Handel - The Conquering Hero The Birth of British Music

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah... #

The Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah, a piece which is woven into the fabric of our national life.

-"Ha"!

-# Hallelujah. #

But it was written by a German, George Frideric Handel, a brilliant yet volatile composer,

who came to Britain to make his fortune, and wound up enriching and redefining our musical life.

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah... #

Here he is, cemented into the wall

in Westminster Abbey as a national icon, carved from the life

and holding the manuscript of his most famous work, Messiah.

# Hallelujah, hallelujah... #

But how did a foreign composer become such a celebrity here,

and what is it about his music that still captivates and fascinates us today?

Handel's capacity to write a melody which reflects emotion is brilliant.

He really gets people going, you know. He can come and move you

and get right into the depth of your soul and then yank you back out.

Hallelujah, hallelujah! You've got to attack it.

# Hallelujah! #

My journey will take me back 250 years, to some of the places

Handel lived and worked, in order to discover the man behind the music.

He was almost like, in the cultural sphere, the equivalent of the King.

The King was German, top cultural figure was German.

# Hallelujah, hallelujah... #

Handel wrote some of the greatest music of his, or I think, any age.

He took Britain as his home, and the British took him to their hearts.

He is our greatest adopted musical genius,

and we're proud to continue performing his music.

Handel seems to bestride the centuries as a musical conquering hero.

MUSIC: "Zadok The Priest"

His coronation anthem, Zadok The Priest, gives us some clues

about the unique and enduring qualities of Handel's genius.

Its extraordinary slow, burning crescendo builds up

to an awe-inspiring climax evoking all the pomp and majesty of the occasion.

It was written 300 years ago for the coronation of King George II,

and has been used at every coronation since then.

# Zadok the priest

# And Nathan, the Prophet... #

Millions of people across the world heard the music of Handel

when Elizabeth II was crowned Queen at Westminster Abbey in 1953.

But Handel's fame and popularity are not just a modern phenomenon.

Few, if any, composers have been as celebrated during their lifetime as George Frideric Handel.

At the start of the 18th century,

London was the fastest-growing and wealthiest city in Europe.

When the ambitious young keyboard virtuoso and composer arrived here in 1711, he had a master plan.

He was 27 years old and in love with Italian opera, and his plan

was to establish this sophisticated European art form in the United Kingdom.

He announced his arrival on the London scene with Rinaldo,

the first Italian opera to be composed specifically for the British stage.

The rich and the fashionable flocked to the opera, drawn to its story of love in a time of war,

complete with a beautiful princess, a spiteful enchantress and a host of chivalrous knights and crusaders.

But it wasn't just the lavish orchestration

or the spectacular scenic effects,

which included the release into the theatre

of a flock of starlings, or even his own keyboard fireworks

that made this young, cosmopolitan composer the talk of the town -

it was his singers.

London had never seen or heard anything before like these singers,

brought over from Italy at huge expense.

They were simply the best in the world,

their exotic personalities offstage attracting almost as much attention

as the music they sang.

Handel was, in pop culture terms, at the top of his game.

His arias read the way people listen to popular songs today,

and they were as popular in his time as they are now.

# Lascia ch'io pianga

# Mia cruda sorte... #

Lascia Ch'io Pianga's a very dramatic piece.

There is a dichotomy between the dignity of the music

and the sort of wallowing sadness of the young girl.

You've got this beautiful simple melody, it couldn't be more simple.

She sings about weeping for her fate and she says it over and over again.

It does sound like somebody who can't get the words out, and Handel writes it beautifully.

He actually literally cuts the phrase in two, "mia cru...da sorte",

just like someone who would be crying and is whimpering and can't get it out.

# Mia cruda sorte

# E che sospiri

# La liberta... #

Handel's operatic genius was to be able to reach out beyond the conventions of the high baroque

to present his audience with characters who, through music, expressed vivid human emotions.

These are people that, in different circumstances, could almost be you or me.

Vo' Far Guerra is sung by Armida, who's the sorceress in Rinaldo.

It's an aria about revenge,

it's an aria about vendetta, it's an aria about rejection, even,

because she discovers that her consort has been unfaithful to her

and is not in love with her but in love with the princess.

