Handel's Harpsichord?
2024-07-16 by Peter Bavington
Any object that has links to a well-known personality is bound to be of special interest. One such case is the double-manual Ruckers harpsichord belonging to King Charles III (BMO-1628), which is on long-term loan to the National Trust, and is kept with the other keyboard instruments of the Benton Fletcher collection at Fenton House, London. A persistent tradition links this instrument with the composer George Frederic Handel; but did it really belong to him?
It was discovered in a derelict condition in 1883 in a storeroom at Windsor Castle, a Royal residence some 25 miles west of London, along with some old sedan chairs. From then on, its history is known: it has been restored several times since its discovery, and the history of its various eighteenth-century enlargements and alterations has been established.
The idea that it had belonged to Handel came originally from A. J. Hipkins , who announced its discovery in a letter to The Athenæum in September 1883. Hipkins assumed that it was the ‘large harpsichord’, mentioned in Handel’s will, which was left to his amanuensis Christopher Smith, along with a house organ, music books and £500 sterling. Smith, he said, presented it to King George III in gratitude for the granting of a pension.
For many years this account was widely accepted: for example, when Henry Tull restored the harpsichord in 1938 for Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the late Queen Elizabeth II), he displayed it in his music room at Ealing with a label unequivocally declaring it to be ‘Handel’s harpsichord’ .
More recently, doubts began to be expressed. Several problems with Hipkins’s account were noticed: firstly, he does not distinguish between Christopher Smith (1683–1763) and his son John Christopher Smith (1712–95). Both of these men had been friends and assistants of the composer in his blindness and old age, but it was the father who inherited the ‘large harpsichord’. On his death in 1763, it could have been inherited by his son, but it is not specifically mentioned in Christopher Smith’s will.
The younger Smith may have presented the harpsichord to George III, but the details of this are unclear and come from a possibly unreliable secondary source (the anonymous Anecdotes of George Frederick Handel and John Christopher Smith, published in London in 1799). And there are several other claimants to the title of ‘Handel’s Ruckers’, notably one now in the Victoria and Albert Museum (BMO-1573) and one in the Morris Steinert collection at Yale University (BMO-1563).
Such was the level of skepticism that until recently the BMO record roundly declared ‘the persistent legend that this harpsichord at one time belonged to Handel is without any firm foundation’.
The pendulum has swung, and it now seems that it probably did belong to Handel after all. Why this sudden change; what has made it possible? The answer is digitisation of the British Library's extensive collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers, so that they can easily be searched online for specific words or phrases, reducing a task which would have taken days or even months before to a matter of an hour or two.
Peter Holman has made use of this wonderful new resource, and presented his findings in two articles in the periodical Early Music in 2021. He has found several reports of King George III playing a harpsichord at Windsor, where he was living in retirement because of his mental illness (so memorably portrayed in Alan Bennet’s play The Madness of George III).
His son, Prince George, was appointed Prince Regent in 1811, taking over the King’s duties as sovereign. A report in the Ipswich Journal in January that year headed ‘A letter from Windsor’, stated that ‘the harpsichord on which his Majesty plays, formerly belonged to the great Handel, and is supposed to have been manufactured at Antwerp in the year 1612’. It was said to be in the king’s sitting room in the Blenheim Tower. Another report in the Examiner, also in 1811, mentioned that the King used ‘to shew it to his musical friends with much pleasure, and explain to them whom it belonged to, and that the keys were worn away by HANDEL’s fingers’.
This detail – the excessive wear on the keys – tends to confirm the link with Handel. Some 35 years earlier, it had been mentioned in Sir John Hawkins’s General History of the Science and Practice of Music (published 1776): Handel, he said, ‘had a favourite Rucker harpsichord, the keys whereof, by incessant practice, were hollowed like the bowl of a spoon’.
So the link between Handel, King George, and the instrument discovered at Windsor in 1883 now seems fairly secure. Yet doubts remain. Hipkins reports that the harpsichord when found did not have the heavily worn keys he was expecting to see: ‘Are the keys scooped out […] by the composer’s fingers? Alas, no! Like the one in South Kensington [BMO-1573], it has two modern sets.’ Why and when were these new keys installed? Could a subsequent royal owner have commissioned them? George, descending into his final madness, would hardly have been in a position to do so.
How is it that a very similar Ruckers harpsichord was sold at Christie’s on 10 May 1819 as part of the effects of Queen Charlotte, and immediately bought by the Prince Regent and brought back into the Royal household? Is this the same harpsichord, or another one?
If only harpsichords could talk, as well as sing, all these puzzles could be resolved. As it is, we try to keep abreast of the latest knowledge in the ‘Provenance and Episodes’ section of each record in BMO.