The Abbey of Westminster gets a statue

Readers: ATTENTION! As you know, my authorial name stands for the highest aspirations of our past’s culture and the stories that might be told about it/them. Whatever. All three or four of you who now know about what Will had to shake and Mike was angelic over must anticipate breathlessly that, drama and sculpture out of the way, I would turn to music. So, tongue where it ought to be (in my cheek), I offer the following account (more of which is true than you might imagine).

George, as he now styled himself (earlier, when it suited, he adopted the moniker Giorgio) had been named Georg (pronounced GAY-ORG) – and he was. From the moment the kid wanted to take up the flute, his dad knew.

A passing fancy, he thought in German. Initially alarmed at his son’s propensity with his young lips, he changed his tune. Where’s the harm? He’ll grow out of it on his way to the study of law.

Georg didn’t. Grow out of it, that is. No, he liked to blow and became rather good at it. Proved it to his sputtering teacher. Herr Zachow shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, his own dear old Dad, pied piper of Leipzig, blew many – I mean, a lot. Zachow thought it prudent (not that he was a prude) to teach Georg another orally-involved instrument, the oboe.

“To broaden your interests,” he told the kid using the local dialect, that of Halle where he held a church job and could access organs and the boys choir. I’ll toss in harpsichord lessons and get him at the organ. Do his fingers good. Gut, sehr gut. I might even finger his gut.

George, gut with fingers and mouth as well as on the organs, rapidly progressed. For fun, he hung out in the dressing room of the local Gymnasium where practiced as chance permitted. In between, he wrote.

Not schoolwork. Music. “I wrote like ze very debbil,” he said years later in his best English.

Reason was encouragement from an aristocrat no less, the Duke of Weissenfels, who thought he was cute as a button at nine, tootling his wooden flute and giggling like a girl when he was tickled, and from royalty (or so it has been claimed), some king nobody can identify.

Georg’s personal parts grew faster than his musical talent with sharpened feathers and ink. He job-hopped from organ to organ and popped in on lectures by recently-absconded-to-the-faculty- of-Halle’s-new-University from Leipzig and Erfurt two scholars accused of dire liberalism (read: overly solicitous interest in children). Thus, Georg “loved his companions” and took to sausages and drink.

Gay Hamburg drew George, especially its Opera, where all the best parts were sung by men with no balls but with dicks at the ready. Cross-dressers got huge sums back then. Our Georg craved experience in those circles and certainly got it. In no time his operas threatened singers who lacked the right sort of trained throats. An invitation from one of the de’ Medici swishes in Florence took him off for sunny Italy and its long tradition of castrating nubile boys.

To fit in, our Georg Friedrich Händel became Giorgio Federico Handelio. He carried on so extravagantly with a conclave of Cardinals (churcified men in red dresses who ran their own College) that, records say, “his Saxon grandeur” left them “thunderstruck.”

Giorgio had a big cazzo (dick).

And, it might be surmised, a big culo (butt).

Sniping for means to wedge his way into Italian opera, he was deflected from Alessandro Scarlatti, who was straight, to his same-age son, Domenico, whose habits were known to stray. “The two of you,” Alessandro said, “should travel our peninsula together, each looking out for the other’s needs. Here, here’s a purse. Go.”

Alessandro dusted off his palms, thinking,Good riddance. It was.

They bummed it for a while, got on each other’s nerves, and split. Domenico was off to Spain, where he changed his name to Domingo and ended up in the service of a nut-case king who used lathe-turned dowels as suppositories. Giorgio (née Georg, remember?) crossed waters to England, where he managed George correctly but misspelled his middle name as Friderick on documents and was stuck with it. What made him famous in London merits a story to itself.

After meeting spirited wordsmith and occasional tune-tinkerer, a chap who went under the moniker “John Gay” (What does that tell you?), George and his new friend cobbled together something for which there was no category, naming it Acis and Galatea.So bad was George’s handwriting (remember, he skipped most of his schooling), that typesetters for the new thing’s broadsides (think, posters) thought the title was Anus and Galatea.

It sold out. The British Bottom Cissers, a gossip group known simply as the BBC, bought all the tickets and scalped them to would-be members. There was talk.

Some of it reached King George, who wasn’t English and whose real name was Georg Ludwig von Brunswick-Lüneburg-Hanover. Delighted at prospects for some native tonguing – he hated English tonguing – he invited his new subject George for boat rides on the Thames.

