Good Musick

His father was sullen and cantankerous. "If that boy," he fumed, "ever shows the first inclination towards music, or noises disguised as such, I will kill it." Musical noises were just what the boy did incline to, and nothing his father said or did could stop him. On Sundays, his mousy spinster aunt sneaked him off to a church where he could hear an organ. By the time he was eleven, he was composing a church service every week ("I used to write like the devil in those days," he apologized later). He toured the petty courts of Italy and Germany, played for cardinals, dukes and princes. By the time he was 25, George Frederick Handel was Hanover's Kapellmeister and one of the most talked-about young musicians in Europe.

Last week, 189 years after his death, George Frederick Handel was more widely talked-about than ever. Sir Newman Flower's revised edition of his scholarly George Frideric Handel, His Personality and His Times had just been published in the U.S. (Scribner; $6); the late Romain Rolland's Essays on Music (Allen, Towne & Heath; $5) had a fat chapter on him. Handelian Robert Manson Myers had written a book--Handel's Messiah, a Touchstone of Taste (Macmillan; $5), out next week--on his greatest oratorio. Handel was not always so well treated in his own day.

Ocean of Neck. The London Handel moved to in 1712 was a bawdy place of brawling and bawling. Handel did well at court. Queen Anne, who had little use for musicians, pensioned him just to spite her Hanoverian cousins. Anne's successor, lumpish George I, attended almost all his operas with his favorite German mistress and her "two acres of cheeks ... an ocean of neck." The rest of London was more fickle. Addison, who had written an unsuccessful opera himself, denounced and ridiculed Handel's music. Handel's rival, the egocentric Giovanni Battista Bononcini, kept him fighting for audiences.

At one time, Londoners were far more interested in the caperings of Handel's two leading prima donnas, Faustina and Cuzzoni, than in his music. Almost nightly at the opera house, heads were bashed, windows smashed. The cheers & jeers drowned out Handel's arias, while the two "fighting cats" scratched at each other's eyes and pulled at each other's hair.

But Handel's most powerful opponent was Frederick, Prince of Wales. He and his young friends, who scorned everything his father, George II, chose to favor, set up an Opera of the Nobility to rival Handel's theater. Handel's enemies organized bands of hoodlums to tear down his posters, gave parties on the nights of his oratorios to make sure no one would attend. Sometimes Handel played to nearly empty houses ("My music will sound the better so!" he snorted). Sometimes, the King and his party made up nearly the entire audience. Quipped Lord Chesterfield on leaving a concert early: "I thought it best to retire, lest I disturb the King in his privacy."

Tears of Appreciation. Through all those troubled years, Handel worked furiously. He could turn out operas, cantatas and oratorios in a matter of days. Refusing sleep and food, weeping copious tears over the beauties of his own inspiration, he composed the Messiah in 24 days.

A huge, periwigged man, bent over his cane by the pain of his rheumatism, he roamed the streets of London, sputtering his brand of Germanic English. "Mine musick," he roared, "is good musick." It took Londoners years to realize just how right he was.

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