Chapter 7 - Self and Friends

Summary

HAWKINS states that as Handel's involvement with private musical parties for royalty and nobility, including the Duke of Rutland and Earl Cowper, declined, ‘he gradually retreated into a state of privacy and retirement, and showed no solicitude to form new [relationships]’. He gives no dates for when this musical activity took place or ceased, so it is hard to know if he means after 1721 when John Manners the 2nd Duke of Rutland died or 1723 when William, 1st Earl Cowper died. Perhaps it was after 1733 when the nobility established its own opera company in opposition to Handel, and in which John Manners, 3rd Duke of Rutland and William, 2nd Earl Cowper were actively involved, or at a later date. If Hawkins means at the age of sixty (in 1745) or the onset of blindness in 1752 then it is hardly surprising that Handel would not form new relationships at that point in his life. Handel may have discontinued directing domestic concerts but he cannot be said to have become a hermit.

Social Affections

AT no point in his life does Handel seem to have been without friends and admirers. On his summer travels he visited the spa towns of Bath, Tunbridge Wells, and Scarborough, usually in the company of a friend as well as a servant. He stayed with his friends in the country, such as the Noel family (Earls of Gainsborough) at Exton, the Harrises at Salisbury, and the Ashley Cooper family (Earls of Shaftesbury) at St Giles House in Dorset. Burney reports that in London Handel held oratorio rehearsals at Carlton House, the home of the Prince and Princess of Wales, as well as at his own house. He attended the Sunday soirées of Susanna Cibber. In his sixty-sixth year he took a long visit to the Netherlands and Germany. Even the onset of blindness did not cause him to remain at home, though his presence at oratorio performances upset some in the audience. The Countess of Shaftesbury wrote to Elizabeth Harris in March 1753:

I went last Friday to Alexanders Feast, but it was such a melancholy pleasure as drew tears of sorrow to see the great th’unhappy Handel dejected, wan and dark sitting by, not playing on the harpsichord, and to think how his light has been spent by being overply’d in musicks cause;