Handel’s harpsichords revisited Part II: Handel’s domestic harpsichords

Abstract

The harpsichords supposedly owned or played by Handel have long been the subject of scholarly enquiry, in recent years mainly to try to match their compasses and disposition to his solo music, a strategy also used, for instance, with instruments associated with J. S. Bach and Mozart. Similarly, Grant O’Brien, John Koster and others have tried to determine how Ruckers-family instruments might have been used to play early 17th-century keyboard music.

In Part I of this article (in the last Early Music) I discussed six Ruckers harpsichords associated with Handel and his followers in the 18th and 19th centuries, three of which can be identified with surviving instruments. I argued that Handel favoured them partly because they had a cachet equivalent to Amati violins, and partly because he used them for directing oratorios at Covent Garden, where a small instrument with a brilliant tone would have been an asset in a crowded performing area. In this second part I focus on five plucked instruments said to have been owned by Handel, and apparently used by him at home, for accompanying in small rehearsals, for performing solo music to his friends and for private practice. Not all the claims made for the total of eleven instruments associated with Handel stand up to scrutiny, as we shall see, but a surprising number of them can be traced back to his milieu, and I argue that the composer needed a large number of instruments for his varied activities as a composer, solo keyboard virtuoso, teacher and musical director.

In Part I of this article (in the last Early Music) I discussed six Ruckers harpsichords associated with Handel and his followers in the 18th and 19th centuries, three of which can be identified with surviving instruments: 1612a hr, 1651b ar and 1640a ar, using the system in Grant O’Brien’s catalogue of Ruckers instruments.¹ I set them in the context of new information about the large number of Ruckers harpsichords that were offered for sale in 18th-century London, most of which must have been modernized and enlarged there.² I argued that Handel favoured them partly because they had a cachet equivalent to Amati violins, and partly because he used them for directing oratorios at Covent Garden, where a small instrument with a brilliant tone would have been an asset in a crowded performing area. I now turn to instruments Handel might have used at home, for accompanying in small rehearsals, for performing solo music to his friends and for private practice.

When Handel settled in London permanently in 1712 he seems at first to have relied on accommodation provided by friends and patrons, including the Earl of Burlington at Burlington House in Piccadilly (probably 1713–16),³ and the Duke of Chandos at Cannons near Edgware or Albemarle Street in Mayfair (1717–19).⁴ He established his own household in the summer of 1723, leasing a new house in Mayfair, now 25 Brook Street (illus.1).⁵ This is where he composed, held small rehearsals, conducted business and entertained his friends. 1723 may also have been the year when he began to acquire his own keyboard instruments rather than using those provided by employers and patrons.

Thornhill’s lid design

The first evidence of a harpsichord owned by Handel seems to be a drawing by Sir James Thornhill (1675/6–1734), a design for a painting on a harpsichord lid (illus.2).⁶ It is headed ‘Peace introduces Arts & Sciences, who Sacrifice to Apollo &c.’ and has a detailed description of the scenes depicted, with a sentence at the bottom identifying the drawing: ‘M^r. Handel has _^^{or had} the Harpsicord this design was made for’. Thornhill apparently added this sentence sometime after he made the drawing, not knowing what had happened to the instrument in the meantime. This may have been after 1731, when he lived ‘much in retirement’, probably at least partly in his native Dorset.⁷ Perhaps Handel acquired this harpsichord and commissioned the lid painting for it a few years earlier, in or shortly after 1723. Incidentally, Thornhill is known to have painted at least one other harpsichord lid: ‘A Very fine ton’d Double-row’d Original Harpsichord of Hans Ruekers, beautifully Japann’d, and the Lid painted in Figures by Sir James Thornhill’ was advertised in London in 1754.⁸ It had been ‘in the Possession of Mr. Robinson, Organist’—presumably John Robinson, organist of Westminster Abbey 1727–62.