She has everything. She has power, she's magnetic, she's strong,

but she doesn't have love, and that is quite a telling thing, actually,

that propels her to revenge and to hurt.

# Vo' far guerra, e vincer voglio

# E vincer voglio

# Collo sdegno chi m'offende

# Vendicar i torti miei

# Per abbatter quel orgoglio... #

Handel uses triplets to keep banging in this idea of vendetta,

this sort of gnawing, gnawing jealousy that she has.

# Vendicar... #

It's used in a sort of knife wound.

You know, I'm going to keep pushing the dagger in deeper and deeper.

# ..ah-ah-ah-ah

# Collo sdegno chi m'offende

# Vendicar i torti miei

# Vendicar i torti miei. #

Rinaldo was a massive public success, with an unprecedented three-month run.

But for the ambitious young composer, it was also a personal success.

He'd found the audience he needed and he was determined to give them what they needed -

sophisticated Italian opera, Handel-style.

But where did all this burning ambition come from?

I've travelled to Handel's birthplace, the town of Halle, in Eastern Germany.

At the end of the 17th century, a certain George Handel,

together with his second wife, Dorothea, lived here at the house

of the sign of the yellow stag, earning a comfortable living

as a barber's surgeon with a sideline in selling wine.

They're currently stripping the house back to its original 17th century core

giving us a tantalising glimpse into the fashionable

middle-class affluence the Handel family must have aspired to.

This is supposed to be the room where, on 23rd February 1685, George Frideric Handel was born.

Every biography has two or three charming anecdotes about his childhood,

but in reality, we know virtually nothing about Handel's early years

apart from the fact that he had a huge propensity for music,

something which apparently alarmed George senior.

His ambition was for his son to enter a respectable profession and become a lawyer.

Musical instruments were banned from the house and the father

did everything he could to discourage his son.

But when the boy was 12, George senior died.

With his father gone, nothing could stand in the way of the young George Frideric.

And the Church offered multiple opportunities for music-making and access to instruments.

So, here at the Market Church in Halle, the teenage Handel, already a devout Protestant,

would come to worship, but also to improve his skills on the organ.

And here it is, built in 1664, just 30 years before Handel would have sat right down here and played it.

Still sounding as sweet as ever the best part of 350 years later.

Driven by his huge talent and ambition, Handel left provincial Halle at 17.

He spent his early 20s travelling across Europe, developing a passion

for Italian opera and extending his skills in Church music.

# Dixit dixit Dominus Domino meo

# Dixit dixit Dominus Domino meo

# Dixit dixit

# Dixit dixit

# Dominus meo Domino meo

# Dixit dixit Domino meo

# Dixit dixit Domino meo

# Dominus meo

# Dixit dixit

# Domino meo

# Dixit Dominuo meo

# Dixit dixit... #

He composed Dixit Dominus in his early 20s, during a lengthy stay in Rome, a Latin psalm

set in the most fashionable rich Roman Catholic style by a Lutheran Protestant.

By the time he arrived in London, the talented boy from the provinces

had become a sophisticated, cosmopolitan composer.

He was the right man, in the right place, at exactly the right time.

On the 20th October 1714, British politics changed forever

when Prince George Ludwig of Hanover was crowned George I, King of Great Britain and Ireland.

The United Kingdom had a German monarch.

With his reputation for musical brilliance, Handel, London's most fashionable German,

was the natural choice when George I decided he needed some special propaganda music.

The idea was to make the new foreign King literally visible to his subjects.

He and his entourage would glide down the Thames

in a flotilla of barges to the sound of Handel's music.

Cleverly, Handel introduced hunting horns into his floating orchestra,

exploiting their ability to sound bright and pure across vast distances.

The Water Music was a triumph. The King was delighted and Handel became a Royal favourite.

He's a much grander, more politically connected figure

as a musician than anyone else I can think of.

His main feature, in a way, apart from his brilliance as a composer,

is this incredible chameleon-like capacity to take on styles and forms

and to fit in wherever he wanted to fit in.

Handel's enormous natural talent as a musician made him both prolific and versatile.

But I think his restlessness and ambition drove him to experiment,

constantly seeking out opportunities to explore new sounds and styles.

