italian opera songs.

Israel in Egypt is the most conspicuous example of a strange and almost unaccountable habit which from about this period began to show itself in Handel's methods of composition—the incorporation of large quantities of music by other composers. Samuel Wesley was the first person to draw attention to this practice of Handel's, though only in a private letter of 1808. In 1831 Dr. Crotch, in his professorial lectures at Oxford, named no less than twenty-nine composers whom Handel had "quoted or copied." The researches of Chrysander, Dr. Max Seiffert, Ebenezer Prout, and Sedley Taylor eventually proved beyond dispute that not only Israel, but several other works of Handel were largely made up from the music of other men.

Chrysander maintained that Handel began appropriating other men's ideas as early as 1707, for not only Rodrigo and Agrippina, but also La Resurrezione and the Laudate pueri show obvious reminiscences of Keiser's opera Octavia (Hamburg, 1705). These were probably subconscious, like Handel's reminiscences of Scarlatti and others at this period; they need not be taken any more seriously than Schubert's frequent reminiscences of Beethoven. But in Atalanta (1736) and Giustino (1737), Prout discovered quotations and adaptations several bars long from a Passion by Graun, which is known to have been composed not many years before. Further fragments of this Passion were identified by Prout in Alexander's Feast and the Wedding Anthem (1736); Saul, like Israel, incorporates several movements from a Te Deum by Urio (fl. 1660). From this date onwards until the end of his career Handel systematically drew upon the works of other musicians.

There has been much controversy over this question, and many attempts have been made to explain away Handel's "borrowings" so as to leave no moral stain on his character, which indeed, by all contemporary accounts, was scrupulously upright. Sedley Taylor (1906) was certainly anxious to clear Handel's character, but still more concerned to arrive at the exact truth, and his method of presenting the evidence throws a new light on Handel's procedure. He showed that in most cases Handel made frequent alterations in the music which he utilised, almost as if Stradella (to cite one name out of many) had been a young pupil to whom he was giving a lesson in composition.

A careful study of these alterations suggests a reason for Handel's action which seems not to have occurred to any previous writer on the subject. No one seems to have noticed hitherto that Handel's "borrowings" begin in 1736 on a small scale, and become more frequent in 1737, after which they develop into a regular habit. It seems only natural therefore to connect them with Handel's mental collapse; it became acute in the spring of 1737, but it may well have been approaching in the previous year.

There is no need to go so far as to suggest that Handel suffered from moral insanity and was incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong; but it is quite conceivable that his paralytic stroke affected his brain in such a way that he may sometimes have had a difficulty in starting a composition. Biographers of Handel have more than once drawn attention to phases in which he seems to have suffered from the inability to make a definite decision. Indecision is a common symptom of overstrained nerves, and anyone who has attempted musical composition or taught it to students will understand the hesitation and uncertainty which often attends the first writing down of a musical theme, although, once the initial idea has been settled, the continuation and development of it may proceed without difficulty. Any musician who studies the examples printed by Sedley Taylor will at once exclaim that for a man of Handel's experience, to say nothing of his fertility or indeed of his genius, it would have been far less trouble to compose an original setting of given words than to adapt them so laboriously to music written by someone else for a totally different purpose. But after his attack of paralysis there may well have been occasional moments when Handel could not make up his mind to write down an idea of his own, but may very likely have found that when once he had an idea ready on paper before him, whether that of another composer or an old one of his own, he could then continue to compose, and often make alterations in the music under his eyes which transformed it from a commonplace into a masterpiece.

In the autumn of 1739 Handel transferred his concerts to the smaller theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where at first there seemed some hope of success. On November 17 he produced his setting of Dryden's Ode for St. Cecilia's Day; it was repeated several times, Alexander's Feast and Acis and Galatea being added to the programmes. But a month later an exceptionally severe frost set in; the Thames was frozen over, and for two months it was useless to open the theatre, owing to the impossibility of warming it adequately. In February he produced L'Allegro, adapted by Charles Jennens from Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, to which Jennens had added a third part of his own, Il Moderato; but the public, whether from indifference to the work or from fear of the cold, refused to come to it. Handel was once more on the verge of ruin, but that did not prevent him from giving a performance of his two most popular works, Acis and Alexander's Feast, for the benefit of a new musical charity.

The charity in which Handel was so keenly interested had been founded in 1738 to assist impoverished musicians and their families; it still carries on its honourable work under the title of the Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain.

