Handel’s first Foundling Hospital concert
Mr Handel being present and having generously and charitably offered a performance of vocal and instrumental music to be held at this Hospital, and that the money arising therefrom should be applied to the finishing the chapel of the Hospital Resolved — That the thanks of this Committee be returned to Mr Handel for this his generous and charitable offer.
Thus, at a meeting of the Foundling Hospital’s General Committee on 4 May 1749, Handel enters abruptly into the documentary record of the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted young Children, almost exactly a decade after its foundation by royal charter. The outcome was a concert later in May 1749 in which Handel presented a programme of his recent music, culminating with an anthem produced specially for the occasion, Blessed are they that considereth the poor and needy, now known as the Foundling Hospital Anthem. The event was a success in every respect: it was attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales, attracted a capacity audience and raised more than £350 for the charity.
It seems likely that Handel’s interest in the Hospital had come about through the music publisher John Walsh, who had been elected a Governor in October 1748, and had heard about the financial difficulties of completing the chapel building at the committee meeting that he attended to pay the customary Governor’s donation. In the decade since its inauguration the Hospital had come a long way, particularly in the extensive building programme that was a prerequisite for the maintenance of a sizable intake of children. By 1749 the main structure, with its large east and west wings joined by the chapel and cloisters, was approaching completion. The chapel itself was structurally virtually complete when Handel gave his concert in May 1749, though as yet awaiting furnishings and windows. The proceeds of the concert must have contributed substantially towards the ‘finishing the chapel’: in terms of Handel’s relationship with the Hospital, however, this was the beginning rather than the end of the story, and the composer may have seen the long-term implications of the completion of the chapel building more clearly than many of the Hospital’s managers.
Although his involvement with the Hospital was concentrated into the last decade of Handel’s life, we may suspect that his support for the charity was strongly motivated by recollections of a comparable venture — similar in some ways, but very different in others — that he had known in his youth. While he was growing up in the city of Halle, there had been major innovations in local educational provision. Handel attended the long-established local school — the Gymnasium — but the university to which he proceeded was of recent foundation, and in his teenage years he would have witnessed the construction of the complex of buildings that housed the foundations for elementary education established by Pastor August Hermann Francke — a ‘pedagogium’, a Latin school, a German school and the residential ‘Waysen-hause’ for orphans and charity children. (‘Waysen-hause’ quickly became the name for the complete site.) Francke’s pietistic outlook was reflected in the emphasis on religious instruction in his schools, though as part of a curriculum that was in many ways progressively broad. Eventually the Waisenhaus became as famous as a publishing-house for bibles and hymn-books as for its own educational achievements. The Foundling Hospital did not develop in quite the same way, and the chapel may have originally been perceived primarily as a way of attracting a wealthy and influential adult congregation (and thus putting the Hospital on London’s social map) rather than as a means for the religious education of the children themselves. But as the Hospital moved towards the end of its ‘foundation’ phase, the chapel became to some extent a symbol of the dilemma (and the opportunity) that faced the charity. Having committed themselves to the chapel building, the Hospital authorities then had to give thought to its maintenance, both as a building and as an institution: a regular pattern of services would have to be established, and this in turn required the employment of at least a clergyman and an organist. The clergyman would be expected to attract an elegant congregation, but there was also the education of the children to be considered. As it turned out, it took another four years from 1749 before the chapel was opened for worship, rather longer than the Hospital’s various administrative bodies had anticipated. There seems little doubt, however, that the series of annual musical performances given by Handel contributed critically to raising money for the completion of the chapel building and the subsequent maintenance of its activities: between 1749 and the composer’s death ten years later, the concerts brought the Hospital £6,000 directly, and probably much more indirectly on account of the public interest that they generated for the charity. Sadly, the Chapel to which Handel so largely contributed eventually vanished with the rest of the main building in 1926.
The Foundling Hospital concert in 1749 was a new venture for Handel that came on the end of what had already been a busy period. He had given his usual season of Lenten oratorios at Covent Garden theatre with a repertory of five of his best works: the new oratorios Solomon and Susanna, and revivals of Hercules, Samson and Messiah. Normally the weeks after Easter would have been a fairly quiet time for Handel, but this year he became involved with the celebrations for the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, composing the Fireworks Music and the music for the Royal service on the official day of Thanksgiving, and arranging the performances. It seems that virtually every available wind-instrument player in London, from the regular orchestras and the military bands, was pressed into service for the Fireworks Music: Handel’s oratorio scores also suggest that he had an unusually large force of string players available this year. The logistic arrangements for the Fireworks Music must have been complicated, and a public rehearsal at Vauxhall Gardens (which took place less than a month after the end of the oratorio season) proved so popular that it blocked the traffic on London Bridge. The following week saw the rehearsal and performance of the music for the Chapel Royal service, and the Royal Fireworks in Green Park on 27 April: it was exactly a week after that that Handel attended the Hospital committee meeting and offered his concert. All this activity indicates that the 64-year-old composer was in excellent form.
