Handel’s House
George Frideric Handel, 1685–1759, lived in Brook Street (at the house presently numbered 25) from 1723 until his death. Many of his most-loved works were written in this house, including Messiah, the Coronation Anthems, and Music for the Royal Fireworks. The Handel House Museum, located in 25 and 23 Brook Street, will be open to the public in 2001. The Handel House Collection is temporarily housed at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge until the Handel House opens.
To coincide with AAM’s concert on 12 October 2000 at the Fitzwilliam Museum, at which three of Handel’s Nine German Arias (to texts by Brockes) will be performed, we reprint here the following article by Dr Julie Anne Sadie with the kind permission of the Handel House Trust.
The house of the first Hallelujah
I did think that I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God himself seated on His throne, with His company of angelsHandel’s alleged words on the composition of Messiah’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’
You may not see anything quite as spectacular as that if, today, you go into the room in which Handel composed Messiah. But the house where he wrote his greatest work still stands, in Brook Street, 3 minutes walk from St George’s Church, just past the corner of New Bond Street — a walk Handel knew well.
Handel moved into 25 Brook Street in 1723. He had just taken on the position of Musical Director to the new opera company and, shortly after, he was appointed Composer to the Chapel Royal. His place in London musical life was firmly assured. Clearly he now felt that this was the moment to put down roots in London.
He had already been living in England for some 10 years, during which time he had been given living accommodation by his friends or patrons. Now, it seems, he wanted to be independent. The house he moved into during the summer of 1723 was newly built, one of a terrace put up by a speculative builder, on a field with a stream running through it (hence ‘Brook Street’). The land on which it stood was owned, as it still is, by the Corporation of London. This quickly became a good middle-class area. The new, classically-designed St George’s in Hanover Square, where Handel became a worshipper, was completed soon after he moved in. The main London concert rooms and the opera house were all within reasonable walking distance.
The house in Brook Street followed the traditional pattern for a London town house. A small corridor served as entrance hall; there were two rooms on each floor, front and back, with a small closet at the rear. Handel used the front parlour on the ground floor as an office, where he sold tickets for his concerts and copies of his published music. The back parlour was probably a sitting-room; his chamber organ may have been installed there. On the first floor, in the customary way, he did most of his entertaining — the light and pleasant front room seems to have been used for music-making and the rear room for dining. There is a famous anecdote about his slipping off into the closet during a dinner party, with the words ‘I have de taut’ — his guests, unwilling to see the world deprived of his latest thought of inspiration, readily excused him. When he was slow to return, one of them peeped into the closet: and there was the master, quaffing the best burgundy (in another version of the story it is champagne) while the guests had been making do with port. You can still see the angle of the windows through which he could be seen at his indulgence.
On the second floor is Handel’s bedroom, where in 1759 he died (‘...a good Christian, with a true sense of his duty to God and man, and in perfect charity with all the world’, wrote his friend and neighbour), and his dressing room. Above it was a garret for the servants, later converted into an airy and spacious third floor. The original kitchen was in the basement.