Which is why, in the early years of George I's reign,

he moved just outside London to what is now the residential suburb of Canons Park.

For the next two years, he lived here as house guest and resident composer to James Bridges,

Duke of Chandos, and master of a huge country estate called Canons.

From suburbia to parkland. You can still see the drive.

Handel used his stay here as an opportunity to play with all sorts of new ideas

including his first English language opera, Acis And Galatea,

set to words by another of Bridges' house guests, a young poet called John Gay.

# Harmless, merry, free and gay

# Free and gay

# Free and gay... #

The palatial mansion is long gone, but a fragment of the property survives as the local parish church.

Oh, wow! What a place!

This is the only continental baroque parish church in the country.

The Duke of Chandos, James Bridges,

who rebuilt this church in 1715,

he was very much a person who wanted to be extravagant and wanted people to see how much money he had

even though it was really bad money,

money which he'd made as Paymaster General to the Duke of Marlborough,

working on the basis that you employ mercenaries, you invest the money,

you don't pay them till they get back, and when they get back

obviously there's been natural wastage, so you can cream off the rest of the money for yourself.

And we wanted to let people see him sitting in the Duke's pew, there,

on a Sunday morning, enjoying fashionable music of the day.

He's putting on a big show, a massive display of ostentation.

-He's setting himself up almost like the King.

-Very much so.

I mean, basically, all he was interested in was listening to Handel.

In fact, that's why he built this place very much as an opera house.

If you look, you've got the proscenium arch,

you've got the stage itself where the altar is now.

-The badinage would have been situated on the stage.

-Church band, with the organ as centrepiece.

It's quite unusual you see the organ directly behind the altar, it's like music is also sacred here.

Gay and Handel's opera conjured up an innocent pastoral idyll of nymphs and shepherds,

exactly the kind of enchanted world that James Bridges wanted Canons to be.

# The flocks shall leave the mountains

# The woods the turtle dove

# The nymphs forsake the fountains ere I forsake my love

# The flocks shall leave the mountains

# The woods the turtle dove... #

The music takes its cue from the sweet, simple style of the poetry,

floating the words on clouds of florid baroque phrases.

But when a jealous mythological giant enters the story, Handel is able to capture

all the harsh directness of the English language without breaking the spell.

# Torture

# Fury

# Rage

# Despair I cannot, cannot bear I cannot, cannot bear

# I cannot, cannot bear

# The flocks shall leave the mountains

# Torture, fury

# I cannot, cannot bear

# I cannot, cannot bear

# Torture and despair

# I cannot, cannot bear

# I cannot, cannot bear

# I cannot, cannot bear I cannot bear

# No, no I cannot, cannot, cannot bear... #

As exciting and sexy as it formal and elegant,

Acis And Galatea seems to me to be the German-speaking composer

tackling the English language head on and emerging joyously triumphant,

much to the evident delight of his patron, James Bridges.

All this opulence, this kitsch, you have to admire the man, he had balls. You'd have thought,

who's this nouveau riche guy, he wants to make himself just like the aristocracy, but no,

he's more than that, he wants to actually better them.

He wants to, but equally, it's also very much skin deep.

The outside of the church is very, very plain.

The brickwork outside is quite shoddy.

I mean, this is very much scenery. This church is all about music,

and he wanted to show off by employing Handel.

# Galatea, dry thy tears

# Acis now a god appears... #

Handel's relationship with his patrons demonstrates his extraordinary astuteness

for dealing with people who have financial control and potentially

artistic control over him, but dealing with them on his own terms.

Acis And Galatea allowed Handel to explore his dramatic talents

at a time when it wasn't possible to perform English language opera in the London theatres.

# Shepherds' pleasure Muses' theme... #

It was typical of Handel - he'd achieved his goal and it was time to move on.

He remained autonomous, even perhaps aloof.

His brilliant talent put him in a class all of his own and he knew it.

His first love was still Italian opera, and returning to London,

he set out to prove that fashionable society simply couldn't exist without it.

London was an incredibly vigorous town, obsessed by fashion,

what they called The Taste Of The Town, and it kept changing,

and it was because it was free and open and there was a lot of money.

