The art, music, and philanthropy of eighteenth-century London were beautifully recreated and dramatically linked in the drama-documentary Messiah at the Foundling Hospital, presented by social historian Amanda Vickery and music critic and presenter Tom Service.
The programme explored the financial challenges, the moral prejudices, and the ultimate social recognition of two ambitious and controversial projects in the 1740s: Thomas Coram’s establishment of the London Foundling Hospital, and George Frideric Handel’s composition of his celebrated oratorio, Messiah, which was performed at the chapel of the hospital on May 1st, 1750.
This performance was recreated during the programme by the Gabrieli Consort and Players with Trinity Boys’ Choir whose songs powerfully introduced and concluded the action in the intimate and communal setting of the chapel. The musical extracts embellishing the narration were occasionally less effective, and perhaps more of an interruption, with the exception of the cleverly positioned ‘He was despised’ acting as the chorus to Handel’s abasement and deteriorating health condition after the first performance of his Messiah in Covent Garden.
The programme told the interweaving stories of Coram and Handel. The struggle and determination of Thomas Coram to secure royal support for his mission to build a hospital for abandoned babies in London were vividly painted by Vickery, who unveiled the hardships and humiliation faced by single mothers forced to give up their new-born babes and the devastating infant mortality rates in eighteenth-century London.
Examining Coram’s notebook of aristocratic supporters and portraits of him and his first sponsor, Lady Somerset, and transporting us from the Foundling Museum to Petworth House, Vickery convincingly demonstrated the appeal Coram’s charity would have for an aristocratic teenage mother. After its establishment in 1742, the hospital’s policy of anonymity for mothers who gave up their children attracted large and unsustainable numbers, resulting in vexing financial troubles and still appalling survival rates for the infants.
The narrative of Handel began with the profitable career he enjoyed by feeding the English audience’s demand for Italian opera by producing many extravagant productions up until the early 1730s.
From the stunning simplicity of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, Service traced the change in musical tastes of English society which led Handel to invent a new form, the oratorio, a sacred drama in English. The result of experimenting with such a new genre was Messiah, completed in just 24 days in 1743, and offering, as Service explained, a unique blend of the sensual with the spiritual and a widely accessible music form in the audience’s native language. The beauty of the work, however, was initially obscured by its moral ramifications when performed in London: the staging of sacred drama in the morally dubious stage of a playhouse was deemed a profanity and was denounced by the London elite, leading Handel and Messiah to seclusion and obscurity respectively.
Having each reached such bleak climax, the two storylines merged and the pieces finally began to fall into place with the arrival of William Hogarth in the scene. Hogarth was responsible for turning the hospital into an art gallery, by donating paintings (including Coram’s portrait closely studied by Vickery), by inviting his artistic followers to contribute to the exhibition, and by persuading his social circle to appreciate the art on show while donating to the hospital.
The discussion of the logo designed by Hogarth for the hospital, with the plain inscription ‘Help’ in English, highlighted the design’s immediacy. The Foundling Hospital became a fashionable venue for showcasing artistic talent while raising funds for the preservation of its charitable cause. Handel’s decision to perform a benefit concert of Messiah at the hospital’s chapel to raise money for the chapel’s completion proved immensely successful, confirming the hospital as a place where art met charity and re-launching his oratorio as a wonderful piece of worship.
With the exception of some repetitive and excessive hand gestures, the delivery, the interviews with experts, and the locations and records examined contributed to a tight and well-presented dramatic documentary. The emotional highlight for me was not Handel’s music, but Vickery’s examination of the hospital’s records of admission, where several pages in the records had a piece of fabric attached to each entry as a token of hope in case the mother was ever in position to reclaim her child. One of those tokens was a hazelnut shell, powerfully capturing in its simplicity the poverty and desperation of a mother who had to abandon her child. (For more on these tokens, see the Criticks review of Fate, Hope and Charity, a 2013 exhibition at the museum.)
Furthermore, highlighting art and its role in philanthropy, the programme allowed for stimulating connections between eighteenth-century moral and fashion codes, and it introduced new ways of thinking about space, society, and performance. Moving notionally and physically from the streets of London to opera houses, from the commercial stage to the chapel, and from the hospital gates to its art gallery, Messiah at the Foundling Hospital captured the diversity of performative spaces and their significance in shaping social conscience.
Messiah at the Foundling Hospital was first broadcast on BBC 2 on April 19th 2014.