Impossible! Rubbish! Nonsense! informed readers would exclaim in reply to this question. They are well aware that Handel never came to Malta and that St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral was completed in 1844, a full 85 years after the composer’s death on April 14, 1759. So the answer is a resounding chorus of noes.
But hang on – oras Handel famously indicated in his score before the final, majestic Hallelujah. Is there a glimmer of possibility that the answer is yes? Let’s find out.
George Friedrich Handel was born on February 23, 1685, in Halle, Germany, and by 1698 he was already an accomplished musician performing before Frederick I of Prussia.
After several years in his native Germany and in Italy, during which he composed sacred music and a number of operas, Handel finally moved to London in 1712, became a British citizen and was granted an annual income of £200 by Queen Anne after composing a Te Deum for her.
During his first years in the English capital, Handel produced a number of important compositions including the popular Water Music.
In 1729, two years after writing Zadok the Priest for the coronation of George II (a piece which has been played at every royal coronation ceremony since) he became an important impresario.
Eventually this proved to be a financial disaster and he left the business in 1741. He had by now composed a number of successful oratorios, foremost among them the celebrated Messiah.
In the summer of 1741, Handel was invited by the Duke of Devonshire to give a number of concerts in aid of local hospitals in Dublin.
It was here that Messiah was premiered at the New Music Hall in Fishamble Street on April 13, 1742 (although there is disagreement about the possibility of an earlier performance in London which was coldly received).
The celebrated Mrs Cibber sang the mezzo-soprano part and the ‘grand chorus’ consisted of 26 boys and five men from the combined choirs of St Patrick’s and Christ Church cathedrals.
The paucity of the choir was due to the fact that the dean of St Patrick’s, the celebrated Jonathan Swift of Gulliver’s Travels fame, was not at all pleased by the disruption caused to his choir.
Three months earlier he had called the music hall “a club of Fidlers at Fishamble Street”, and called for the punishment of “such vicars as shall ever appear there, as Songsters, Fidlers, Pipers, Trumpeters, Drummers, Drum Majors, or in any Sonal Quality, according to the Flagitious aggravations of their respective Disobedience, Rebellion, Perfidy and Ingratitude”.
Notwithstanding this tirade and the resulting small chorus, the performance was a great success. The hall was so crowded that “ladies were publicly intreated, in the announcements, to lay aside their hoops as it would greatly increase the charity by making room for more company”.
The following extract from Faulkner’s Dublin Journal sums up the success of the performance: “Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crowded Audience.
“The Sublime, the Grand and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestick and moving Words conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.”
It is, however, the journey from London to Dublin which interests us. This involved a long ride by stagecoach to Liverpool.
On arriving in the vicinity of Chester, word reached the travellers that the wind conditions were not favourable for the crossing from Liverpool to the Emerald Isle.
Handel decided to stop over at Chester to restore his flagging energy with some wholesome fare, while taking the opportunity to put some finishing touches to the oratorio.
The former being accomplished, he set about arranging some form of rehearsal which would enable him to fine-tune some choruses of the Messiah.
He accordingly asked Edmund Baker, the organist of Chester’s St Werburgh Cathedral, to find him some choristers who could read music at sight. A number of suitable people were recommended, among whom was a printer by the name of Janson, who was considered to have a good bass voice.
The rehearsals started and the first part to be tried was the chorus “And with his stripes we are healed”.
Janson was a dismal failure and Handel’s biographer, Victor Schoelcher, recounts how the enraged composer, after swearing in four or five different languages, as was his wont, cried out in broken English:
“You shcauntrel! tit not you dell me, dat you could sing at soite?”.
“Yes, Sir,” said the printer, “but not at first sight!”
At this Handel good-humouredly burst out laughing and the rehearsal was completed.
Fast forward to 1847. The Rev. Moses Margoliouth stops at Malta on the way to the Holy Land, a journey he chronicles in his book A Pilgrimage To The Land Of My Fathers.
He visits St Paul’s Cathedral in Valletta, the Anglican church whose foundation stone had been laid eight years earlier by Queen Adelaide.
Fr Margoliouth describes the cathedral as a “beautiful, chaste and elegant church” and says the organ was sent over from England “after singing the praises of Jehovah at the Cathedral of Chester”.
The quality of the ancient organ, parts of which dated back to 1626, was considered by the Chester Cathedral Chapter to be in rapid decline and, after it was replaced, it was sent to Malta for service in the new cathedral. Here, writes Fr Margoliouth, it “renewed its youth and vigour, like the fabled Phoenix, and therefore as melodious as ever”.
At this point those who had dismissed the idea out of hand that Handel had rehearsed Messiah on the organ at Valletta must be regretting their hasty judgment.
The organ at the cathedral of St Werburgh, Chester, when Handel stopped there in 1741 on his way to Dublin, was the very same one which was eventually shipped to Malta. It had been installed as far back as 1626.
So it is indeed possible that Handel did rehearse parts of the Messiah to the accompaniment of the organ which now graces the Anglican Cathedral in Valletta.
But did Handel actually rehearse in Chester Cathedral? Is that where the hapless Janson was berated by the infuriated composer?
Actually, most reports of the Chester incident state that while it is true that the singers were selected from the cathedral choir, the rehearsals took place in the Golden Falcon Inn in Northgate Street, where Handel was lodged.
One of the earliest published accounts is that by Charles Burney, the renowned music historian, in 1785. Burney himself was a 15-year-old pupil at a Chester public school during Handel’s visit and he indicates the Golden Falcon as the site of the rehearsal. Burney’s account, quoted by Victor Schoelcher in his biography of Handel, is the basis of the aforementioned anecdote.
Another version is given by Prof. John Tullidge, the English-born musician who settled in Utah and became a Mormon in 1864.
Tullidge had visited Chester in 1842 and he relates in an article appearing in The Utah Magazine in 1867 that in Chester he had attended a musical evening at an inn called ‘The Kitchen’.
The inn had a music room which “contained all of Handel’s oratorios and a small chamber organ”.
An impromptu performance of Messiah was held in this room, with Tullidge rendering the recitativos and arias.
When they reached “And with his stripes we are healed”, the organist stopped and asked Tullidge whether he was familiar with the “sight-reading” anecdote.
He then went on to describe the events which he said had taken place a hundred years earlier in that very room to the accompaniment of the same chamber organ.
According to Tullidge, he continued his account as follows: “They came to the chorus ‘And with his stripes we are healed’ when they all broke down.
Handel was leading the soprano boys with his violin, which instrument he took by the neck and threw it at Janson’s head.” Apart from this rather fanciful variation, Tullidge’s version broadly tallies with that given by Schoelcher in his Life of Handel.
Some more recent sources do indicate that the rehearsals took place in the cathedral, but the earlier quasi-contemporary accounts deserve more credence, and it is safe to assume that the cathedral organ was not, in fact, played on that occasion.
So the incredulous remarks were actually justified, and the answer as to whether Handel rehearsed his Messiah on the organ presently at Valletta’s Anglican Cathedral is “no… but nearly”.
What does emerge as fact is that the organ at St Paul’s Anglican Pro-Cathedral was originally built in 1626. Since then it has been rebuilt on at least four occasions, the latest in 1949, but the 17th century organ case survives intact.
The cathedral is currently appealing for funds for the organ’s restoration, which has been estimated to cost £90,000 (€106,830).
Details of the organ appeal can be found online at www.anglicanmalta.org/j.organappeal.html, and contributions to this worthy cause will help in the preservation and enjoyment of one of the oldest organs in Malta.