Handel’s business sense

Wednesday, 15th April 2009

It’s not often that a business correspondent looks to a musician for advice on investing in the stock market, but Radio Four’s Peter Day turned up on Handel Week and gave us an unusual take on the great baroque composer. Liquid Assets (Sunday night’s feature on Radio Three, produced by Paul Frankl) revealed that Handel was not just an extraordinarily prolific composer, he was also a very canny financial operator, even surviving one of the worst stock market crashes of all time, the South Sea Bubble.

The German musician arrived in London in 1710, aged just 21, and almost immediately began investing his earnings in the new, post-Restoration joint stock companies (the Bank of England, too, had only just been established in 1694). There was lots of talk from Day about buying up bad debt and selling it on, much of which was a bit beyond me, but I did manage to grasp the fact that Handel started buying South Sea shares in 1716 and with superb foresight got out before the market crashed in 1720. Amazingly, though, by 1723 he had started buying up South Sea stocks again, as Day discovered while looking through the ancient ledgers in the vaults of the Bank of England. (Perhaps Brown and Darling should take a look at Handel’s investment strategy before forecasting when our own crash might end.)

Handel was never just a musician, he was also an impresario, staging his own operas, importing singers from France and Italy, paying for the orchestra, the special effects (dragons breathing fire, gods flying down from the heavens) and the opera house staff. The singers alone cost him £6,400 in 1721 (multiply that by about 85 and you’ll get some idea of what that means in today’s money). He crafted his operas around what he could afford (using a limited number of principals to reduce costs), and what he could afford depended on how successful he was at playing the market.

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