ABSTRACT
IN TERMS OF SCALE, IMPACT, and cultural significance, the five-day Commem-oration of Handel staged in the spring of 1784 ranks as one of the three or four most significant performance events of the eighteenth century. It was originally scheduled as a three-day celebration with concerts in Westminster Abbey on the first and third days and a concert at the Pantheon on the second day, but the King and Queen commanded repeat performances of the first and third days’ programs, thereby turning the Commemoration into a five-day event. The staging of Messiah in Westminster Abbey on the third day involved over 500 performers and drew an audience of over 4,500 people. As Claudia Johnson has argued, the Commemoration was very much about size: it involved the largest orchestra and largest choir ever convened. 1 And it was widely held that the vast numbers of performers, the immense audience, and the grand settings were particularly suited to the sublimity of Handel’s music. Nothing had ever been attempted on this scale before and its effect was to all accounts extraordinary. The musical sublime, which was so clearly the object of the performances, prompted the papers to indulge in increasingly sublime rhetoric whose nationalist import was explicit. Yet the event was held at a time of great national and imperial uncertainty. With the loss of the American war, Britain’s Atlantic empire was in ruins, and the rise to global dominance heralded by the Seven Years’ War now seemed like the precursor to a world-historical fall. Recriminations over the mismanagement of the American crisis reached into the most elite precincts of the kingdom, and domestic politics were extremely unsettled well into the 1780s. Into this volatile environment, the overt patriotism of the Handel Commemoration seemed to presage a renewed kingship and new future for Britain at a time when the future was far from certain. Indeed, one could argue that the sheer excess of the performances, their martial intensity, operate like a kind of over-compensation for far more nagging lapses. 2
The Commemoration generated highly detailed day-by-day commentary across the press, and a book-length commentary by Charles Burney, which offered an account of Handel’s life, described the genesis of the event, and the effect of every piece performed on the program. 3 Burney wrote under the explicit patronage of George III, who did everything possible to align himself with Handel’s music in this period. As many commentators have noted, Burney’s text is a partisan account of an extremely important political ritual, which used the power of a vast array of performers to proclaim the emergence of a new era. As William Weber has argued, the Commemoration turned Handel into a national icon and instantiated a string of celebratory programs of Handel’s music well into the 1790s. 4
Even reports skeptical of the Commemoration’s aesthetic and political significance described the entire affair not only as the highest attainment of musical art but also as the most remarkable social gathering in living memory:
We cannot in any adequate terms describe the grandeur of this festival. Habituated as we are to public exhibitions, and having had the opportunity of beholding whatever has engaged the notice of the metropolis for many years, we may be allowed to speak from comparison-on experience, therefore, we say, that so grand and beautiful a spectacle, with, at the same time, a feast so rich and so perfect, has not been presented to the public eye within our memory. The coup d’oeil infinitely surpassed that of the trial of the Duchess of Kingston in Westminsterhall-and the Jubilee of Garrick, from which the idea of the present was taken, though it filled the bosoms of men with equal enthusiasm, fell greatly short in the execution. On the trial of the Duchess of Kingston there was a heavy grandeurthe robes and etiquette of rank, aided by the gloom of the Hall, prevented us from enjoying the beauties of variety. Here we had all the youth, beauty, grandeur and taste of the nation, unrestrained by the regulations of a court of law, and grouped in all the natural and easy appearance of the pele mele . The ladies were without diamonds, feathers, or flowers, and thus, in our mind, their charms were embellished.