From now on, Handel would compose and stage a big new Italian opera every year -

fearsomely expensive productions with star salaries for the singers,

big orchestras and elaborate stage effects, and to meet the enormous cost of the enterprise,

he did what any enterprising 18th century businessmen did.

He formed a limited company and sold shares,

shares in an opulent dream world of the imagination.

# Piangero

# Piangero

# La sorte mia

# Si crudele e tanto ria

# Finche vita in petto avro... #

Handel's ability to create epic tales

peopled with recognisable human characters,

like Cleopatra in Julius Caesar, meant that again and again,

his operas hit the bull's-eye as popular successes,

and his artistic and commercial master plan brought him real rewards.

Handel moved into the fashionable new Mayfair district -

just the sort of area where his rich and cultured opera audience lived.

And he rented this modern house, because as a foreigner,

he wasn't actually allowed to own property.

-Hello.

-Hello. Welcome to Handel House.

-Good to be here.

So, we're one floor up.

-That's correct.

-Downstairs was...

The reception is on the ground floor.

This is the first floor.

We know from records that Handel rehearsed in this space.

-We have records of there being up to 20 people in this room at one time...

-No way!

..which, when you consider the size of the clothing they wore,

is quite a feat, I think.

These details at the end of the stairs

are one of the few original features from the house when Handel moved in.

How much of what we can see today is exactly what was here then?

The majority of it is a very faithful representation

of what the house looked like.

So, this is Handel's bedroom -

the only private space of a very public man.

And colour scheme-wise,

have you tried to reproduce what you perceive him to have had?

Absolutely.

The colour from the walls, this grey colour,

is copied from a piece of the original panelling that was upstairs,

where we stripped back something like 28 different coats of paint,

which gave a history of the colour of the house,

and the very last colour - the first one applied - was this colour.

-Wow! So it was a real forensic job you had to do.

-Absolutely.

How fashionable was Mayfair at the time?

It was just at the point

where Mayfair was beginning to become very fashionable indeed.

It was at this point that Handel seems to have decided

to take the ultimate step and become a British citizen.

In 1727, George I dies while visiting Germany,

and the throne is taken by his son, George II.

One of the last acts of George I

had been the naturalisation of Handel.

It was partly a practical move,

because it gave him a greater sense of security

but allowed him opportunities as a composer

that he wouldn't have had otherwise -

one such opportunity being to compose the music

for George II's coronation.

# Zadok the priest

# And Nathan, the Prophet

# Anointed Solomon King... #

Handel was now entering middle age and beginning to put on weight.

He composed with a seemingly inexhaustible energy,

and his work would have undoubtedly made him rich

if he hadn't continuously put all the cash into the opera company.

He was, by then, a Londoner.

He was a person that people recognised

and was a visible public figure.

There's a sort of parody of Handel with a heavy German accent.

Now, I don't quite believe that.

I think he had a forceful way,

a rather heavy way of speaking English.

It was said he could swear in four or five tongues -

he could manage Latin and English and German and French,

as well as Italian.

His public profile made him the butt of numerous jokes.

Cartoonists depicted him as a greedy, selfish brute -

literally a pig in a wig.

But it wasn't just the man himself.

It was his entire artistic project that was fair game.

And the greatest satirist of them all, William Hogarth,

launched his career with an etching lampooning his Italian opera.

This is the print I want to show you to start with.

This is the one

that Hogarth referred to as The Bad Taste Of The Town.

On the left here, we have the building

in which Handel's Italian operas were put on,

and this show cloth here

shows a scene from an Italian opera,

and we have here the central figure,

the leading Italian diva of the day, Madam Cuzzoni.

She's got two Roman guards either side of her.

It's probably Giulio Cesare.

We can see this nobleman here,

he's got this little bubble which says, "Pray accept £8,000,"

that's about a million in today's money,

and he's pouring out a sack of gold coins in front of her,

and we can see that Madame Cuzzoni is holding a rake,

so she is, literally, raking it in.

The worst was to come.

A new musical sensation

was about to deliver a fatal blow to Handel's master plan.

The Beggar's Opera was something totally new -

a caustic musical satire

that ripped into the corruption at the heart of 18th century society.

It was constructed out of 70 already well-known songs -

street music, folk tunes and works by Purcell and Handel,

all given savage and witty new lyrics by Handel's former collaborator from Canons,

John Gay.