Thornhill’s drawing shows the lid of a harpsichord with a double bentside, a design particularly associated with instruments from Hamburg.⁹ A few English harpsichords have double bentsides, notably the double-manual of about 1725 by Thomas Hitchcock,¹⁰ but their tails are rather narrower than the instrument implied by Thornhill’s design. Furthermore, nearly all English 18th-century harpsichords and spinets have cases finished in plain or veneered wood without lid paintings, in line with the dominant tradition of English furniture at the time.¹¹ The feet-and-inches scale below the design suggests that this instrument was about 7′ 8′′ (2336.8 mm) by 2′ 11′′ (889 mm)—perhaps a single-manual harpsichord, to judge from the relatively short cheek piece. Instruments of this shape and size were made in Hamburg at that period by Johann Christoph and Carl Conrad Fleischer, Hieronymus Albrecht Hass and Christian Zell.¹² For instance, the single-manual Carl Conrad Fleischer harpsichord of 1720 now in Barcelona is 2364mm by 867mm.¹³

However, Thornhill’s design might have been intended just for the main part of the lid up to the nameboard, without the flap over the key well, as with the lid painting on the 1712 harpsichord by Hermann Willenbrock of Hanover.¹⁴ (Incidentally, this instrument, originally a claviorgan, might have been known to Handel, since it was supposedly made for the Elector of Hanover shortly before he became George I of Great Britain. Handel, officially the elector’s Kapellmeister, was in Hanover in 1711–12 before returning to London.¹⁵) If Thornhill’s design was just for the main part of the lid of Handel’s harpsichord, then it might have been a very large double-manual instrument, similar in size to the one by Hieronymus Albrecht Hass of 1734 now in Brussels, which is 2672mm by 926mm, with an original 16′ choir of strings on a separate bridge, soundboard and hitchpin rail.¹⁶ The breadth of the tail in Thornhill’s design suggests that Handel’s instrument could also have had a 16′ register—like the Shudi harpsichord to be discussed later.

Handel spent three years in Hamburg before travelling to Italy in 1706, and maintained links with the city through Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Mattheson.¹⁷ Telemann, his friend from about 1701, became music director of Hamburg’s five principal churches in 1721, while Mattheson had worked with him in the Hamburg opera, was married to an Englishwoman and was secretary to Sir John Wich and his son Cyril, successively the British residents in Hamburg between 1702 and 1742. Handel had been Cyril Wich’s ‘music-master’, according to Mainwaring.¹⁸ Perhaps he wished to acquire a large and richly decorated harpsichord for his house in Brook Street, to be placed in the large first-floor dining room,¹⁹ and arranged through a contact for one to be sent from Hamburg. He might have done so because in the 1720s much larger and more elaborate harpsichords were being made in Hamburg than in London.

The 1729 Shudi harpsichord

In his pioneering book on the Shudi-Broadwood firm, published in 1913, the archaeologist and historian William Dale published photographs of a two-manual harpsichord with a name batten inscribed ‘BURCKAT TSCHUDI LONDINI FECIT 1729’ on the front and ‘QVESTO CIMBALO È DEll^a SIG^a ANNA STRADA 1731 LONDON’ on the back (illustrations 3, 4).²⁰ These inscriptions sent Dale into raptures:

Who but Handel could have given it to her? To this very instrument she must have sung, and on it Handel must have accompanied her. The date associated with Strada’s name is the year when she had gained popularity. One pictures Handel [at Shudi’s house] in Meard Street choosing it or superintending its manufacture, and it probably figured in her benefit at the King’s Theatre.²¹

Handel certainly recruited Anna Maria Strada from Venice in 1729, and she was his leading soprano for eight seasons before returning to Italy in 1738. However, the inscription on the back of the name batten does not mention Handel, and the idea that he gave this harpsichord to Strada, though widely accepted today,²² seems just to be a romantic fantasy. If she did receive it as a gift it is surely more likely that the donor was an aristocratic patron or admirer. When she left England a newspaper mentioned the ‘so many signal Marks of Favour’ she had received from ‘the British Nobility and Gentry’.²³ Incidentally, in her portrait by John Verelst, signed and dated 1732 (illus.5), she sits at a single-manual harpsichord, clearly not the instrument in Dale’s photograph.²⁴

