17 
Anthems and Choruses
The victory over the Jacobites was followed two years later by the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, the continental conflict that had pulled Britain into a global war with France. The growing mood of security and confidence—or at least George II’s eagerness to nudge public sentiment in that direction—played to Handel’s advantage. In the spring of 1747, he had premiered a new oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus, which drew its theme from Jewish history. A tale of resistance to foreign rule and the struggle against false gods, it was dedicated in the wordbook to the Duke of Cumberland—hero to Whigs, “Butcher” to Tories and Highlanders. Handel later inserted an easily singable chorus, “See, the conquering hero comes,” which would rival Arne’s “Rule, Britannia!” as the emblem of a newly assertive Britishness.
The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in October 1748, formally returned Britain to peace with France, Prussia, and other belligerent powers. It would turn out to be more of an armistice than a lasting settlement. Britain and France would go to war again only six years later, a conflict sparked in part by an attack on French positions in the Ohio River valley led by a young lieutenant colonel named George Washington. But Aix-la-Chapelle did manage to weaken the link between domestic politics and foreign intrigue. France undertook to expel any remaining Stuarts. No Jacobite rising would ever again threaten the succession. Charles Edward Stuart would make one further clandestine visit to Britain, but his cause was effectively at an end. By the time he died several decades later, in 1788, diminished by alcohol and disappointment, even most nonjurors had come around to accepting the reality of a Hanoverian dynasty.
George placed the Duke of Montagu, who served as master of the ordnance, in charge of plans to celebrate the hopeful new era. It took months to organize an event of suitable scale and grandeur, something that would both please the king and mark the first time in years that no grenadiers or cavalrymen were called to battle. Handel was commissioned to provide a musical prelude. An outdoor stage and set, consisting of a hundred-foot-high temple of wood and canvas painted to look like stone, now rose in the flower meadow in Green Park near St. James’s Palace. In an attempt to control the expected carriage traffic, newspapers gave careful instructions for arrival and departure. People planning to attend were warned that thieves would no doubt lurk in the crowds.
In April 1749 an audience of thousands arrived to witness the nine-hour spectacle. A hundred musicians—woodwinds, trumpets, horns, and drums, but no strings, Montagu insisted, since the king regarded “fidles…and violeens” to be insufficiently martial—formed the largest and loudest orchestra Handel had ever commanded. The royal family looked on from the palace. Other people leaned out of windows or climbed to their rooftops. The festivities featured minuets and fanfares, booming cannons, whirring fireworks, and a mechanical sun emblazoned with “Vivat Rex”—“Long Live the King”—which workmen cranked up above the temple to illuminate the entire scene. The whole thing was impressive beyond measure, although “Irregular & in Confusion,” as one witness reported. Rain clouds threatened. Falling fireworks set a woman’s clothes ablaze. The faux sun burned for nearly a full minute as planned, but an errant rocket caused part of the stage to catch fire.
Still, the “Royal Fireworks,” as the event would be known afterward, confirmed Handel’s place in what would later be called national identity. When Handel first came to Britain, its unified Parliament was only three years old and its rightful royal line in dispute. Now the kingdom was forging a public story that cast Britons not just as subjects of a common king but as members of an emerging nation, defined by some combination of official Protestantism, naval power, a global empire, and most important not being French.
Part of that sense of the commonweal was also coming to mean having a tune by Handel occasionally running through one’s head. He was now more publicly adored than at any point since he had arrived in London more than thirty years earlier. His position as his adopted country’s premier public composer was unrivaled, with an annual routine that involved English-language oratorios during Lent and spectacle when required by the crown.
Some of the old energy was back. “The old Buck is excessively healthy and full of spirits,” a friend reported. In rehearsals he was known to suddenly cry, “Chorus!!!” at the end of a quiet aria, inspiring his singers while also terrifying them. He had maintained a signature style of dress left over from his youth, including an old-fashioned white wig, large and full, that bounced as he played and nodded at his singers. Audiences could tell when things were going well by how vigorously the curls shook during a performance.
As for the Messiah, it was, if not the least of his creations, then by the late 1740s among the least performed. Few people had ever had a chance to hear it. He had conducted it eight times and, of those, only once since 1745. He never published the full score. Pirated copies of arias and choruses circulated, as they always had, but with their words drawn straight from scripture, they were not the sort of thing one sang around the spinet after supper. The whole invention now seemed the product of an odd parenthesis, one winter and spring when a harried composer fled briefly into an Irish exile.