The same year saw the inauguration of another charitable institution which owed much to the continued generosity of Handel, the Foundling Hospital. Like Hogarth, who was also a benefactor, Handel did not confine his support to an occasional gift, but took the warmest personal interest in the place, and eventually both he and Hogarth were made governors of it.

The managers of the Opera had found themselves quite unable to continue productions on the grand scale of former years. In the winter of 1739-40 there had been an insignificant season at Covent Garden; it seems to have been directed by the Italian composer Pescetti, who, in the following winter, started concerts at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Mrs. Pendarves, who during the last few years had not lived much in London, and had thus dropped out of Handel's life, wrote in November: "The concerts begin next Saturday at the Haymarket. Carestini sings, Pescetti composes; the house is made up into little boxes, like the playhouses abroad." Dr. Burney gives a comic account of the undertaking. "The opera, a tawdry, expensive and meretricious lady, who had been accustomed to high keeping, was now reduced to a very humble state. Her establishment was not only diminished, but her servants reduced to half-pay. Pescetti seems to have been her prime minister, Carestini her head man, the Muscovita her favourite woman, and Andreoni a servant for all work." Concerts and pasticcios formed the main repertory, and Burney ascribes such success as they enjoyed to the fact that the Little Theatre was a "snug retreat" in which those who had the courage to quit their firesides during the great frost might keep reasonably warm.

Handel had nothing to do with this theatre, but in 1740 again rented the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where on November 8 he revived Parnaso in Festa "in its original oratorio manner, with the addition of scenes, dresses and concertos on the organ and several other instruments." It had but one performance; on the 22nd, Handel produced a new opera, or, as Burney calls it, an operetta, which had no more than two performances. This was Imeneo. On January 10, 1741, he brought out another new opera, Deidamia, which ran for three nights. Imeneo is a work of little importance; Deidamia, on the other hand, contains several very beautiful songs. But Dr. Burney, notwithstanding his admiration of it, has to admit that much of it was old-fashioned, in the style of Handel's youth, and sometimes "languid and antique." To Handel's admirers to-day such criticism may seem ridiculous, but to his audiences of 1741 these reversions to an earlier style would certainly have been most unwelcome.

Deidamia was Handel's last work for the stage; the glorious achievements of his youth and maturity had come to a hopeless end. His own public had unjustly neglected him, posterity consigned his operas to oblivion.

At some period during the summer of 1741 Handel received an invitation from the fourth Duke of Devonshire, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, to go over to Dublin and give concerts there for the benefit of the local hospitals. It is very probable that Mrs. Pendarves may have helped to secure this engagement for Handel. She had spent a year and a half in Ireland in 1731-32, and her letters give a lively account of society in Dublin. Matthew Dubourg, an excellent violinist, was at the head of the Viceroy's band, and musical entertainments were frequent, for to judge from Mrs. Pendarves' descriptions the Irish bishops and deans lived almost as magnificently as the cardinals in Rome. Mrs. Pendarves was naturally a very popular guest in Dublin society; she was a remarkably fine harpsichord player for an amateur, and was constantly in demand as a performer at private parties. There was no one in London or Dublin who had a more intelligent understanding of Handel's music, and her enthusiasm for his works was unbounded. She kept constantly in touch with Dublin life when in England, for she corresponded with Dean Swift, and, what was more important still, she had in 1730 made the acquaintance of Dr. Delany, an Irish clergyman, whom she was to marry in 1743.

Handel did not leave London until the first week of November. During the summer he had been occupied with the composition of a new oratorio, Messiah, the words for which had been chosen and arranged by Jennens, apparently with a good deal of assistance from his chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Pooley. Whether Messiah was composed with a view to production in Dublin is not known; it was begun on August 22 and finished on September 14. A fortnight later he had completed the first act of Samson. On the way to Holyhead he stopped at Chester, where he was obliged to stay several days on account of contrary winds which prevented his embarking. He seized the opportunity to try over some of the choruses of Messiah with local church-singers, and Burney, who was at school at Chester, gives an amusing account of the little rehearsal, at which Handel was roused to grotesque fury by the inability of the bass, a printer by trade, to read "And with His stripes" at sight. On November 18 he arrived in Dublin, and opened his season at Neal's new music-hall in Fishamble Street on December 23 with a performance of L'Allegro, interspersed with concertos. A few days later he wrote a long letter to Jennens describing the unprecedented success which he had enjoyed. Dublin received him with open arms, and he thoroughly enjoyed his triumph, the more so as he felt himself to be in unusually good health.