Instead of employing professional singers,

Gay assembled a cast of energetic young actors

who sang like the man in the street.

To London audiences, The Beggar's Opera

must have sounded like something totally radical and modern.

By taking a contemporary approach to the music,

I hope to capture some of the impact the work must originally have had,

when it really was the shock of the new.

# The modes of the court

# So common have grown

# That a true friend

# Can hardly be met

# Friendship for interest

-# Is but a loan

-Ooooh

-# Which they let out

-Ooooh

-# For what they can get

-Ooooh

# 'Tis true, you find

# Some friends so kind

# Who will give you good counsel

# Themselves to defend

# In sorrowful ditty

# They promise, they pity

# But shift you, for money

# From friend to friend. #

John Gay's English lyrics spoke directly to the audience

in a way that Handel's Italian operas never could.

He peopled the stage not with kings and queens and gods and goddesses

but with real London lowlife -

the highwayman Macheath and assorted pickpockets and prostitutes.

Gay's subject was the theft of innocence in a corrupt world.

ORGAN PLAYS

# Virgins are like

# The fair flower in its lustre

# Which in the garden

# Enamels the ground... #

'Virgins are like the fair flowers.

'It starts off with him talking about'

they're fair flowers and how wonderful it is,

but how, as soon as they're plucked,

their worth is completely lost

and they end up on the scrapheap, basically,

which kind of in those days, that's how it was -

'that was the harsh reality of it.'

# ..But when once pluck'd

# 'Tis no longer alluring. #

This song seethes with all of Gay's moral outrage

at the exploitation of the weak by the rich and powerful.

He hammers it home

when the villainous Macheath

is reprieved from execution at the last moment

in a ludicrous send-up of the conventional happy ending of an Italian opera.

To the tune of Greensleeves,

Macheath claims that thanks to their money,

the upper classes always get away with their crimes.

# Since laws were made

# From ev'ry degree

# To curb vice in others

# As well as me

# I wonder we hadn't better company

# Upon Tyburn Tree. #

The popular success of The Beggar's Opera

was simply staggering.

It was performed in London every season for the next 100 years.

It was genuinely something new.

I call it the first British musical.

And it was a success that hit Handel where it hurt him most -

at the box office.

In the 1730s, there were problems.

People said,

"The theatre's going to be a bit empty tonight," and Handel went,

"The music'll sound better with fewer people in the audience."

It was obviously a very personal matter.

He actually signs a letter which is published in the papers,

saying, "I have done my best for the London audience

"but find they're not turning up."

Finally, the spiralling financial difficulties

bankrupted his opera company,

and after 25 years in Britain,

Handel's cherished dream was coming to an end.

In 1741, Handel is finally forced to give up on opera

when his new work, Deidamia, is an ignominious failure

and is taken off after just three performances.

Typically, Handel got over his disappointment

in crafting a new masterpiece -

Messiah.

# Hallelujah

# Hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah

# Hallelujah... #

For Handel, devout Protestant

and regular worshipper at St George's, Hanover Square,

Messiah was a personal expression of faith.

# ..For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah... #

Composed in just 24 days,

it combined his love of church music with his passion for opera,

celebrating Jesus' significance for all humanity

with a text drawn from the Bible

and, crucially, in English.

And this was the turning point.

This was when, for me,

Handel ceased to be an illustrious composer from abroad

but became one of us.

# ..Hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah

# For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# The kingdom of this world

# Is become

# The kingdom of our Lord

# And of his Christ

# And of his Christ... #

He'd discovered the ideal vehicle for his musical ambitions.

Messiah is an oratorio -

a kind of narrative concert previously unknown in the UK.

Dramatic texts could be played out in non-theatrical space

with no expensive scenery or costumes,

all bound together by thrilling choruses

that could be sung by pretty much everyman.

# ..And he shall reign forever and ever

# King of Kings... #

Through these collective experiences,

Handel started a very British choral revolution.

It's thanks to him that even today,

there are probably more choral societies per square inch in our country

than in most others.

We British love to sing.

Handel saw it and harnessed it.

# ..Hallelujah, hallelujah... #

The Hallelujah Chorus is the centrepiece of the oratorio.