The arrangements for the Foundling Hospital concert went through various vicissitudes, though these were administrative rather than musical. The Committee on 4 May decided initially that the performance should take place on Wednesday 24 May at 11 am. A morning concert might seem unusual to us now, but 12,000 people had recently attended the rehearsal of the Fireworks Music in Vauxhall Gardens at 11 am, and Handel’s performers probably had evening commitments in the theatres. The timing of the concert also related the event to daytime church services for institutions such as the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy, and the charity matinee became the model for Handel’s subsequent Messiah performances in aid of the Hospital. The planned concert day clashed with celebrations for the birthday of Prince George (later King George III) and an alternative date — 25 May — was fixed upon: this is given in the word-book printed by Jacob Tonson, a Governor of the Hospital, and advertised on 19 May. But that same day Handel informed the Secretary of the Hospital that he had received a letter ‘signifying the desire of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales for deferring Mr. Handel’s Musical Performance to Saturday the 27th instant’, and the Hospital hurriedly complied. Tickets were half a guinea each, word-books a shilling: the concert began at 12 noon, in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
It was a rare event for Handel to give a concert of his works. The only real precedent in London had been his benefit performance at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, in March 1738 under the title of An Oratorio. This had been a mixed concert of choral items, vocal items in English and Italian, and an organ concerto; it was arranged in three parts, and thus outwardly resembled the conventional structure of Handel’s operas and oratorios. There were several excerpts from Deborah in the second part, but the programme as a whole showed variety rather than coherence. Handel’s Foundling Hospital concert programme was much more coherent. Like the Oratorio programme it was arranged in three parts, but Handel assembled fewer and more substantial works. There was, furthermore, an overall symmetry to the programme: Part Two comprised extracts from Handel’s oratorio Solomon which had a direct appropriateness to the occasion of the concert. This central core was framed in the other parts by an orchestral work followed by an anthem. The text of the newspaper advertisement announcing the concert was almost certainly supplied by Handel himself: his titles are quoted below, followed by brief notes on each work.
‘First The Musick for the late Royal Fireworks and the Anthem on the Peace’The peace treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had been resolved in principle by the European powers in October 1748 and the Peace was proclaimed in London on 2 February 1749: the public celebrations were delayed until the arrival of spring weather, though the elaborate building for the firework display had already been erected. Handel provided a Te Deum and an anthem for the service in the Chapel Royal on 25 April and ceremonial music for the firework display in Green Park two days later. There had been some dispute beforehand as to whether the music for the Fireworks should be performed solely by wind instruments, though Handel had a clear preference for the inclusion of strings. We can be fairly sure that he included strings at the Hospital, and used an appropriately-sized wind group in relation to the building: the vast array of instruments from the open-air performance would have been overpowering, even if they could have been accommodated. The Peace Anthem was constructed and re-composed using musical ideas from several of Handel’s previous works — Messiah, the Occasional Oratorio and the Chapel Royal anthem ‘I will magnify Thee’. Handel produced a splendid new work from this diverse material — though we need to suppress our immediate recognition of the familiar Messiah music in order to give it a fair hearing. He also used the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus in the Foundling Hospital Anthem, but even this would not have been familiar in 1749: Handel’s single performance of Messiah in his oratorio season had only been his sixth in London, and the first for four years.
‘Second Select Pieces from the Oratorio of Solomon, relating to the Dedication of the Temple’Solomon had been one of Handel’s new oratorios in his 1749 season. The first half of Part One of the oratorio portrayed celebrations on the completion of Solemnness temple in Jerusalem. From this Handel derived a sequence of five movements entirely suitable for a fund-raising concert in aid of the Chapel, completing the scheme with an aria from Part Two of the oratorio and a magnificent double chorus from Part Three. Thus from his oratorio music Handel created a short cantata with a satisfying musical balance.
We do not know for certain what instrumental music began Part Two of the 1749 concert. In the oratorio, ‘Your Harps and Cymbals sound’ is preceded by a three-movement Ouverture, but in the autograph score Handel wrote cues for an amended version which included the Sinfonia from Part 3 of Solomon (‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’) and the fugue form the overture. This amendment was probably made for the Foundling Hospital performance, and such a reconstruction is presented here.
‘Third Several Pieces composed for the Occasion, the Words taken from Scripture, and applicable to this Charity and its Benefactors’By the time the word-book was printed these ‘Several Pieces’ had consolidated into a single work, the anthem ‘Blessed are they that considereth the Poor and Needy’. (Handel’s conducting score of the anthem is now in the possession of the Thomas Coram Foundation.) As with the Peace Anthem, Handel created an imposing new work largely from pre-existing material, though in this case there was rather more musical carpentry and rather less recomposition. The principal sources were Handel’s Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline, the music from which had not been heard in any form for ten years, and a movement composed for Susanna but never performed in that oratorio. The final chorus was also taken from another work. The ‘Words taken from Scripture’ came mainly from Psalms 41, 72 and 112, some of them via the Funeral Anthem text. There is an apparent anomaly in the word-book for the Foundling Hospital concert in the use of the heading ‘Verse’ to some movements of this anthem. Normally, as in the Peace Anthem text, this heading indicated a section sung by soloists, but it is clear from musical sources that the version of the Anthem which is given in the word-book was a fully choral one: the ‘Verse’ sections have a prominent solo line for one voice part of the chorus. Although Handel had no shortage of soloists for his Foundling Hospital concert from the earlier parts of the programme, he clearly decided to conclude the concert with a solid choral work combining all of his forces throughout. Handel later revised the anthem, incorporating some solo movements, but this was almost certainly a few years afterwards, and the fully-choral version was the one performed in 1749.
The ‘Concerto’ at the start of Part Three is unidentified and in this concert the role is filled by Handel’s Concerto Grosso Op.6 No.11 in A major. The Foundling Hospital Anthem itself, which otherwise begins without any preliminary to the first choral chord, requires an introduction of some sort. When Handel revised the anthem later he added a movement in D minor at the beginning: in this concert the Anthem is preceded by the opening movement from his Organ Concerto Op. 7 No.4.
Donald Burrows
March 1999