Michael Cole has assembled evidence that the ‘harpsichord’ featured in Dale’s book was offered for sale in Naples in 1903 as a piano.²⁵ He points out that Dale’s photograph shows it sitting on what appears to be the stand of ‘an English piano, of five octaves, made about 1780–90’; that ‘the curve of the bentside is exactly what you might see on a grand piano of 1785 and not at all like the profile you expect from Shudi’; and that there is ‘a suspicious looking vertical line on the cheek, as if the instrument had been lengthened (perhaps to accommodate the second keyboard)’.²⁶ He concludes that an English grand piano was converted into a two-manual harpsichord after 1903, with the addition at some point of the name batten associating it with Schudi and Strada. According to Dale, writing in 1913, it was purchased in Rome ‘six or seven years ago’ (i.e. in 1906 or 1907) by the Dutch collector and pioneer gamba player Paul de Wit, and was in use in Leipzig and Berlin in 1911 and 1912.²⁷ It is now in Japan,²⁸ though photographs of its current state led Cole to conclude that it is ‘of entirely modern manufacture’—apart perhaps from its name batten.²⁹ It seems therefore that this instrument is a modern forgery, and it certainly has no convincing connection with Handel.

The Mercier portrait

In 1993 Michael Cole drew attention to the connection between the single-manual harpsichord by William Smith, then recently acquired by the Bate Collection at Oxford,³⁰ and the one depicted in Philip Mercier’s painting of Handel (illus.6).³¹ The painting has been dated c.1730,³² the harpsichord c.1720.³³ Cole made a good case for the connection, tellingly juxtaposing a detail of the painting showing the bass of the keyboard with the equivalent section of the harpsichord.³⁴ He was careful not to claim that Smith’s harpsichord was actually the one painted by Mercier, though that claim was made in an accompanying advertisement for a CD, billed as ‘Your chance to hear Handel’s harpsichord’.³⁵ However, Mimi Waitzman subsequently pointed out that ‘any reader can see that the details of the design of the instrument do not exactly correspond. This of course could be artist’s licence, but there is no particular reason why it should be’, though she conceded: ‘That the instrument is likely to be from the same workshop is not in dispute’.³⁶ An obvious difference is the decorative border around the inscription on the nameboard, which extends much closer to the left-hand stop-knob in the painting than on the instrument.

Furthermore, even if we accept that Mercier depicted Handel sitting at a harpsichord by William Smith, we cannot assume that it belonged to him. The art historian Susan Sloman has pointed out to me that at the time artists were reluctant to work outside their own studios, and that it was standard practice for the subjects of portraits to sit just for their heads, leaving their chosen clothes and props behind. Painters frequently used their own props, particularly large pieces of furniture such as keyboard instruments, or they might have painted them separately as reference images. A further complication is that small single-manual harpsichords, of similar but not identical design, appear in some other Mercier paintings, including the three versions of The Music Party (1733),³⁷ a fancy painting also entitled The Music Party (c.1737–40)³⁸ and The Sense of Hearing (1744–7).³⁹ The harpsichords depicted in these paintings need further research, though it is likely that the instrument in Handel’s portrait belonged not to the composer but to Mercier or a third party. The 1733 Music Party, portraying Frederick, Prince of Wales and his sisters Anne (harpsichord), Amelia (mandolin) and Caroline (reading) (illus.7),⁴⁰ is also potentially relevant to Handel since he had been appointed Music Master to the princesses in 1723.⁴¹ However the same argument applies: the harpsichord depicted did not necessarily come from the Royal Collection.