Talk about eye-candy! Naked boys swam like fishes all around the royal barge hoping for coins to be tossed their way via monarchical magnanimity. Diving for pence showed boy butts to advantage – all slick and shiny.

“Händel,” said the King, noting his guest’s interest, “next time bring along some of your tunes and a band to play them. “I’ll pay and you can take your pick. We’ve got capacious nets in the back.”

Hence, the Royal Water Music.

A hit with several queens in London and their hangers-on, George (whose intimates, we hear, called him “Freddy”), wormed his way into a Haymarket assembly room known familiarly as The Queens’ Theatre. Wouldn’t you know?

(NB: Prissy scholars later relocated the apostrophe. The first of many cover-ups.)

Operas – even with entire gaggles of girlish male singers and butch-dike females elaborately garbed in lace and hoops, and doing unspeakable things at rehearsals and backstage at performances, sometimes onstage (such as pulling off each other’s wigs and tossing fake tits) – slumped. Bankruptury dented George’s Judith Lieber purse (the one with all the sequins) to the point of embarrassment. This one’s so tatty, but how can I afford a new one? he wondered, not for the first time.

A brutish blacksmith he met at a favored ale house, The Purple Pimpernel, seduced George into some naughtiness with ropes, chains, birches, a B-natural anvil, some nails, and a couple of runaway apprentices. George got a few stripes out of those experiences and, as a reward for stoicism, his own set of hand-forged iron cuffs. So grateful he was that he scratched out a tickler for the harpsichord called The Harmonious Blacksmith.

Musing in the afterglow, he thought “And with these stripes” might one day make a whip-snappy chorus line. It did, once he glommed onto a money-making scheme the Wops had come up with a while before. Oratorios.

No prodding stupid singers who want to stand still anyway, no sets or trappings or props like gilt thrones, no gaudy costumes – I’ll make a killing. Wait! What’ll I do to compensate the scalpers for their efforts to push tickets? I know. Organ concerti! –he remembered his Italian plural. I have to pay the band anyway. We can fill up our intermissions (the earwax-impacted Brits not yet confusing that word with the musical word intervals) and I can write off on my taxes that organ I want to buy. Tee-hee. I’ve always wanted another organ.

There was the problem of story line. Example: the one he abandoned after the Earl of Chandos introduced it to his guests at the private premiere, thusly: “Opening our program is The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba –and here comes Mr. Handel.” He had forgotten the revealing gown and ostrich fan – major embarrassment!

One piece, Largo, sold well. Slow, easy to play and sing. Must do more of those.

Mr. Jennings, a fellow member of the Hell-Fire Club, said, “I’ll divvy up a lurid libretto for you – say, about a largely unclad man who – although not an Etonian – never protests a whipping, lets himself get tied up with a smile on his face, a lance in his side, and some of your blacksmith’s nails in his hands and feet – and everybody’s glad about it.”

“Mein guter…I mean, my good man, what a capital idea!’ remarked Handel, adjusting his crotch while running figures under his powdered wig. Ah, money ahead!

To Jennings he declared in his blustery manner, “I’m thinking of D-Major and a choral jog called Halle-after my home town-lujah!

***

And now you know how our prosperity-fattened hero could afford several new Judith Lieber purses and gain access to thumb-suckers at an orphan’s home, the patron of which he unashamedly became.

When he croaked in 1759, the clean-up began. All that could be was swept under such carpets as there were in London in those days (and some in Dublin) or out onto sewage-wet streets – because everybody with sterling piles who had known him as “a jolly good fellow” wanted a statue in the Abbey. A great cover-up!

You just try to find anything about Freddy’s personal life. Nary a peep in letters, diaries, or newspapers. There were, but…. At least there’s that statue. Yep. Still there. Collecting dust.

Yrs truly,

F. Periwinkle Snapdragon, Esq.

Maida Vale

London 2b (or not)

***

My carefully potted/sotted accounts of Shakespeare and Michelangelo are here:

https://www.gaydemon.com/stories/Hard_work_upon_the_Thames_22712.html; and here:

https://www.gaydemon.com/stories/Florence_in_the_Day_22681.html.

Gaydemon kindly plays host to my series of crotch-throbbers beginning here:

https://www.gaydemon.com/stories/Cosmo_Lulu_22150.html; and here:

https://www.gaydemon.com/stories/Gerald_Jr_the_Judge_22151.html.