Even Handel’s collaboration with Jennens was at an end. After Holdsworth’s death, Jennens would never again work with the Prodigious on a piece of music. Their labors together had always been a three-way affair, in spirit if not in name, at least as far as Jennens was concerned. Handel had “made me but a Scurvy return for former obligations,” he had complained to Holdsworth the year after the first London performances of the Messiah. Now, without his friend and confidant, his tireless listener and bucker-up, what was left of his old passion seems to have withered.
But the work Jennens and Handel had created together was now, at the end of the 1740s, on the cusp of an astonishing renewal. An unexpected possibility would soon come Handel’s way. It was a chance to assist a growing, fashionable charity dedicated to the relief of children in need. The occasion would bring the Messiah into the one place that, surprisingly for a work on sacred themes, Handel had never performed it before: a church. The charity and its irascible founder would be the unlikely vehicle for making the work—and its composer—close to immortal.
In September 1742, the month after Handel returned from Dublin, the governors of the Foundling Hospital had laid the cornerstone for a permanent building. Around the corner from Jennens’s residence, a new structure began to rise on fifty-six acres in Lamb’s Conduit Field, a place where urban London dissolved into meadow and countryside. The design called for two wings, for girls and boys, alongside schools, dining rooms, dormitories, and offices. A large chapel would unite the two wings, forming a visual centerpiece as visitors approached the building over playing fields and parkland.
Coram had been present for the cornerstone ceremony, his disagreements with other members of the governing body temporarily patched over. Hogarth’s portrait of him, circulating as a print, would cement the image of the hospital’s champion and truest builder as an indefatigable advocate for a noble cause. The governors even allowed Coram to retain the physical copy of the king’s charter. By the autumn of 1745, he could walk across the expansive site to see workmen completing the building’s first wing and children already being moved out of Hatton Garden into their new quarters.
With each new admission, however, five times the number of children would be presented at the door as could be accommodated inside. To manage the demand fairly, the governing committee instituted a lottery system. Women drew colored balls from a box—white for accepted, red for rejected—to determine whether their child would be allowed into the inspection room. Around a hundred children were being accepted per year, but that was only a tiny fraction of those still “drooping and dying” in inadequate care, as a contemporary source put it. Funding receipts were also down. Coram’s relentless beseeching could open purses and bank accounts, but now that the hospital was a formal charity overseen by well-heeled dukes and earls, among them some of the largest landowners in Britain and overseas, any sense of urgency had begun to fade.
In 1749 the governors hit upon the same idea that had occurred to Coram more than two decades earlier. Making a charity into a fashion was the surest route to its survival, and there was perhaps no one better to aid that transformation than the country’s foremost composer, his reputation now refreshed in a time of peace. Were Handel to hold a concert for the hospital’s benefit, the governors reasoned, their cause would be fused with someone now regarded as close to a national treasure. Some of Handel’s closest friends were members of the governing body, and he himself had already contributed to the charity by donating an organ, which would later be assembled in the chapel. It seems to have taken little persuading for him to agree to stage a special concert. In the late spring, newspapers carried an announcement for a performance featuring a selection of his music from the Royal Fireworks and other unnamed pieces.
There were no windows yet installed in the chapel and little in the way of furnishings. But the advertisement assured the public that the shell of a building would be “Sashed and made commodious.” On May 27, the program went off just as expected. A thousand people had purchased tickets. The Prince and Princess of Wales were in attendance. Handel premiered a new work that came to be known as the “Foundling Hospital Anthem,” one element of which was simply the recycled “Hallelujah” chorus from the Messiah. In fact, the Foundling Hospital concert might have been the first instance of listeners’ rising to their feet at the chorus, since Handel placed it exactly where one might expect a jubilant wrap-up: as the final movement. The event was considered such a resounding success that the governors invited Handel to return the following year.
Money, as it had always done, followed endorsements. Handel’s association with the hospital was part of what would turn out to be a rush of artists toward the hospital’s efforts. Hogarth and others had already contributed to the hospital’s interior decoration, adding ornate biblical scenes to the court room, or meeting chamber, for the hospital’s governors: Moses in the bulrushes, the outcast Hagar and her fatherless son Ishmael, Jesus inviting the little children to come unto him. Now the hospital was increasingly functioning not only as a concert space but also as a public gallery.