Shudi’s ‘capital double keyed harpsichord’

On 26 June 1788 an auction held ‘At Mr. CROSS’s, Opposite the Town-Hall Oxford’ (presumably the premises of the music seller and instrument dealer William Cross) featured the following:

A Capital Double Key’d HARPSICHORD, by BUREAT [sic] SCHUDI, made for the Immortal HANDEL and used by him till his death, at the different Concerts in London. It consists of four stops, which are as follow[s]; Two unisons, an upper and lower octave, has a powerful tone, and is well calculated for Concerts.⁴²

This advertisement has long been known,⁴³ but another one for the same auction has recently come to light with an interestingly different wording:

A DOUBLE HARPSICHORD, by Burkart Shudi, made for Mr. handel, and used in high Esteem in his Oratorios in London; it consists of two Unisons, an Upper and Lower Octave, which makes a very full Harpsichord, a Crescendo and Piano.⁴⁴

Furthermore, the music seller George Smart (father of Sir George Smart) had advertised what was surely the same instrument in London five years earlier:

Two second hand Harpsichords, by Kirckman, in good condition; a capital double keyed ditto, by old Burkat Shudi; it consists of two unisons, an octave, a double bass stop, and a pedal; this instrument was used by the celebrated Mr. Handel in his Operas, and is well calculated for a large Concert or Orchestra, to be sold for 35 Guineas.⁴⁵

Putting the information from these three advertisements together, it seems that this instrument was a two-manual harpsichord with four ranks of strings, 1 × 4ʹ, 2 × 8′, 1 × 16ʹ. The pedal, providing ‘a Crescendo and Piano’, was perhaps a machine stop similar to the one on the early 18th-century counterfeit Ruckers harpsichord at Helmingham Hall in Suffolk (‘1646 ar’), which ‘engages the registers one after the other successively, to give a sort of “swell” effect’.⁴⁶ There seems to be no other evidence of Shudi making harpsichords with 16′ stops, though instruments with them were certainly made in 18th-century England: Frederick Neubauer advertised himself in 1763 as a ‘Maker of double-basset and treble-key’d Harpsichords, with six stops’,⁴⁷ while the single-manual combined harpsichord-piano of 1780 by John Joseph Merlin has the specification 1 × 4ʹ, 2 × 8′, 1 × 16ʹ.⁴⁸ We can get an idea of how large Handel’s Shudi might have been from the two surviving double-manual Hass harpsichords with 16′ register: the 1734 Hieronymus Albrecht Hass (already discussed) and the 1760 Johann Adolf Hass at Yale, which is 2737mm by 1000mm.⁴⁹

George Smart advertised his Shudi as ‘used by the celebrated Mr. Handel in his Operas, and is well calculated for a large Concert or Orchestra’, though, given the arguments I made in Part I about Handel’s preference for directing from small Ruckers harpsichords, it is more likely that it was a replacement for the instrument with the Thornhill lid painting in his dining room at Brook Street. It is easy to imagine him deploying its resources in his grandest solo music or using it to accompany small rehearsals, perhaps using the 16ʹ register to suggest orchestral textures with double basses. There are references to domestic rehearsals and performances in the letters of his friend and near-neighbour Mary Pendarves (later Mrs Delany) in which he seems to have played reductions of his orchestral music: a rehearsal of Alcina at Brook Street on 11 April 1735, when Handel accompanied Anna Maria Strada (in the title-role) in a scene from Act 2,⁵⁰ and a rehearsal of Semele on 23 January 1744.⁵¹ Mary described Handel playing the overtures of Arminio and Giustino to her on the harpsichord at her house in November 1736,⁵² and her letters give other glimpses of Handel playing in private musical parties.⁵³ Charles Burney, who was in Handel’s circle in the 1740s, also remembered rehearsals at Brook Street, and mentioned an occasion—evidently at Susanna Cibber’s house—when the composer played the overture to Siroe on the harpsichord, and ‘delighted us all with the marvellous neatness with which he played the jig, at the end of it’.⁵⁴

