The Commemoration of Handel

Westminster Abbey 1784

[Based on AN ACCOUNT OF THE MUSICAL PERFORMANCES IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY, AND THE   PANTHEON, May 26th, 27th, 29th, and June the 3rd and 5tb, 1784, IN COMMEMORATION OF HANDEL;

By CHARLES BURNEY, Mus. D. F.R.S.]

Nobility meeting in the house of the Commissioner of the Victualling Office felt that it was time London showed off its great musical talent, determining that  ‘A performance might be exhibited on so grand and magnificent a scale as no other part of the world could equal’.  As it happened, the following year, 1784, would herald special anniversaries of both the birth and death of George Handel, making his works an obvious choice, and Westminster Abbey ‘where the bones of the great Musician were deposited’, the ‘properest place for the performance’.

The King consented to give his patronage, the Directors of the Concert of Antient Music volunteered to manage and direct the event, and an ‘admirable architect’ was appointed to provide ‘the elegant designs for the Orchestra and Galleries – which when filled constituted one of the grandest and most magnificent spectacles which imagination can delineate’.

The sudden dissolution of parliament meant that the commemoration was deferred until a month after the anniversary of Handel’s death, ‘which seems to have been for its advantage as many persons of tender constitutions, who ventured to go to Westminster Abbey in warm weather, would not have had the courage to go thither in the cold’.

Two out of four of the Abbey performances would consist of Handel’s Messiah. Advertisements appeared in the press, announcing that ‘The doors will be opened at Nine o’Clock and the Performance will begin precisely at Twelve’. Tickets cost one guinea each.

‘A more numerous band than was ever known to be collected in any country, or on any occasion whatever’ was assembled, including such instruments as sacbuts, Tower drums (‘taken by the Duke of Marlborough at the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709’) and an ‘excellent organ, erected at the West end of the Abbey for the commemoration performances only (the workmanship of the ingenious Mr Samuel Green of Islington)’. Actually, the organ was being constructed for Canterbury Cathedral, but a trial run in the Abbey seemed like a good idea to all. It was carefully placed ‘in a Gothic frame, mounting to, and mingling with the saints and martyrs represented in the painted glass on the West window’.

There were no holes barred on the size of the instruments – ‘the keys of communication with the harpsichord extended nineteen feet from the body of the organ and twenty feet seven inches below the perpendicular of the set of keys by which it is usually played’.

Somehow, ‘the whole four days of commemoration in the Abbey’ were ‘exempted from every species of accident, notwithstanding the great crowds, and conflicts for places, which each performance produced’.

One can imagine the ‘conflicts for places’, with 500 of them already filled by choir and orchestra, hundreds of enormous instruments, ‘their majesties and the first personages of the kingdom, the Bishops, the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, the families and friends of the Directors, the prebendaries of Westminster, their Majesty's suite, maids of honour, grooms of the bed-chamber, pages, &c.’ not to mention, of course, ‘the Directors themselves, who were all distinguished by white wands tipped with gold, and gold medals, struck on the occasion, appending from white ribbands’!

The reporter rightly claimed that ‘Few circumstances will, perhaps, more astonish veteran Musicians, than to be informed that there was but one general Rehearsal for each day's performance’, though his ebullient conclusion tipped the balance somewhat — ‘an indisputable proof of the high state of cultivation to which practical Music is at present arrived in this country’.

At the first general rehearsal in the Abbey, ‘more than five hundred people found means to obtain admission in spite of every endeavour to shut out all but the performers’. A face-saving solution to this breach of security was to charge them all half a guinea each.

A little Euroscepticism follows: ‘Foreigners, particularly the French, must be much astonished at so numerous a band moving in such exact measure, without the assistance of a Corypham to beat the time, either with a roll of paper, or a noisy baton or truncheon’.

[There followed a salutary digression about ‘the celebrated Lulli’ – a Frenchman - who ‘may be said to have beat himself to death, by intemperate passion in marking the measure to an ill-disciplined band; for, in regulating with his cane the time of a Te Deum, which he had composed for the recovery of his royal patron, Louis XIV, from a dangerous sickness, in 1686, he wounded his foot by accidentally striking on that instead of the floor, in so violent a manner, that from the contusion occasioned by the blow a mortification ensued, which cost him his life at the age of fifty-four.]

‘Accuracy and precision’, however, were achieved by the Brits entirely ‘without the assistance of a Manuductor to regulate the measure’!

The magnitude of the band (i.e. orchestra and choir) ‘commanded and impelled adhesion and obedience, beyond that of any other of inferior force. The pulsations in every limb, and ramifications of veins and arteries in an animal, could not be more reciprocal, isochronous, and under the regulation of the heart, than the members of this body of Musicians under that of the conductor and leader’.

Indeed, the powers of the ‘totality of sound’ produced ‘new and exquisite sensations in judges and lovers of the art’ and were ‘felt by those who never received pleasure from Music before’.

The pomp and pomposity, ambitions of grandeur, motives of ‘pulsations in every limb’, reciprocal, isochronous ‘ramifications of veins and arteries’, and ‘exquisite sensations’ smack of Daniel chapter 3 in the Old Testament - witness King Nebuchadnezzar’s decree that all ‘the satraps, the administrators, the governors, the counsellors, the treasurers, the judges, the magistrates, and all the officials of the provinces’ should gather together and bow down to him at ‘the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of musick’. And surely not a little hint of Jesus overturning the tables in the Temple, ‘My Father’s House of Prayer’.

Little wonder then that Newton wanted to restore some balance  -

‘What about the words?’

 Even Nebuchadnezzar was humbled to shift his focus after all the razzmatazz was over and proclaimed,

‘There is no other God who can deliver like this’.

Vast constructions were erected in the Abbey for the special commemorative performance.

This sketch shows the Royal Gallery in the centre, with clergy either side.