The Foundling Asylum was a pride and pleasure to Handel in his declining years. He presented it with a new organ, opened it himself with a performance of “Messiah” on May 1, 1750, when countless persons of distinction had to be turned away since the Asylum chapel accommodated only 1,000. From that time on the master saw to it that the oratorio was sung there every year and that the proceeds, always considerable, were donated to the Hospital. Not to be behind his great associate, the artist, Hogarth, who subsequently shared with Handel the governorship, donated a portrait he had painted to the Hospital, raffled it off and gave the proceeds to the Asylum.
The composer went one last time to Halle and arrived in Germany, Rolland points out, just at the time his greatest contemporary, Bach, died in Leipzig. His own health was deteriorating, though his mind remained clear and his brain active. To be sure his sight had begun to trouble him. Yet when Thomas Morell, in January, 1751, gave him a libretto, “Jephtha”, he set to work composing it at once. He who had turned out the sublimities of “Messiah” in four weeks and the martial grandeurs of “Judas Maccabaeus” in even less had, however, to break off for ten days after the opening Largo of the chorus “How dark, O Lord, are Thy ways.” And he painfully set down on the manuscript: “I reached here on Wednesday, February 13, had to discontinue on account of the sight of my left eye.” On his 66th birthday (February 23) he wrote “Feel a little better. Resumed work” and set the words “Grief follows joy as night the day.” Then he stopped for four months and did not complete the whole score till the end of August, 1751. The last four numbers had taken him more time than he usually spent on an entire oratorio. By that time he had gone completely blind.
Two years later he regained control of himself, played the organ at twelve oratorio productions he gave annually in Lent. He was, even, with the assistance of his pupil and secretary, John Christopher Smith, son of an old Halle school friend, to compose some more music and to remodel his old Italian oratorio, “The Triumph of Time and Truth.” He had submitted to the care of a notorious quack, the “opthalmiater” Chevalier John Taylor, who then enjoyed an extensive vogue among distinguished patients and who boasted that he had seen, on his travels, “a vast variety of singular animals, such as dromedaries, camels, etc., and particularly at Leipsick, where a celebrated master of musick (Bach) already arrived to his 88th year (sic!) received his sight by my hands.” In any case, the different physicians hid nothing from their patient. His case was hopeless, he was afflicted with “gutta serena”. With his sight his best source of inspiration was gone.
“This man”, said Romain Rolland, “who was neither an intellectual nor a mystic, one who loved above all things light and nature, beautiful pictures and the spectacular view of things, who lived more through his eyes than most of the German musicians, was engulfed in deepest night. From 1752 to 1759, he was overtaken by the semi-consciousness which precedes death.” He had made his will in 1750 and at different times in the next nine years he added codicils to it. On April 6, 1759, he played the organ a last time at a “Messiah” performance, broke down in the middle of a number, recovered and improvised, it was said, with his old-time magnificence. Then he was brought home and they put him to bed.
Handel expressed a desire to be buried in Westminster Abbey; and he said: “I want to die on Good Friday in the hope of rejoining the good God, my sweet Lord and Saviour, on the day of His Resurrection.” On Saturday, April 14, 1759, the Whitehall Evening Post, announced: “This morning, a little before eight o’clock, died the deservedly celebrated George Frederick Handell Esq.” And a week later: “Last night about eight o’clock, the remains of the late great Mr. Handel were deposited at the foot of the Duke of Argyll’s Monument in Westminster Abbey; and though he had mentioned being privately interr’d, yet from the Respect due to so celebrated a Man, the Bishop, Prebends, and the whole Choir attended to pay the last Honours due to his Memory; the Bishop himself performed the Service. A Monument is also to be erected for him, which there is no doubt but his Works will even outlive. There was almost the greatest Concourse of People of all Ranks ever seen upon such, or indeed upon any other occasion.” Nevertheless, others have testified that Handel was not “burried midst a great concourse of people.” Ironically enough, the music performed at his obsequies was “Dr. Croft’s Funeral Anthem.”
In the Poets’ Corner a rather mediocre monument, by L. F. Roubiliac, was later unveiled to his memory “under the patronage and in the presence of His Most Gracious Majesty, George III.” But the lordly George Frideric Handel might have been prouder of the monument the dying Beethoven reared to his greatness when, pointing to Arnold’s Handelian edition by his bed, he exclaimed: “There lies the Truth!”
COMPLETE LIST OF RECORDINGS
by
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
OF NEW YORK
COLUMBIA RECORDS
Under the Direction of Dimitri Mitropoulos
Khachaturian—Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (Oscar Levant, piano)—LP Gould—Philharmonic Waltzes (Zino Francescatti, violin)—LP Rabaud—La Procession Nocturne (Zino Francescatti, violin)—LP Saint-Saens—Dance Macabre (Robert, Gaby & Jean Casadesus, pianists)—LP Saint-Saens—Le Rouet D’Omphale (Zino Francescatti, violin)—LP Saint-Saens—Violin Concerto, Op. 61 (Zino Francescatti, violin)—LP Sessions—Symphony No. 2