Hogarth donated his portrait of Coram, and a lottery brought in his March of the Guards to Finchley, a boisterous take on the dispatch of redcoat soldiers to confront the Jacobites. The picture collection grew to include many of the preeminent painters of the century, including work by portraitists such as Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. Displayed in the hospital’s public rooms, the paintings would form what amounted to Britain’s first public art museum—an outcome that Coram could hardly have imagined when he set out collecting signatures for his proposed charity decades earlier.
In the spring of 1750, an announcement circulated for a new concert under Handel’s direction, now in the completed Foundling Hospital chapel. The program included the full “sacred oratorio” that he had felt unable to name publicly only a few years before. The Messiah had first been performed in aid of debtors, and it was now to have a kind of second premiere, in a chapel dedicated to the rescue of needy children. Paid choristers and boys from the Chapel Royal formed the choir. Hogarth offered his services to design the tickets. They featured an image he had created as the hospital’s new coat of arms: an infant with a hand outstretched, above a motto that said simply, “Help.”
When the doors opened on May 1, more than twice the number of people showed up as for Handel’s concert a year earlier. Thousands pushed and elbowed to get inside. So many prominent donors were left without a seat that Handel agreed to perform again on the following day. “Two or Three Bishops were there,” one attendee reported, “so that I hope, in a little while, that Hearing of oratorios will be held as orthodox.” The minutes of the Board of Governors soon recorded that Handel had joined their number as a Foundling Hospital trustee.
Coram was most likely absent from the Messiah concert. He had earlier been left off the guest list for people invited to see the opening of the court room with paintings by Hogarth and other esteemed artists. Recognized as the hospital’s founder but no longer considered quite fit to circulate in the rarefied reaches of London society that now ran it, Coram would soon be close to penury. Some of his remaining friends organized a public subscription to help support him.
Coram told a friend that it was something of an achievement to have managed one’s finances so well, with generosity of purpose and no self-indulgence, that one could move toward death in satisfied poverty. He was now in his eighties. On many days, he could be seen sitting outside the Foundling Hospital in his rust-colored coat, smiling among the children. He died not long afterward, in March 1751. Only then did the governors make his connection to the Foundling Hospital permanent. After a solemn, well-attended service, he was buried under the altar of the chapel, steps from Handel’s organ, which was at last fully installed and tuned.
Coram had lived long enough to see a monumental expansion in the hospital’s operations. The year he died, records showed that a total of more than 800 children had been admitted to the institution. That figure would swell in the years to come. Within a decade, 270 children were residing in the main building in Lamb’s Conduit Fields, while more than 6,000 others were placed in the care of foster families and wet nurses throughout Britain.
For years, communicable diseases would continue to take an appalling toll. At mid-century the infant mortality rate was 63 percent, although already less than the 75 percent in other institutions. In time, however, the hospital would turn out to be a pioneer in reducing childhood death. A program of mandatory childhood inoculation against smallpox would stem one of the era’s greatest killers. Nurses and other employees were required to have had the disease before beginning work. The mortality rate gradually came down, and infants grew into young girls and boys recognizable by the brown wool uniforms, designed by Hogarth, that marked them as Foundling Hospital residents. When they came of age, boys could expect to be apprenticed or sent to sea, girls to work in manufacturing or domestic service. Many would move into their adult lives, start families of their own, and work throughout Britain and overseas in skilled trades, as weavers, tailors, and shopkeepers, even the occasional singer or organist.
Over the course of the 1750s, the Foundling Hospital’s “Annual Musical Festival of Messiah,” as the organizers called it, became one of the most anticipated events of the London season. The concerts brought in nearly seven thousand pounds in all, an enormous sum for a charity. If the Messiah now seemed intimately familiar to thousands of people, it was because many of them had heard it in that venue. “It was afterwards consecrated to the service of the most innocent, most helpless, and most distressed part of the human species,” wrote John Mainwaring in his early biography of Handel. Susannah Cibber apparently never participated in the hospital concerts; she had moved on to other engagements onstage and last sang for Handel in 1745. But for the first few years at least, audiences could expect to see Handel himself in charge, conducting the choir from the keyboard, a role that he later ceded to John Christopher Smith Jr., son of his old assistant, in his capacity as the Foundling Hospital’s official organist. Now and then, if the weather were fair and the crowds bearable, an astute visitor might even have recognized Charles Jennens, well dressed and dour, seated among the listeners, having made the short walk from his town house. The association with Handel made the chapel a popular destination even outside the annual performances. The pious tourism of attending a Sunday morning service became so popular that the hospital began offering pews for rent. Visitors could gaze up at the gallery to see Coram’s children, as they came to be called, in their crisp uniforms, sitting patiently through the liturgy.
