Handel and the British Public
People say the generous British public supported Handel. It did nothing of the kind. On the contrary, for some 30 years it did its best to ruin him, twice drove him to bankruptcy, badgered him till in 1737 he had a paralytic seizure which was as near as might be the death of him and, if he had died then, we should have no Israel, nor Messiah, nor Samson, nor any of his greatest oratorios. The British public only relented when he had become old and presently blind. Handel, by the way, is a rare instance of a man doing his greatest work subsequently to an attack of paralysis. What kept Handel up was not the public but the court. It was the pensions given him by George I and George II that enabled him to carry on at all. So that, in point of fact, it is to these two very prosaic kings that we owe the finest musical poems the world knows anything about.
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.
Handel and Shakespeare
Jones and I had been listening to Gaetano Meo’s girls playing Handel and were talking about him and Shakespeare, and how those two men can alike stir us more than any one else can. Neither were self-conscious in production, but when the thing had come out Shakespeare looks at it and wonders, whereas Handel takes it as a matter of course.
A Yankee Handelian
I only ever met one American who seemed to like and understand Handel. How far he did so in reality I do not know, but inter alia he said that Handel “struck ile with the Messiah,” and that “it panned out well, the Messiah did.”