When George II first heard it, he spontaneously got to his feet.

Because the King had stood up,

everyone else had to stand -

audience AND musicians.

# ..Hallelujah, hallelujah

# And Lord of Lords

# King of Kings

# And Lord of Lords

# And he shall reign And he shall reign... #

Messiah is, without doubt, Handel's masterpiece,

a massive artistic success,

but also just the popular success his career needed,

and it was the Hallelujah Chorus that really seized the public imagination.

With a little bit of rehearsal, anybody can be a part of it,

and here in a school in Somerset,

I've brought the pupils together with singers from half a dozen local choral societies

for a Hallelujah Chorus crash course.

OK...

We're gonna start off, then we're gonna do a slow, fantastic build

for eight hallelujahs.

Here's a chord... Big, big breath, like you're gonna yawn.

Three, four...

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

-# Hallelujah... #

-Good.

I wanna feel real power on "ha". Ready...go!

Ha! Ha!

Ha!

-Ha!

-Good.

That is the power that we need every time you sing the word "hallelujah".

Ha!

# Hallelujah, hallelujah... #

'The secret of the Hallelujah Chorus's success

'is its blood-pulsing rhythm.

'In three and a half minutes, there are over 70 hallelujahs -

'an unstoppable, jubilant repetition.'

# ..Hallelujah... #

Hallelujah.

You've got to attack it.

Two, three, go!

'Like King George, you have to respond...' Again!

'..and respond to it physically.'

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

# ..Hallelujah... #

This is getting very good.

You may think I'm trying to get you to sing in the equivalent of death metal...

-RIPPLE OF LAUGHTER

-..and you wouldn't be far wrong.

'I believe that the act of singing, no matter what it is,

'is good for you.

'But Handel intended that singing hallelujah would be good for your body and for your soul.

'Soon after Messiah's first performance,

'a friend congratulated Handel

'on the success of his "noble entertainment".

'His reply was that he'd be sorry

'if he'd only entertained his audience.

'"I wished," he declared, "to make them better."'

I'd buy that... I'd buy that.

We have power!

We have pizzazz.

One, two, three, four!

'After less than an hour, there's an audible improvement.

'It's almost impossible to sing this piece of music with a reserved and reverent attitude.

'It's as if Handel wrote a sense of instant community into his score.'

'It sounded so great.'

They just all started singing.

It was such a big kind of volume. It was amazing.

Really passionate and it just felt really good to be part of it.

The energy builds and you feed on each other's energy,

and it gives you a bit of extra lift.

# ..Hallelujah, hallelujah... #

It was quite cool to be a part of it and it was good to sing as well.

The young trebles today are 11,

the same age as I was

when I first sang the Christmas music from Messiah,

which was in 19...44.

It sounded awesome. I loved the sound of it.

# ..For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth

# Hallelujah. #

Very good!

Give yourselves a round of applause.

CHEERING

Not long before his 50th birthday,

Handel was invited here to Oxford University

to become the first ever recipient of an honorary degree in music,

and this exceptional gesture from the heart of the British Establishment

was testimony not just to his status as a composer

but to his huge impact on the musical and cultural life of the nation.

To mark the occasion,

he organised a series of concerts here at the Sheldonian Theatre.

But what did this academic distinction really mean to Handel?

In fact,

he seems to have been SO busy organising, performing

and collecting his substantial box office receipts

that he never got around to picking up his degree.

The oratorio form gave Handel the freedom to organise his concerts

with supreme flexibility and flair.

Even a three-movement harp concerto could be inserted comfortably

into the texture of arias and choruses.

All of Handel's problems were solved.

Oratorio concerts were cheap to stage,

audiences found them both respectable and uplifting,

and he could experiment freely.

However, when he presented as an oratorio

the secular, even saucy, story of Semele,

he was to discover that perhaps the form did have its limitations.

It's about telling a story,

and Handel does that through his music,

but we as performers, we have to take this music

and do it through our bodies.

He wrote so well in the English language.

You can sing it in a very upright and in a very sort of pristine way,

and you can sing it in a very sensual way.

# Endless pleasure

# Endless pleasure, endless love

# Semele enjoys above... #

'It's a gavotte, so it's always moving over to the down beat.'

