Handel House Museum - History

History

Handel acquired 25 Brook Street in the summer of 1723, shortly after having been appointed by George II as composer to the Chapel Royal, for which he was paid £400 per annum. The house had been newly built with Nos. 23, 27/29 and 31 by George Barnes as part of the planned extension of Brook Street, linking Hanover Square with Grosvenor Square, between 1717 and 1726. Originally, as a foreign national, Handel was not eligible to buy or take long term leases on property in London; and even when he acquired British nationality in 1727, Handel continued renting the property on short term leases. The fact that he remained there for the rest of his life, almost 40 years, is remarkable, since opera composers at the time were rarely of fixed abode; prior to that, Handel had been lodged in the homes of friends and patrons. At the age of 38, Handel had become accepted within the higher echelons of British society, with whom he freely mixed. His immediate neighbours on either side were from the upper middle classes and initially included the Member of Parliament, John Monckton, who later became the first Viscount Galway in 1727. The layout of the rooms followed the conventions for a modest Georgian townhouse: the basement contained the kitchens; on each of the three floors above, there was a front room and a smaller back room with an adjacent closet; under the roof were garrets for servants.

The larger front first room was used for rehearsal and probably contained a harpsichord and a small house chamber organ. The museum currently contains a reproduction of a period harpsichord of the Flemish firm Ruckers; a reproduction of a period chamber organ, based on the designs of the organbuilders Richard Bridge and Thomas Parker, was made for the Handel House Trust in 1998 and can be seen in Handel's parish church, St George's, Hanover Square, round the corner from Brook Street.

From the 1730s onwards there are many references to rehearsals of operas and oratorios at Brook Street by Handel's friends and fellow musicians. Listening to a rehearsal of Alcina with the soprano Anna Maria Strada, Mrs Pendarves commented, "Whilst Mr Handel was playing his part, I could not help thinking him a necromancer in the midst of his enchantments." The Messiah was also rehearsed there; the lead violinist Abraham Wilson recounted to the musicologist Charles Burney "how civilly he had been attended by him to the door, and how carefully cautioned, after being heated by a crowded room and hard labour, at the rehearsal in Brook-street, not to stir without a chair."

The adjacent room at the rear of the house was Handel's composing room and probably contained Handel's clavichord, an instrument Handel used when composing, portable enough to be taken on journeys and which, according to an anecdote oft-repeated by his biographers, he secretly played as a child in the garret of his house, in defiance of his father. Handel's clavichord was built in 1726 by the Italian instrument maker Annibale Traeri from Modena; it is now in the Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery in Kent.

The remaining rooms on the second floor comprised a main bedroom containing a full tester bed dressed in crimson harateen, connected to a dressing room and closet in the back. The servants, three or more in number, occupied the garret rooms on the floor above.

Handel used his house not only for entertainment, composition and rehearsal, but also for business: in the late 1730s the scores of Alexander's Feast and other works could be purchased directly there. His home also contained an extensive art collection; by the end of his life handel possessed over 80 paintings, including works by Watteau, Teniers and Rembrandt, as well as various prints.

After Handel's death in 1759, his musical instruments passed to John Christopher Smith and his son of the same name: the father had been summoned from the continent by Handel to act as his copyist when Handel first arrived in London; and his son had acted as amanuensis and assistant when Handel's blindness prevented him from writing and conducting in his later years. The tenancy of the house and Handel's clothing passed to his servant John Du Burk. The detailed inventory, now stored in the British library, gives a clear guide as to how the house was decorated and used. Apart from the conversion of the garrets into a fourth storey in the 1830s, the house remained largely unchanged until 1905, when C. J. Charles converted the house into a shop, removing the original facade and the internal dividing walls. It was subsequently occupied by interior decorators and antiques dealers. In 1971 it was acquired by the Co-operative Insurance Society and the Handel House Trust has leased the upper stories of the property since 2000.