The W. H Cummings Reports on His Visit to the Handel House Page at the Teri Noel Towe Home Pages
Handel at 56, in 1741, the year in which he composed Messiah in the house on London's Lower Brook Street a portion of which now houses the Handel House Museum. This image is the frontispiece to the 1760 John Mainwaring biography.
W. H. Cummings Reports on his Visit to Handel's House
The Handel House Museum Companion, the newly published official guidebook to the Handel House Museum, contains a thorough and compelling account of the history of the house in Lower Brook Street that was Handel's home for 36 years.The handiwork of Jacqueline Riding, the present Director of the Handel House Museum, this excellent essay makes no mention of a description of the house that antedates by 12 years the "renovation", or rather the talibanization, of the house by the philistine art dealer C. J. Charles, that resulted in the loss of most of the original panelling. Ms. Riding makes no allusion to this description, written in 1893, by W. H. Cummings, one of the pre-eminent Handelians of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and it is possible that his comments provide valuable clues to the sad history of the alteration of the interior of this most precious of Handel shrines.
W. H. Cummings (1831-1915) was a fine composer and church musician as well as one of the most important music historians and musicologists of his time. He also enjoyed the peculiar distinction of having sung alto in the London première of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's Elijah. Cummings's biography of Henry Purcell, one of the first, if not the first, monographs on the composer, has long since been superseded by the works of subsequent scholars who built on the firm foundation that Cummings laid for them, but his writings on Arne and other aspects of music in Great Britain during the Augustan Age still have great value to the scholar and the lay reader alike.
But it was as a bibliophile and as a collector of musical memorabilia and ephemera that Cummings achieved his greatest distinction. His collection, which, unfortunately, was dispersed at auction several years after his death (If only the British Library had acquired it in toto!), and, to the best of my knowledge, the present whereabouts of significant portions of his holdings are unknown. He owned a significant amount of important Handeliana. He owned one of the original copies of Handel's will. He owned Handel's lace ruffle. He owned the original pastel from which all of the engraved versions of that nasty and insolent Goupy caricature "The Charming Brute" were derived, and he owned the wonderful little Kyte portrait, the precise relationship of which to the famous Houbraken portrait print has never been sorted out.
Cummings was a major contributor to the special number of The Musical Times devoted to Handel and to Beethoven that appeared on December 14, 1893, a bound copy of which I received as a present from my treasured friend of yore, Joseph Greenspan, who, some will recall, was the owner of the legendary New York City record emporia, Discophile and Ludus Tonalis. Among Cummings's contributions to that special number of The Musical Times is the description of his visit to Handel's house. It has long been my intention to post scans of the entire Handel portion of the December 14, 1893, issue of The Musical Times here at my home pages, but, until I can make good on that intention, I am going to settle for posting Cummings's account of his visit to Handel's house.
Cummings's account is not without problems, however. He makes mention of a "fine cast-lead cistern, on the front of which in bold relief I read '1721. G. F. H.'" The date on this cistern, which apparently ended up in the London city dump during the course of C. J. Charles's binladenization of the house, unfortunately antedates the beginning of Handel's tenancy by two years. Did Cummings misread the date? Did Handel bring the cistern with him from a previous residence? Was the cistern a clever forgery? Alas, it is unlikely that we will ever know for certain.
Cummings's brief, possibly flawed, but nvertheless extremely important account of his visit to Handel's house, begins near the bottom of the second column of Page 24 and fills all of the first column of Page 25, or, at least however much of that column is not taken up by an egraved illustration of the famous Balthasar Denner portrait of Handel that is now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Here are those two pages, seriatim:
Finally, for the sake of completeness, here is the illustration of the house that appears on Page 37. If it looks familiar, you will easily be able to figure out why! {:-{)}
Obviously, I cannot leave one of my favorite Handel anecdotes hanging in mid-sentence, so here is Page 38!
Teri Noel Towe
December 1, 2001
This black and white photogravure, from an 1893 issue of The Musical Times, reproduces an early photograph -- perhaps the first to be taken of the painting, as a matter of fact -- of one of the earliest authentic portraits from life of George Frideric Handel (or Georg Friedrich Händel, as his name still legally was at the time that he sat for it). Painted about 1720 by Thornhill, this portrait depicts the approximately 35 year old composer-virtuoso, casually but elegantly attired, at the console of the organ that was then in the chapel at Cannons, the Duke of Chandos's palatial country residence. This instrument, or, more accurately, however much now remains of it after nearly three centuries of "rebuilds" and "restorations", is now in the Church of Holy Trinity, Gosport, England, to the best of my knowledge.
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The Roubilliac Statue of Handel that was commissioned from Roubilliac by the promoters who owned the notorious Vauxhall
Gardens, a libertine pleasure garden that was the "Heaven" or "Studio 54" of its day.
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