So this, "Endless pleasure, endless LOVE Semele enjoys a-BOVE."

You know, the music just is a continual joy.

# ..Pleasure, endless love

# Semele enjoys above

# Semele enjoys above. #

Handel's audience was confused.

The stories in oratorios were meant to be upright - at least biblical.

And yet Semele is drawn from the classical and slightly erotic Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Semele was, they suspected, something slightly louche.

An opera in disguise?

Overall, it was a failure and, I think, for Handel a hurtful failure.

But it did yield one rich tenor aria which was, and continues to be, hugely popular.

# Where'er you walk

# Cool gales shall fan the glade

# Trees where you sit

# Shall crowd into a shade

# Trees where you sit Shall crowd into a shade

# Where'er you walk

# Cool gales shall fan the glade

# Trees where you sit

# Shall crowd into a shade

# Trees where you sit

# Shall crowd into a shade. #

It's an interesting example of the fact that Handel so often

tried and didn't always necessarily succeed. This was a bit of a flop,

-when it opened.

-Yeah, but I think it's gone on from strength to strength

and some of the things we love most of Handel's are from this, so in the long run, he won out.

You do feel that he did end up British. The way he sets the English language

is so extraordinarily good.

Yes. I mean, I think he always spoke with a German accent,

but he'd adopted Englishness in the most extraordinary way,

and he became this amazing symbol of Britishness.

He was almost like, in the cultural sphere,

the equivalent of the King.

I mean, the King was German, the top cultural figure was German.

# ..Trees where you sit

# Shall crowd into a shade. #

Handel's best tunes always reach out to the widest possible audience.

Spring Gardens, on the south bank of the Thames,

was once part of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens,

a vast and hugely popular 18th century entertainment complex

dominated by a statue of the hero of British culture - George Frideric Handel.

The people themselves were part of the entertainment.

They saw themselves as part

of this unfolding, constantly moving spectacle.

Some were not pleased with the way

in which aristocratic and poor would mingle together.

They said that they were "jumbled together as in a common grave",

which is a rather dismal view of the gardens,

but I think most people who came here would come

to look at the statues, to enjoy walking in the trees -

this sort of ambience of nature in what was becoming

increasingly built-up, urbanised London.

They would sit and have dinner and listen to music by Handel

performed in front of the dinner boxes.

MUSIC: "La Rejouissance" from Music For The Royal Fireworks

Handel was a master of the grand musical statement.

Audiences are still captivated by his bold, large-scale pieces, like the Music For The Royal Fireworks,

which was first heard at a legendary public rehearsal in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

The public rehearsal of Handel's Firework music

made an enormous impact - there were huge numbers.

London Bridge was the only route across the river, and so it was jam-packed with coaches

and apparently, a group of footmen had a public brawl and some nobleman got injured.

How many people do you think crammed in here

-to witness this spectacle?

-About 12,000.

I think he always had his eye on popular success of a kind,

where he could do it without compromising his musical or artistic integrity.

MUSIC: Foundling Hospital Anthem

Handel was nearly 65 and still composing prolifically.

But now he began to use his status as the country's leading composer to support charitable causes.

The Foundling Hospital was Britain's first home for abandoned and illegitimate babies.

William Hogarth was already a major benefactor,

and Handel now decided to join him.

Looking at that, as with all Hogarth, you just sense

just how seething and, basically,

most people's experience of life was so unpleasant.

You see all sides of 18th-century life - The March Of The Guards.

He raffled it to raise money for the hospital

and he gave the spare, unsold tickets to the hospital.

One of those happened, perhaps not by chance,

to be the winning ticket, so the hospital got the painting as well as the proceeds of the raffle.

-How did Handel come to be involved?

-He first turned up

in the council committee minutes offering to do a benefit concert in 1749.

The concert was arranged within about three weeks

and he wrote some new music for it - the Foundling Hospital Anthem -

and put it together with the other new music he'd written that year to make a popular, sold-out concert.

This is clearly a way he could make a difference. Hogarth could auction paintings. Handel had to do gigs.

Yes. Very much in the Live Aid theme of today, he did the benefit concerts of the 18th century.

