Handel Hendrix House
Handel Hendrix House is a museum in Mayfair, London, dedicated to the lives and works of the German-born British Baroque composer George Frideric Handel and the American rock singer-guitarist Jimi Hendrix, who lived at 25 and 23 Brook Street respectively.
Handel made his home in London in 1712 and eventually became a British citizen in 1727. Handel was the first occupant of 25 Brook Street, which he rented from 1723 until his death there in 1759. Almost all his works after 1723, amongst them many of his best-known operas, oratorios and ceremonial music, were composed and partially rehearsed in the house, which contained a variety of keyboard instruments, including harpsichords, a clavichord and a small chamber organ.
The museum comprises a carefully restored set of period rooms on the first and second floors of 25 Brook Street together with exhibition rooms in number 23, the adjacent house on the terrace. In 2016 the museum expanded to incorporate the upper floors of 23 Brook Street, home of Jimi Hendrix in the late 1960s.
History
The museum was opened in 2001 by the Handel House Trust following four decades of tireless and dedicated hard work. The idea first sparked in 1958 when Leslie Sparey, a dentist from the Lake District, made arrangements with Viyella, who occupied 25 Brook Street at the time, for a special visit with his family. A year later the musicologist and Handelian Stanley Sadie had the same idea when he attended a commemoration held there for the bicentenary of Handel's death.Sparey's quest for a Handel Museum started when he began writing letters to a few eminent musicians; most of this early correspondence is now lost apart from a letter from Sir Keith Faulkner, Director of the Royal College of Music, written on 18 April 1972 in response to a letter he had received from Sparey on 11 April. Sir Keith apologised for not being able to meet during Sparey's recent visit to London, commented that no one appeared to be willing to take action, and further apologised for having no time to take on the project himself. In January 1983 Sparey drew up a detailed memorandum on the subject of Handel's house in which he mentioned that despite its being a Grade I listed building, planning permission had been sought in 1982 for the demolition of five Grade II listed buildings, substantially affecting several listed buildings including Handel's house. Sparey noted that although planning permission had been refused, he understood that the Co-operative Insurance Society, who had acquired 25 Brook Street in 1971, intended to appeal. His memorandum also mentioned that a few years earlier he had helped set up a committee specifically for promoting a Handel museum, with representatives from the Royal College of Music, the Royal Academy of Music, the Arts Council and interested others; having noted that the project had been shelved, Sparey finished his memorandum by pointing out the urgent need in ensuring the permanent preservation of Handel's House. When he posted the memorandum to a number of prominent musicians and personalities, the following responded favourably: Sir Charles Mackerras, Sir Charles Groves, Christopher Hogwood, Neville Marriner, Richard Baker and Edward Heath.
By 1983 the idea of forming the Handel Museum Trust Fund had been mooted, and as a result of a meeting with the Charity Commissioner a draft statement was issued in January 1984, setting out the objects and aims which involved creating a Handel museum in which articles of musical and personal interest from the period would be available for public display, organising events including exhibitions, seminars and concerts, creating scholarships, bursaries and fellowships, and raising funds for making all these aims possible.
In April 1984 Sparey received a letter from the Handel scholar Anthony Hicks, secretary of the Provisional Council for a Handel Institute. In his letter Hicks explained that the Institute consisted of a group of musical scholars, one of them Stanley Sadie, who wished to form a group in order to promote and support Handel studies with the aim of increasing public knowledge of Handel's life and music. Hicks further explained that although their concept of a Handel Institute was not dependent on a specific location, they were interested to hear about the proposal to turn the upper floors of 25 Brook Street into a Handel Museum, whilst hoping to explore with the developers the possibility of the Institute administering or making use of the premises. In Sparey's reply he informed Hicks that the Cooperative Insurance Society Ltd were appealing against the rejection of their development plan for the area, but with the assurance that if they won their case they would be interested in the idea of creating a Handel Museum. Hicks responded by sharing the Provisional Council's plans, pointing out that should a Handel Museum materialise at 25 Brook Street, it should incorporate articles of musical and personal interest connected to the life and times of Handel; he also mentioned that if it were to be a centre for Handel studies it would need equipment out of keeping with an elegant Georgian interior, such as microfilm readers, filing cabinets, a photocopier and tape- and disc-playing facilities. A compromise, he added, would be use of the first floor as a public exhibition and the upper floors for study and administration. Finally, Hicks stated that in view of the uncertainty concerning plans for the area and that the Handel house would not be available before 1989 at the earliest, the Provisional Council would focus on their own plans without associating with a particular location.
Sparey's response to Hicks in June 1984 stressed his sense of urgency in exploring the matter as thoroughly as possible despite the uncertainty regarding plans and the length of time before Handel's house would become available, and having expressed surprise that nothing had been attempted before, he emphasised the need for a few eminent Handel experts to meet and consider the whole concept in depth.
In the early 1990s Stanley Sadie and his wife Anne set up the Handel House Trust, the charity which eventually oversaw the conversion of the house into a museum. Having raised funds through a Heritage Lottery Fund grant they were able to purchase the lease of 25 Brook Street from the Co-operative Insurance Society, who had held the freehold since 1971. Following a long period of extensive renovation work, 25 Brook Street finally opened its doors as the Handel House Museum on 8 November 2001.
The Museum
The house has been restored to look as it did during Handel's 36-year occupancy from 1723 to 1759. A typical early 18th-century London terrace house, it comprises a basement, three main storeys and an attic, and Handel was the first occupant. The attic was later converted into a fourth full floor. The ground floor is a shop not associated with the Museum, and the upper floors are leased to a charity called the Handel House Trust, and have been open to the public since 8 November 2001.The interiors have been restored to the somewhat spartan style of the Georgian era, using mostly architectural elements from elsewhere, since, apart from the staircase, few of the original interior features survived.
The Handel House Collection Trust has assembled a collection of Handel memorabilia, including the Byrne Collection of several hundred items, which was acquired in 1998.
History of 25 Brook Street
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." 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, and by the end of his life Handel possessed over 80 paintings and prints, including works by Watteau, Teniers and Poussin.
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, a transcript of which is 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 façade 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 storeys of the property since 2000.