Handel and Madame Patey
Rockstro told me that Sir Michael Costa, after his severe paralytic stroke, had to conduct at some great performance—I cannot be sure, but I think he said a Birmingham Festival—at any rate he came in looking very white and feeble and sat down in front of the orchestra to conduct a morning rehearsal. Madame Patey was there, went up to the poor old gentleman and kissed his forehead.
It is a curious thing about this great singer that not only should she have been (as she has always seemed to me) strikingly like Handel in the face, and not only should she have been such an incomparable renderer of Handel’s music—I cannot think that I shall ever again hear any one who seemed to have the spirit of Handel’s music so thoroughly penetrating his or her whole being—but that she should have been struck with paralysis at, so far as I can remember, the same age that Handel was. Handel was struck in 1737 when he was 53 years old, but happily recovered. I forget Madame Patey’s exact age, but it was somewhere about this.