Between 1717-1719 Handel entered the service of the Earl of Carnarvon (James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos and prominent patron of the arts) as a composer in residence. This position was held concurrently with his royal duties and does not seem to have been too onerous. The only works which we can attribute directly to this employment are the twelve Chandos Anthems, written and premiered at Cannons, a large house in Middlesex, and the ancestral seat of James Brydges. The Duke, a flautist, had a private orchestra consisting of 24 instrumentalists. Fellow native German, and composer of the famous Beggar’s Opera, Johann Pepusch (1667-1752) was the Master of Music at Cannons from 1716. He saw the size of the musical establishment at first expand, and then decline in the 1720s in response to Brydges' pecuniary losses in the South Sea Bubble, a financial crash which took place in 1720.
Handel, Italian Opera in London: Fame, Fortune and Decline
During the winter of 1718-1719, the leading members of the London nobility, under the patronage of the king, started a movement to establish Italian opera in London on a long-term basis. The enterprise was known as the Royal Academy of Music and Handel was appointed as its Musical Director. The finest singers in Europe were to be engaged and, in 1719, Handel set off on a whistle-stop European tour to audition, cajole and engage these singers. The Academy opened formally in 1720 with performances of Handel’s opera Radamisto. There followed eight years of unqualified success. London became the operatic capital of Europe, easily attracting the best singers, orchestral players, librettists, directors and scenery designers. The ‘catchy’ melodies of the arias by Handel and his colleagues quickly became fashionable, universally popular and well-known. This music was soon being published in all manner of unauthorised arrangements on cheap sheet music for use in the home. Handel was at the top and centre of this musical revolution, revered by the London public, and the favoured musician of the Royal household. He was truly the equivalent of a modern celebrity – with wealth, fame and influence, but also with talent! (One can perhaps draw a more contemporary parallel between this and the general common popularity that the melodies of songs by groups such as The Beatles and Abba enjoy today, in terms of how much they might be regarded as a type of musical common currency, instantly familiar to many corners of the social demographic.)
The next six years saw Handel at the summit of his achievement as an opera composer and dramatist, producing the operas Guilio Cesare, Alessandro, Floridante, Tamerlano, Scipione (from which comes the regimental march The British Grenadiers), Ottone, and Rodelinda. It is somewhat ironic that the man giving the newly-constituted Great Britain its fresh musical voice was a native German, writing operas in Italian. In total Handel composed over forty Italian operas in thirty years. Tamerlano saw the first visit to London of the greatest Italian tenor of the day, Francesco Borosini, who was engaged for a single season for a fee of £2,000 - a staggering amount of money at the time (and roughly equivalent to £1m in today’s money). In Alessandro, two famous prima donnas were engaged at a cost of £1,600 each (note the gender pay gap!). The world famous castrato, Farinelli, was similarly tempted to London by a huge fee, although one might argue that, with prepubescent castration leading to abnormally long limbs, and a voice of serene but childish purity, he had already paid a personal price for his fame. (Are we witnessing here a kind of eighteenth-century equivalent of today’s English football Premier League, with international superstars from overseas being sensationally attracted and imported at huge personal gain, but with what must surely become ultimately unsustainable costs?)
Not surprisingly, this recklessness and largesse meant that the Academy began to suffer financial difficulties. This, coupled with the fact that, after a decade of immense popularity, Italian opera was gradually becoming regarded as somewhat passé, meant that the 1727-8 season was the Academy’s last. Generous and wealthy patrons were simply not willing to subsidise such inflated fees for a genre which was losing popularity. There was the inevitable and ugly disharmony and squabbling amongst the directors, claims and counter-claims of financial corruption; in 1728 the Academy folded.
