Handel's London – British musicians and London concert life

Abstract

When Handel arrived in London in the last weeks of 1710, Henry Purcell had been dead for just fifteen years. His younger brother Daniel, though still active as a professional organist, was no longer a productive composer, and much the same is true of the long-lived William Turner (1651–1740), who, with John Blow (d. 1708), had been the most distinguished of Purcell's colleagues and contemporaries in the Chapel Royal. Likewise John Eccles, the leading English theatrical composer at the turn of the century, and official court composer from 1700 until his death in 1735, had by this time retired from the hurly-burly of life in the city and gone to live in Hampton Wick where, according to Hawkins, he spent most of his time fishing. As for Jeremiah Clarke, one of the more impressive creative talents of the next generation, he had, seemingly for love, put a pistol to his head in late November 1707. Of those native composers still left and active on the London musical scene, much the most gifted were John Weldon (1676–1736) and William Croft (1678–1727), both of whom Handel must surely have encountered quite early on in his first visit. A former organist of New College, Oxford, Weldon moved in 1701 to London where, as a rank outsider, he immediately succeeded in winning first prize (over the heads of both Eccles and Daniel Purcell, who came second and third respectively) in a celebrated competition for a setting of Congreve's masque The Judgment of Paris . In 1708 he succeeded Blow as one of the two organists of the Chapel Royal, and not long after he was also appointed second composer for the Chapel, at which point he seems more or less to have dried up.