A mystery surrounds the identity of Handel's librettist for the 1749 Covent Garden oratorios Solomon (hwv67) and Susanna (hwv66).Footnote 1 There are no known contemporary references to the texts’ authorship, whether in wordbooks (published by Tonson and Draper), the composer's autograph, printed scores (published by Walsh), press reports, financial records, correspondence or diaries. Indeed, there is very little contemporary comment of any sort relating to these two works, although we do know that they were profitable in so far as Handel had banked £300 after the first performance of Solomon and some £577 after performances of Susanna.Footnote 2
Winton Dean considered the subject of the anonymous librettos in his ground-breaking 1959 book Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques. Noting that Thomas Morell (1703–1784) and Newburgh Hamilton (1691–1761) had been considered possible candidates for the authorship of Solomon, Dean argued that neither was credible, not only on stylistic grounds but also for lack of primary sources to link them with the oratorio.Footnote 3 Now, with the discovery of a new documentary source, we are able to contemplate the possibility that Moses Mendes (c1690–1758), a wealthy London-based Jewish financier-poet, was the anonymous librettist for both Solomon and Susanna. The source is an irreverent three-verse poem about Mendes contained in the leather-bound notebook of his close friend John Ellis (1698–1791), a London scrivener who was several times Master of the Scriveners Company and himself a poet.Footnote 4
Ellis's notebook is now in the Library and Museum of Freemasonry in London, where it forms part of an extensive permanent loan of manuscript and printed items belonging to the Quatuor Coronati (QC) masonic lodge.Footnote 5 This lodge, which still exists, was founded in 1884 under the jurisdiction of the United Grand Lodge of England expressly to undertake research into the history of freemasonry. The interest of the notebook for the lodge was that it contains poetry and prose by several eighteenth-century literary figures who were freemasons: not only Mendes, who had held high office in the English Grand Lodge as the Grand Steward responsible for underwriting the London freemasons’ Grand Feast (annual festival) of 1738, but also men such as John Anstis, younger (1708–1754), Theophilus Cibber (1703–1758), Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707–1751), David Garrick (1717–1779), Lord John Hervey (1696–1743), Philip, Duke of Wharton (1698–1731) and Paul Whitehead (1710–1774).Footnote 6 Apart from these authors’ masonic membership, there is nothing else in the notebook's contents that connects it directly with freemasonry.Footnote 7 Some time prior to 1905 the notebook was presented to the QC lodge by John Percy Simpson (1861–1938), a London solicitor and a lodge member.Footnote 8 At the same time he wrote an article about Mendes and the notebook, identifying Ellis as the owner.Footnote 9 How the notebook had come into Simpson's possession is not known.
To judge by the various dated entries and the single hand throughout, Ellis filled up the notebook in the period c1743–1755. It contains a variety of items such as anecdotes, literary extracts, song lyrics, poems, classically inspired odes and humorous letters to the press. Often a piece's original author is identified, so we find items attributed not only to ‘Mr Mendes’ and those already mentioned, but also to John Byrom (1692–1763), Anthony Henley (died 1748), William Kenrick (1729/1730–1779), William King (1685–1763), James Merrick (1720–1769) and Richard Savage (1697/1698–1743). There are also a number of unattributed items that may be by Ellis himself, and one of these is the verse that suggests Mendes wrote Solomon (Figure 1). It reads:
‘My Dear Moses Mendes’. The Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London, shelfmark 1860 MEN, page 314. Used by permission
MOSES MENDES
Moses Mendes, shown in Figure 2, was a wealthy City stockjobber from a well-to-do Portuguese-Sephardic Jewish family based in London, with property in the City of London, at Mitcham in Surrey and at Old Buckenham in Norfolk.Footnote 20 His paternal grandfather was Dr Fernando Mendes (1647–1724), court physician to Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705). He accompanied Catherine to London upon her marriage to Charles II, and attended to Charles during his final illness.Footnote 21 The Mendes family shared marital ties across several generations with two other well-to-do London Jewish families of Iberian origin: the da Costas and the Mendes da Costas. For example, Moses Mendes's father, James, married Anne da Costa, while James's brother Anthony married Rebecca Mendes da Costa.Footnote 22Figure 3 provides a simplified genealogy of Moses's immediate family.Footnote 23
