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.
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.
It’s an extraordinary thought: one moment Handel was crafting ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people’ at his desk in Brook Street, and the next he was negotiating the purchase and sale of government bonds in the great hall of the Bank of England at Threadneedle Street, dealing with several deals of £1,500 and £1,600 in one visit. His house in Mayfair was not just a home. Handel also held rehearsals there, sold sheet music from his front room, and subscription tickets for his seasons at Covent Garden. When his operas stopped making enough money, he turned to oratorios, but continued to charge the same for tickets (half a guinea for a box seat, four shillings for the pit) even though his running costs were much reduced without need of those fiery dragons and flying gods.
Fittingly, Day played us out with the strains of ‘Where’er you walk’, which contains the lines ‘All things flourish where’er you turn your eyes’. When he died in 1759 Handel left something in the region of £2 million; and he had also raised about £1 million for the Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields, mostly from benefit performances of the Messiah.
Handel Week gave us a special edition of Private Passions made up solely of choice selections from his repertoire. Posy Simmonds, the cartoonist, takes comfort from the self-confidence in the music, the resolution of anxieties and uncertainties, the way that melancholy is never allowed to prevail. She chose a movement from his Concerto Grosso in B flat, because, she said, rather wonderfully, ‘for snorting optimism there’s none better’.
Handel is therefore an astute choice for the new Radio Three adverts on TV and, with his acute commercial instincts, he would almost certainly have approved. But if you’re fretting to know what the two discerning ladies on the ad are hooked in by, I can tell you it’s from one of his Italian Cantatas, ‘Delirio Amoroso’ (HWV 99).
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