A series of concerts followed, at which various oratorios and other works were performed. On April 8, 1742, there was a rehearsal of Messiah, open to those who had taken tickets for the first performance, which took place on Tuesday, April 13. The choir was provided by the singers from the two cathedrals, some of whom took the male solo parts as well; the female soloists were Mrs. Cibber and Signora Avolio. Over seven hundred persons were present, and about £400 was divided between the three charities, the Relief of Prisoners, Mercer's Hospital, and the Charitable Infirmary.

Saul was performed on May 25, and a second performance of Messiah took place on June 3. Handel left Ireland on August 13. In another letter to Jennens he says that his plans for the winter are undecided; for "this time twelve-month" (i.e. September 1743) he intended to continue his oratorios in Ireland. For some reason or other this second visit to Ireland never took place.

It was not until February 17, 1743, that Handel came before the London public again with Samson, which, unlike most of his oratorios, had an immediate success. He had by this time dropped the Italian singers altogether, and depended mainly on Mrs. Cibber and John Beard, a tenor who had more sense of artistic style than power of voice. Mr. Flower says that his voice was more powerful than sweet; Horace Walpole, who heard him, said that he had only one note in it, and Mrs. Pendarves, whose judgment was probably more trustworthy, said that he had no voice at all. The first London performance of Messiah was given on March 23, but it had no more than two subsequent repetitions this season. There were many reasons why it should have fallen flat. Jennens himself was extremely dissatisfied with it. Israel had been a failure too, and it is extremely probable that musical people, accustomed to the Italian opera, were estranged by a setting of Bible words in prose instead of a libretto in verse laid out on more or less dramatic lines.

William Law's Serious Call had been published in 1729; the book makes frequent allusions to the frivolity of Italian opera, and opera-going is picked out as one of the chief characteristics of irreligious persons. In 1739 John Wesley first began to preach in the open air; in 1742 Edward Young's Night Thoughts achieved its extraordinary popularity. These three events were all significant of the religious movement that was taking place among the more cultured classes in England, and this movement undoubtedly affected Handel's oratorio concerts. The ultra-religious were shocked at the association of sacred subjects with the theatre; those who could combine religion with culture, like Mrs. Delany, who was now approaching the age of piety, were Handel's most earnest supporters. It is quite probable that the section of society which preferred its culture unmixed with religion resented the attitude of the second party even more than that of the first, because the second party belonged to their own social class, and this resentment may well have contributed to the ever-increasing hostility shown by many social leaders toward Handel. And Handel's personal oddities were becoming rapidly more acute, partly owing to increasing age, and still more owing to recurrences of paralysis and associated mental derangement. He had another attack in this very year—1743.

Messiah and Samson were composed at a more favourable moment, and show little use of borrowed material, except that Messiah incorporates some of Handel's own chamber duets, the melodies of which were more suitably illustrative of their original Italian words than of the sentences from Scripture to which he adapted them. But his next important work, the Te Deum in celebration of the victory at Dettingen (June 27), begun in July and performed on November 27, incorporates no less than nine movements from the Latin Te Deum by Urio already drawn upon for Israel in Egypt. Mrs. Delany "was all raptures," and thought it "excessively fine."

It is curious that, whereas the Dettingen Te Deum was largely based on borrowed material, Semele, composed in the previous month of June, should be, as far as is at present known, entirely original. The libretto had been written by Congreve in 1707 for an opera, and it was only natural that its theatrical sense and its literary grace and distinction should have inspired Handel to one of his loveliest works. Handel was never quite at home in the English language, but in his later years he seems to have developed a feeling for English poetry, more especially for that of approximately his own time. But Semele did not attract the opera audience; it became increasingly clear that the opera party would have nothing to do with Handel, and were in fact deliberately doing all they could to bring him to ruin. Mrs. Delany and a few other great ladies remained faithful, but they were in a small minority. It was evidently the younger generation who were in opposition; Mrs. Delany alludes to them as "the Goths—the fine ladies, the petits maÎtres and the ignoramuses," and seemed surprised that they allowed the oratorio to be performed without making a disturbance. Mrs. Delany was settling down to being the wife of a dean.

Joseph (March 2, 1744) fared no better, and Handel himself "was mightily out of humour about it" at the rehearsals. The summer was devoted to the composition of Belshazzar, for which Jennens had supplied the libretto. The collaboration was not altogether happy, for although Jennens had considerable sense of the picturesque, and offered Handel opportunities for what may be called spectacular music on the grand scale, his literary style was pompous, rhetorical, and long-winded. Handel protested perpetually against the length of the work, for the Handelian style of composition naturally extended the prolixity of the words; Jennens greatly resented the musician's criticism, and insisted on printing the poem in full.