From his coronation anthems to some of the greatest works of public spectacle ever created, Handel had become nothing short of the architect of British musical sensibility. The concerts at the Foundling Hospital provided a regular occasion for popular adulation unlike anything he had ever experienced. His music was inseparable from a cause as well as a moral sensibility: helping indigent children and knowing the deep tangibility of hope. After the London premiere of the Messiah in 1743, Handel is supposed to have told a noble patron, “My Lord…I should be sorry if I only entertained [an audience]; I wished to make them better.” The quotation was probably a later invention, but to his listeners the story came to express something real. Handel’s music did well because people now expected it to make them good.
Handel performed the Messiah more frequently than any other oratorio he ever composed, thirty-six times, most of them after the age of sixty. But for many of his admirers, the Foundling Hospital concerts were what made the Messiah his greatest creation—a fact so seemingly obvious that the details barely warranted a mention. “It is needless to enlarge upon particulars, which are easily remembered, or to give a minute account of things generally known,” wrote Mainwaring. The Messiah was now established as “the favourite Oratorio,” he said. “So that it may truly be affirmed, that one of the noblest and most extensive charities that ever was planned by the wisdom, or projected by the piety of men, in some degree owes its continuance, as well as prosperity, to the patronage of HANDEL.”
The old typesetter from Bartholomew Close apparently agreed. Benjamin Franklin, who had returned to London in 1757 as colonial agent for Pennsylvania, was in the audience at one of the chapel concerts. Writing to a young friend afterward, he felt no need to describe it as anything other than “the Oratorio in the Foundling Hospital.” By that stage, anyone would have known what he meant.
In the winter of 1751, Handel noticed a problem with his left eye. “So relaxt”—it’s weakening—he jotted in German at the bottom of another oratorio he had been working on, along with the date, February 13. He was just turning sixty-six. For the past fifteen years, busy performance seasons had left him plagued by recurring illnesses, including bouts of unexplained paralysis. Now his eyesight seemed to be fading as well, the same affliction that had rendered his mother completely blind in middle age.
Bach had died the previous year, and Handel might have been aware of how the great composer had ended up: as a pitiable colossus who had to be led to the keyboard by an assistant. Only a few months after first noticing his eye problems, Handel found himself following the same course. Each time he instructed a lawyer to update his will, his signature became noticeably less legible, trending toward a scrawl. He started attending prayers twice a day at St. George’s church near Brook Street and pulled back on his swearing, for which he had once had a particular gift. He found some relief in taking the waters in spa towns such as Bath or Tunbridge Wells, but each time he returned to the manuscript pages on his table, the lines on the staff had become less distinct.
He still composed, now with the help of Smith Jr., but his performances increasingly depended on recalling things from memory or relying on his legendary gift for improvisation. He practiced incessantly during oratorio season, working to keep his skills sharp and the impromptu passages fresh. He might give out only sketch parts to his musicians, playing all the solos himself at the keyboard and then using a final trill to signal the rest of the orchestra to join him again. His fingers had grown puffy and dimpled, like a baby’s, but his hands, as a Roman cardinal had once put it, still had wings. “To see him…led to the organ…and then conducted towards the audience to make his accustomed obeisance,” remembered Charles Burney, “was a sight so truly afflicting and deplorable to persons of sensibility, as greatly diminished their pleasure, in hearing him perform.”
In 1756, Jennens persuaded Handel, around the age of seventy-one, to sit for the portraitist Thomas Hudson. He wore a dove-gray coat with gold brocade that stretched over his substantial midriff. The painting showed Handel to be more jowly than ever, his eyebrows bushy, his head turned slightly to look straight out at the viewer. But the full-on gaze, focused at middle distance, hinted at what everyone knew: that his sight had totally gone. The printed score that Hudson placed on the table before him—the trailing letters of Messiah just visible in the frame—was now unreadable to the man who had composed it.