The Royal Ruckers

In the first part of this article I discussed the evidence that John Christopher Smith gave the Ruckers 1612a hr to George III, hence its place in the Royal Collection today. However, the problem with identifying it with the ‘large Harpsicord’ Handel bequeathed to Christopher Smith is that even in its enlarged state (2303mm by 879mm, with the compass GG–f′ʹ′ without GG!) it is not particularly large by mid-18th-century standards. The Shudi just discussed, with its 16′ stop, would certainly have been substantially larger, and is therefore a better candidate for the instrument mentioned in Handel’s will. Perhaps J. C. Smith’s collection, consisting of instruments acquired from his father as well as those assembled for his oratorio seasons at Covent Garden, included both of them as well as the Winchester Ruckers, 1651b ar. Smith might then have given 1612a hr to George III because of its visible and highly personal connection with Handel. We saw in Part I that three early sources state that it had keys ‘hollowed like the bowl of a spoon’, caused by Handel’s ‘incessant practice’ as Hawkins put it.⁵⁵ Burney wrote that ‘During the Oratorio season, I have been told, that he [Handel] practised almost incessantly; and, indeed, that must have been the case, or his memory uncommonly retentive; for, after his blindness, he played several of his old organ-concertos, which must have been previously impressed on his memory by practice’.⁵⁶ 1612a hr was perhaps placed in a private room in his Brook Street house, such as the one at the back on the first floor,⁵⁷ which, according to W. H. Cummings, ‘tradition says was Handel’s composition room’.⁵⁸

As an aside, I should mention that this domestic scene, though featuring 1651b ar rather than 1612a hr, was conjured up as ‘The Waiting Handel’, an engraving by ‘Batt’, the pseudonym of Oswald Charles Barrett (1892–1945) (illus.8). It was first published in 1935 but is best known as an illustration in Percy Scholes’s Oxford companion to music, published in 1938.⁵⁹ According to the artist, it depicts ‘the blind old man … smoking as he awaits the arrival of his amanuensis’, with his harpsichord, ‘to be seen in the South Kensington Museum … open near at hand’; ‘Thus Handel must have waited many times for John Christopher Smith to come and commit his last music to paper’.

Andrew George Lemon and the Hitchcock spinet

In his pioneering survey of the harpsichords associated with Handel, first published in 1883, A. J. Hipkins wrote:

I have just bought a spinet of the Stuart time which the family tradition of the late owner affirms was once Handel’s. It came from Downham Market, Norfolk. Andrew George Lemon, who died at Lynn in 1756 had, so say his descendants, come with Handel to England in 1710. The spinet was afterwards given by Handel to Lemon, who was a violin player, and had been a paymaster in the King of Prussia’s horse. Lemon is an Anglicized form of a name which may have been, or perhaps resembled, Lehmann.⁶⁰

Edith Hipkins presented this instrument to the Royal College of Music following her father’s death in 1903 (illus.9),⁶¹ after having exhibited it in the 1904 Music Loan Exhibition.⁶²

At first sight the Downham Market spinet seems to be another unlikely Handel legend, though Hipkins was a serious scholar, in advance of his time in his handling of source material and documentary evidence.⁶³ In his 1883 article, nevertheless, he made one error: he assumed that the spinet’s serial number, 1676, was its date—which is why he dated it ‘of the Stuart time’—though he corrected that in the 1893 version of the article, writing that it is by John Hitchcock and ‘is numbered, not dated, 1676’.⁶⁴ We shall see that it is also unlikely that Lehmann/Lemon had been ‘a paymaster in the King of Prussia’s horse’, though that was probably his family’s error. In general, the information Hipkins reported about Lemon and his spinet is supported by the documentary evidence to a remarkable degree.

Lehmann/Lemon is first recorded as ‘A. G. Lemon’, the single trumpeter in the service of the Duke of Chandos at Cannons near Edgware, paid between May 1719 and New Year 1721.⁶⁵ He would have worked with Handel there, presumably playing the trumpet parts in Esther and the Cannons Te Deum hwv281 as well as in a Magnificat and two anthems by J. C. Pepusch, the musical director at Cannons.⁶⁶ The instrument he played there may have been ‘A Trumpet made by John Harry at London’, listed in the 1720 catalogue of the Cannons instruments.⁶⁷ ‘Andreas Georg Lehman, Trompette, unter dem blauen Königl: Regiment Quarde [sic] zu Pferd’ (a Trumpeter in the Blue Royal Regiment of Horse Guards—the cavalry regiment first raised in 1650) was listed by the composer J. S. Cousser in the address-book section of his commonplace book.⁶⁸ This confirms that Lehmann/Lemon was German, though he seems to have served in the British rather than the Prussian army. If he was the Georg Andreas Lehmann born in ‘Boernicke’ (Börnicke, north-west of Berlin) on 16 August 1691, the son of Christopf Lehmann and Anna Meyer,⁶⁹ then he would have been too young to have served as ‘a paymaster in the King of Prussia’s horse’.

