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The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Political Ritual

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

William Weber
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Extract

Between May 26 and June 5, 1784, five concerts were given in Westminster Abbey and a West End entertainment palace to mark the death of George Frideric Handel twenty-five years before. The event became a legend in its own time. The scale of the commemoration festival of 1784 was unparalleled among musical events: 4,500 people gathered in the abbey to hear 525 performers render Handel's Messiah, and, as European Magazine put it, “so extraordinary a spectacle, we believe, never before solicited the public notice.” This novel festival to a German-born composer captured public attention all around the Western world but in Britain made Handel's music into a national tradition. The commemoration was indeed a political event. It came on the heels of constitutional crisis—the dispute over the authority of crown and Parliament, the Fox-North ministry of 1783, and the turbulent election of 1784. Nobody planned the commemoration for political reasons, but that is what it became, willy-nilly, celebrating the end of the crisis and the hope for a harmonious new order.

The commemoration put in ritual form the culmination of the country's political development over the previous three decades. The new harmony seen in the grand event suggested the reunion of Tories with Whigs in government and the growth of a new political community—a kind of establishment—that, despite the conflict over the war and the constitution, was broad-bottomed in its inclusion of faction and opinion. Yet that does not mean that the commemoration was unanimously supported or was truly nonpartisan, any more than was this establishment itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , January 1989 , pp. 43 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1989

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References

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15 The closest rival to the Ancient Concerts was the series put on by J. C. Bach and C. F. Abel from 1765 on; see newspaper reports naming the most prestigious members of the audience in the Public Advertiser (May 23, 1783), p. 3, and ibid. (May 7, 1784), p. 3.

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60 Bates to Montagu, April 3, 1784, SP F 52/11.

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76 Wynn to Montagu, August 9, 1785, SP F 52/46. See also letters 47, 62, 74, and 87 in the same collection.

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