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Handel’s Blunder, Part 1

By
Georg Handel

When George Frederick Handel’s oratorio Deborah premiered in London in March, 1733, it could have made the composer a lot of money if he hadn’t made several blunders having little to do with music.

King George and the Royal Family were present, and all of them liked it except for Frederick, Prince of Wales, who had taken to condemning anything his father praised. Diarists of the day wrote that the oratorio was charming and magnificent.But the blessing of the king was a curse for Deborah because the king was not a popular man in 1733. King George the Second had just spent a long sojourn in Hanover, confirming his subjects’ suspicions that he had no great love for England.

Prime Minister Robert Walpole had just reinstated a salt tax, was about to impose a tax on tobacco, and to raise the taxes on spirits and wine. At the same time Walpole had reduced the land tax, playing into the hands of the well-to-do at the expense of the masses.

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Without any apparent sensitivity, Handel chose to raise admission prices to his oratorios. The people could not do without salt, tobacco, or wine. They could do without Handel. And at the opening night of Deborah, only 120 of them showed up. Most patrons had resolved to boycott his theater. Handel tried to make excuses: The cost of new lights for the theater. People laughed and stayed away.

His temper became so violent that most of the singers kept their distance from him. One of Handel’s librettists published a letter in which spoke of Handel having been thrown into a fit of deep melancholy, “interrupted sometimes by raving fits, in which he sees ten thousand opera devils coming to tear him to pieces, then he breaks out into frantic incoherent speeches, muttering ‘sturdy beggars, assassinations, etc.’”

It would get worse before it got better. Next time we’ll find out about Handel, an angry artist, and a case of Burgundy.

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