However, if Lemon was born in August 1691 then he would have been 19 in 1710, a plausible age for a promising young trumpeter to have travelled to England with Handel. The composer arrived in London in 1710 from Hanover via Halle and Düsseldorf, possibly in the second half of September or October.⁷⁰ Perhaps Lemon, on arrival in England, served initially in the British army before working at Cannons. Cousser, who was employed at the vice-regal court in Dublin from 1707, may have encountered him in 1716 while passing through London on a visit to France, Germany and the Netherlands.⁷¹

Lemon married Elizabeth Hornblower at Aske’s Hospital Chapel in Hoxton on 22 October 1724,⁷² and their first child, George William, was reportedly born in Middlesex in 1726.⁷³ In 1729 Andrew became one of the waits of King’s Lynn in Norfolk,⁷⁴ and his son Daniel Robert was baptized in St Nicholas’s Chapel there on 18 September 1730.⁷⁵ He was described as ‘musitian’ in 1734 when he was given the freedom of the borough of King’s Lynn.⁷⁶ As a municipal wait, Lemon is unlikely to have been able to specialize in the trumpet, which is presumably why his descendants told Hipkins he had been a violinist. Perhaps he also played the violin at Cannons when a trumpet was not required. ‘Geo Lemmon one of the Town Whaits’ (that is, Andrew George Lemon) was paid half of his £5 salary and a gratuity of £2 10s in 1746, the year the King’s Lynn waits were disbanded, and he was buried at St Nicholas’s Chapel in the town on 14 February 1756.

The subsequent Lemon family history (and the presumed provenance of their spinet) can be summarized as follows. George William studied at Queen’s College, Cambridge (1744–8); was ordained (18 March 1753); became rector of Gayton Thorpe and vicar of East Walton in Norfolk (9 December 1755);⁷⁷ married Elizabeth Young there (31 May 1760); and was buried there (8 October 1797). He was also a teacher, at Bury St Edmunds Grammar School (1768–9) and as High Master of Norwich Grammar School (1769–78). His son, George William junior, was baptized at St James, Bury St Edmunds (6 October 1769; born 20 January 1768).⁷⁸ This George William became a lawyer, and married the widow Ann Webb at St Edmund’s, Downham Market (6 November 1800). They had at least three daughters, all baptized at St Edmunds: Sophia (10 September 1801), Mary Ann (18 July 1804) and Harriet (22 September 1808; born 4 December 1807). The family remained in Downham Market. George William junior and Harriet were buried there (17 January 1838 and 4 July 1876), but Sophia and Mary Ann (who had married the plumber Robert Spencer on 23 May 1838) were still alive in 1883; they were buried on 20 July 1887 and 18 May 1894 respectively. One of them presumably sold the spinet to Hipkins and provided information about their great-grandfather. An article about Hipkins published in 1898 mentioned that he had purchased it ‘with documentary evidence as to its history, &c.’, though this has yet to be located.⁷⁹

We can now see that Hipkins’s statement about Andrew Lemon is generally borne out by the documentary evidence. He was German, originally Andreas Georg Lehmann; there is a demonstrable link between him and Handel; he did die in King’s Lynn in 1756; and two of his great-grandchildren were alive in Downham Market in 1883 to sell the spinet to Hipkins. But what of Handel’s ownership of the spinet? Hipkins thought it was made around 1710, but an analysis of the serial numbers of Hitchcock spinets suggests that no.1676 dates from the early 1750s.⁸⁰ John Hitchcock (1734–74) became a freeman of the Haberdashers’ Company in 1750, and no.1676 has the inscription ‘Sam no.2’ on the wrest-plank, perhaps indicating it was made partly or wholly by a journeyman—possibly Samuel Blumer.⁸¹

On this basis it is just possible that Handel might have remembered an old friend and colleague while sorting out his affairs and possessions—including what would have been a relatively new spinet—at a time when his blindness was forcing him to hand much of his performing activity over to J. C. Smith.⁸² However, Lance Whitehead has suggested as an alternative that John Hitchcock might not have begun to produce instruments under his own name until 1757 or 1758.⁸³ If true, this would mean that Handel could not have given a Hitchcock spinet to a man who had already died a year or two before—unless of course he sent it to King’s Lynn in ignorance of that fact.