When the winter came, Handel produced nothing of importance until January 5, when he brought out Hercules, a secular oratorio which he had composed in the summer during intervals when Belshazzar had to be laid aside owing to Jennens' delays. Belshazzar was given on March 27. Semele, Joseph, and Saul were revived, but, whatever oratorio was given, the theatre was almost empty, and the season came to a premature end on April 23. Handel was again suffering from some form of illness, and was unable to take any part in the performances, although he was present at them. Lady Shaftesbury describes "the great, though unhappy, Handel, dejected, wan and dark, sitting by, not playing on, the harpsichord," and adds that "his light had been spent in being overplied in music's cause." Hawkins states definitely that Handel became blind in 1751, and this date has been generally accepted; Lady Shaftesbury's letter suggests that he was already blind, or partially so, as early as March 1745, unless the word "light" is to be taken as meaning the light of his reason. This interpretation, in fact, is confirmed by a later letter of Lord Shaftesbury in October, in which he says: "Poor Handel looks something better. I hope he will entirely recover in due time, though he has been a good deal disordered in the head." Another friend of Handel's, William Harris, met him in London, in August, when he seems at first not to have recognised Harris and to have behaved with some oddity; "he talked much of his precarious state of health, yet he looks well enough."

It has generally been stated that in 1745 Handel again became bankrupt, but Barclay Squire pointed out that his name does not occur in the official lists of bankrupts. It must be remembered that, however disastrous his opera or oratorio seasons were, he had always his permanent pension of £600 a year to fall back on, and Hawkins states that this pension, originally granted by Queen Anne and George I, was punctually paid throughout his life.

From the end of August, London was in a panic over the Jacobite rebellion under the Young Pretender, Charles Edward. The Opera remained closed on account of the prejudice against the Papist Italian singers; at the other theatres patriotism expressed itself in appropriate music. Purcell's "Genius of England" was sung at one, Arne's recently composed "Rule, Britannia" at another, and on November 14 a "Chorus Song, set by Mr. Handel for the Gentlemen Volunteers of the City of London," was sung by Mr. Lowe at Drury Lane. The words suggest that the anonymous author was familiar with the Epilogue to Purcell's King Arthur; Handel's music is neither in his own style nor in Purcell's, but resembles the poorest sort of English patriotic song of the early eighteenth century. Patriotic poetry was well illustrated by an additional verse for "God Save the King" which was printed in this same month:

On December 6 the Pretender began his retreat from Derby, and panic was allayed. Handel seized the opportunity to compose and bring out his Occasional Oratorio, about half of which was taken from Israel in Egypt; it contains a well-known quotation of "Rule, Britannia," and the point of the quotation is made clearer when we know that it was one of the patriotic songs sung at the theatres during the period of panic.

The Duke of Cumberland's defeat of the Pretender at Culloden on April 16, 1746, finally disposed of the Jacobites, and Handel made a further contribution to the national rejoicings in "A Song on the Victory over the Rebels," which was printed in the London Magazine for July. The words were by John Lockman; the first and last verses are as follows:

In the same month Handel began the composition of a new oratorio in honour of the Duke; this was Judas Maccabaeus, for which he had discovered a new librettist, the Rev. Thomas Morell, formerly Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Morell has given a lively account of his collaboration with the great man, whom he did not fear to criticise. Handel's retorts to him have been reproduced as if they were outbursts of righteous indignation against a snarling poetaster, but, in view of many other records of Handel's rough tongue and genial humour (in which he seems often to have resembled Brahms), we need not take them too seriously. It is quite clear that Morell was more amused than offended, and the fact that they continued to collaborate up to the end of Handel's career as a composer shows that they must have remained on completely friendly terms.

Morell, to judge from the contemporary portrait of him, must have been a rather comic little figure with a strong sense of humour. He was a scholar, and something of a musician too. The academic primness of his verses has endeared him to all lovers of Handel, and to no one more than Samuel Butler; they are always admirably suited to their purpose, neat and scholarly, concise and direct, with never a word too many. They run easily for a singer, and it is not improbable that Morell was acquainted with the works of that great model of all opera-poets, Metastasio, for his words, like Metastasio's, acquire an unexpected beauty when they are sung.

Handel must have felt himself fully restored to health in the summer of 1746, for Judas, which was written in five weeks, contains no "borrowings," apart from a few numbers added some ten years later and adapted from some of his early Italian opera songs. It was not performed until April 1, 1747.