Binge-eating poisoned Handel

Photo / Gerald Coke Handel

The invitation that Handel offered to his friend Joseph Goupy was double-edged. "You are welcome to dine with me," he said, "but only plain food is available."

Having eaten, Handel excused himself from the dinner table, leaving Goupy alone. Time passed and Goupy wondered what had happened to his host. He went to look for him and saw him in the back parlour stuffing himself with "such delicacies as he had lamented his inability to afford his friend".

Goupy, a painter and set-designer, left in a fury and set to work to wreak his revenge. The result was a caricature of Handel, entitled The Charming Brute, which showed the composer with a pig's snout seated at the organ on a barrel of wine, a brace of fowl hanging from the pipes and further supplies stacked behind him.

David Hunter, a Handel specialist and curator at the Fine Arts Library of the University of Texas in Houston, is more sympathetic. George Frideric Handel was, he says, not a moral reprobate but the victim of a compulsion to eat. That in turn resulted in chronic lead poisoning, which influenced the course of his musical development.

Says Hunter: "The evidence suggests he suffered from what we would now call a binge-eating disorder."

An inevitable consequence was the ingestion of large quantities of lead. Wine was a particular risk. Vintners who wished to import wine faced the problem of keeping it in good condition when barrels could not be relied on to be airtight. To stop the wine turning to vinegar they sometimes added lead shot.

Lead also contaminated beer, cider, gin, food, water and cosmetics, including the white powder used under wigs.

The symptoms of lead poisoning were those which Handel is reported to have suffered: stomach colic, pain, creeping paralysis, confusion and eventually blindness. The toxin also affects mood and may have accounted for Handel's famous ill temper when working with other musicians.

In 1737, suffering with a paralysed right hand, Handel sought treatment in the spa town of Aix la Chapelles, now known as Aachen. Several months of taking the waters, bathing and resting worked their magic. His hand was restored, enabling him to play the harpsichord again, and write. It was typical of lead poisoning, the effects of which last only as long as exposure to the toxin.

Hunter believes this experience had a lasting effect. "It was partly as a result of the paralysis he suffered and the subsequent cure that he moved more into writing oratorios than operas. His increasing infirmity, his experience of major pain and his sensitivity to his own mortality made him more interested in writing about suffering and personal stories than about gods, monarchs and heroes ... Musically it is evident, too, in his greater use of the minor key."

His recovery did not last and there were to be many subsequent visits to Aix each time the symptoms of poisoning overwhelmed him.

On the evening before he died, on April 14, 1759, he announced he was "done with the world". It is apparent that, 250 years later, the world has not done with him.-

- INDEPENDENT