Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/61

Rh and if the ladies of the Court had the misfortune to talk during the performance he was not satisfied with cursing and swearing, but addressed them furiously by name. "Chut, chut!" the Princess would say on these occasions, with her usual indulgence: "Händel is spiteful!"

Spiteful he was not. "He was rough and peremptory," says Burney, "but entirely without malevolence. There was, in his most violent fits of anger, a touch of originality which, together with his bad English, made them absolutely comical. Like Lully and Gluck, he had the gift of command; and like them he combined an irascible violence that overcame all opposition with a witty good-nature which, though wounding to vanity, had the power of healing the wounds which it had caused. "At his rehearsals he was an arbitrary person; but his remarks and even his reprimands were full of an extremely droll humour." At the time when the opera in London was a field of battle between the supporters of the Faustina and those of the Cuzzoni, and when the two prime donne seized one another by the hair in the middle of a performance, patronised by the Princess of Wales, to the roars of the house, a farce by Colley Gibber, who dramatised this historic bout of fisticuffs, represented Händel as the only person who remained cool in the midst of the uproar. "To my thinking" he said "one should leave them to fight it out in peace. If you want to make an end of it throw oil on the fire. When they are tired their fury will abate of itself." And in order that the battle should end the sooner he expedited it with great blows on the kettledrum. 1em