Conclusion

In these two articles I have discussed the evidence connecting a total of eleven plucked keyboard instruments to Handel and his followers John Christopher Smith and John Stanley. In Part I the focus was on six harpsichords by members of the Ruckers family: (1) the Joannes Ruckers sold by Gaetano Pugnani in 1769; (2) the double-manual sold by Christie’s in 1775, perhaps for John Stanley; (3) the single manual, possibly by Hans Ruckers, in the sale of Stanley’s effects in 1786; (4) the royal Ruckers 1612a hr, with a credible provenance back to J. C. Smith; (5) the two-manual Andreas Ruckers 1651b ar, also with a reasonably credible provenance back to Smith, largely in Winchester; and last but not least, (6) the little Andreas Ruckers single manual 1640a ar, perhaps acquired by Daniel Twining from Handel’s estate shortly after the composer’s death, and in the Twining family’s possession until the 20th century. I argued that Handel favoured Ruckers harpsichords partly because of their cachet as the best old harpsichords, equivalent to Amati violins, and partly because their small size combined with a brilliant, powerful tone made them ideal instruments from which to direct oratorios in the crowded performing area on the stage at Covent Garden. I suggested that the circumstances of oratorio performances, which involved clearing the stage twice a week to leave it free for the performance of spoken plays, might have left these instruments vulnerable to damage, perhaps explaining why Handel, Smith and Stanley seemingly needed so many of them.

In Part II the focus has been on Handel’s domestic sphere, at his house in Brook Street. I have suggested that the harpsichord with Thornhill’s painted lid, probably made in Hamburg, was acquired for his first-floor dining room, where he would have entertained his friends with solos and used it to accompany small rehearsals. The four-register Shudi advertised in 1783 and 1788 may have been its successor, and I have suggested that this instrument, not 1612a hr, was the ‘large Harpsicord’ bequeathed by Handel to Christopher Smith. I have also suggested that Handel used 1612a hr, placed in a less public room at Brook Street, for his ‘incessant practice’ as Hawkins put it, causing its keys to be worn down, and that J. C. Smith presented it to George III because of this visible personal connection with Handel.

As for the other harpsichords discussed in Part II, the ‘1729 Shudi’ can be discounted as a 20th-century forgery and for lack of evidence connecting it to Handel, as can the instrument he sits at in Mercier’s portrait, on the grounds that it is more likely to have belonged to the painter or a third party than to Handel himself. Andrew George Lemon’s Hitchcock spinet has a better claim, which might be strengthened if the documents reportedly accompanying it were to come to light, or weakened were it to be established that it was made after Lemon’s death in 1756. We are therefore left with nine instruments with a plausible connection with Handel (a considerable advance on the four discussed by Terence Best in 1997),⁸⁴ though of course in most cases we have no means of verifying the claims made for them in 18th-century documents. I hope that more evidence will come to light as the digitization of newspapers and journals proceeds, as the letters, diaries and account books of the period are investigated more fully, and as the surviving instruments are studied in more detail. Perhaps in time more evidence will come to light about the harpsichords used by Handel in other areas of his career, such as the various Italian opera companies he directed, or his work at court as Music Master to the princesses.

Peter Holman, Emeritus Professor at the University of Leeds, has wide interests in English music from about 1550 to 1850, performance practice and the history of instruments and instrumental music. His most recent book, Before the baton: musical direction and conducting in Stuart and Georgian Britain, was published by Boydell in February 2020. As a performer he is director of The Parley of Instruments, the Suffolk Villages Festival, and Leeds Baroque. [email protected].

Footnotes