# Blessed, blessed, blessed are they

# Blessed

# Blessed are they that considereth

# The poor and the needy

# The Lord will deliver them in time of trouble... #

The anthem that Handel composed specially to be performed at his Foundling Hospital benefit concerts

brilliantly demonstrates his ability to combine

sincere spirituality with rigorous practicality.

# ..The Lord preserve them and comfort them... #

'It's basically a recruiting song for the charity. But it works

'by inviting the listener into a sort of feel-good experience about charitable giving.'

This is Handel's last will and testament. Um...

He wrote a will in 1750 and he leaves a bequest of the score and parts of Messiah

to the Foundling Hospital, which enabled them to carry on their charity concerts after his death.

'Seeing Handel's will really fascinated me.

'His handwriting was as bold, clear and forceful

'as I imagine the man himself was.'

HARPSICHORD PLAYS: Suite No. 8 in F minor, 2nd movement

I was keen to see more, particularly some of his music manuscripts, and in the British Library,

they've conserved one of the most poignant - the manuscript for Jephtha, his last great oratorio.

What happens is that in 1751-2, his eyesight starts to fail.

This is Handel's, as it were, typical handwriting.

Very few changes, and those that are made

are made very, very clearly.

He may leave some details of the orchestra to fill in later, but pretty well,

by the time we're through, there's a draft

of something for every movement.

And when he gets to the bottom of this page,

you see 13th February 1751 - his annotation there is

he couldn't go on,

because of the trouble with his eyesight, and he couldn't do any more.

# How dark

# How dark, how dark

# How dark, how dark

# O Lord... #

Now, this was doubly troublesome, because not merely had he not finished the score,

but the first night was only ten days away,

so he has to get something ready for there,

and actually, what we then find,

down at the bottom of the next page,

he says ten days later, his eye is somewhat recovered

and he can go back to work.

The really curious thing is that the trouble with his eyesight happens

on the chorus How Dark, O Lord, Are Thy Decrees.

# ..How dark

# O Lord

# Are thy decrees... #

The thing about it is that 23rd February actually was his birthday.

-It's suddenly become painfully autobiographical.

-Certainly so.

There's a sense of faith about this.

# ..From mortal sight

# All hid from mortal sight... #

His creative life was over. It wasn't long

before he'd lost the sight in both eyes.

For the next few years he struggled on, helped by assistants,

revising old works and tirelessly promoting the performance of his music.

# ..All hid from mortal sight... #

Every time you get to know the music of a great composer,

your exploration throws up lots of questions about who that person might be or might have been,

because somehow, the music will always feel autobiographical.

Handel came to Britain and, as people so often claim, ended up

becoming more British than the British.

But for him personally, it must have always felt unusual

to have made his whole world in a country where he would only ever be perceived as a foreigner.

So he must have been a pretty strong individual,

able to take the knocks,

that he could more or less completely reinvent himself.

He knew what he wanted and he was damned sure he was going to get it.

All great people who've achieved anything in any walk of life

have had to be quite ruthless.

But I find that a conundrum,

because his music is so deeply human,

and so potent, and so theatrical, so come-hither,

so un-put-downable.

And yet it seems to me the man behind the music

must have been incredibly tough, which probably didn't make him very likeable,

but...goodness me... the legacy is worth volumes.

# I know that my Redeemer liveth

# And that he shall stand

# At the latter day

# Upon the earth... #

One night, on returning from a performance of Messiah at Covent Garden,

Handel was seized with a sudden weakness, and he retired to his bed, never to rise again.

On 14th April 1759, he passed away peacefully at the age of 74.

Over 3,000 mourners attended his funeral, which was given full state honours.

After his death, his reputation would continue to grow,

and the engine was Messiah.

# And he shall reign forever and ever

# King of Kings

# Forever and ever... #

In the years following Handel's death, Great Britain grew increasingly rich and powerful,

and Handel's music became part of the very fabric of our national life.

# ..And ever King of Kings... #

In the next episode of The Birth Of British Music, I'll discover how,

at the end of the 18th century, another foreigner -

the Austrian Joseph Haydn - became our musical national hero.

# ..He shall reign forever and ever

# King of Kings Forever and ever

# And Lord of Lords Forever and ever

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah! #