Moses Mendez Esq:r: From an Original Painting in the Possession of Mr Edwards, Beaufort Buildings, published in the European Magazine and London Review, October 1792. The Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London, 2015. Used by permission
The Mendes family: a simplified genealogy
As a young man, Mendes studied at St Mary Hall, Oxford, a university college headed by the high-Tory and Jacobite sympathizer William King, during most of whose tenure (1719–1763) the college itself had a reputation for Jacobitism.Footnote 24 Mendes, as a Jew, was barred from receiving any degree, since the award of English university degrees was then restricted to members of the Church of England. He was eventually awarded an Oxford MA on 19 June 1750;Footnote 25 the Oxford University register noted that he had recently converted to Christianity.Footnote 26
Although Mendes followed in his father's footsteps as a City financier, he had a passion for writing poetry, which came to preoccupy his later life, with some success. Among his many literary friends were the poet and publisher Robert Dodsley (1704–1764), the poets James Thomson (1700–1748) and Richard Savage, and the actor–manager David Garrick.Footnote 27 Mendes's literary reputation today, albeit faint, is based largely on his poetic imitations of Edmund Spenser, including The Blatant Beast; a Poem, in Spenser's Style (c1749, published posthumously in 1792), The Seasons, in imitation of Spenser (published anonymously in 1751) and The Squire of Dames. A Poem. In Spenser's Stile (published anonymously in 1755).Footnote 28
Mendes also wrote the librettos for four Drury Lane stage works performed between 1746 and 1751. The first of these was a short farce with songs called The Double Disappointment or the Fortune Hunters (1746, composer unknown), ‘whose stage Irishman Phelim O’Blunder brought the house down’.Footnote 29 It was the most profitable work Garrick inherited when he took over Drury Lane in 1747, and so it is no surprise that Garrick would turn to Mendes for similar works.Footnote 30 This resulted in three all-verse librettos for afterpieces called ‘musical entertainments’, effectively one-act English operas with bucolic settings. The first of these was The Chaplet (1749), with music by William Boyce. Its ‘deftly managed comedy’Footnote 31 dealt with the amorous intrigues of English shepherds and shepherdesses, and of swains and their lasses. The work was an immediate and long-running success, published in full score by Walsh, and was perhaps the most frequently performed afterpiece of the century, even reaching America.Footnote 32 Among its first cast were tenor John Beard (1716–1791) and soprano Catherine ‘Kitty’ Clive (1711–1785). The second musical entertainment was Robin Hood (1750), with music by Charles Burney (1726–1814), of which only three songs survive.Footnote 33 This too is a tale of an imagined England, and has a distinct love theme. Its first cast included bass Henry Reinhold (1690–1751) along with Beard and Clive.Footnote 34 Finally, The Shepherd's Lottery (1751), once again with Beard and Clive in leading roles, appears to have been an attempt to recreate the success of The Chaplet, with another score by Boyce (also published by Walsh) and a plot concerning the amorous adventures of English shepherds and swains. Although well received, and even performed under Boyce's direction at the Three Choirs Festival in 1754, The Shepherd's Lottery failed to achieve the same enduring popularity as The Chaplet, remaining in the Drury Lane repertoire for just three seasons.Footnote 35 All three works appeared without the author's name, since Mendes maintained a strict anonymity in print throughout his life, with the exception of his 1743 edition of Novellas exemplares by Miguel de Cervantes.Footnote 36 It was only after his death that his name came to be associated with the Drury Lane stage works and his poetry.
In 1751 we find Mendes listed as a Perpetual Governor of the lying-in hospital for married women, in Brownlow Street, Long Acre. He later lived in nearby King Street in Covent Garden,Footnote 37 in a house he leased until 1757.Footnote 38 On 14 July 1753 he married Ann Gabrielle Head (died 1771) of Rathbone Place,Footnote 39 second daughter of Sir Francis Head (c1693–1768), by whom he had two sons.Footnote 40 Mendes died at his country home, ‘St Andrews’ at Old Buckenham, Norfolk, on 4 February 1758 and was buried there. It was said in 1782 that ‘He was, what poets rarely are, extremely rich, being supposed to be at the time of his death . . . worth one hundred thousand pounds’.Footnote 41
JOHN ELLIS
John Ellis had some status in City life, being three times the Master of the Scriveners Company (1736, 1773 and 1784), and was a common councilman for Broad Street Ward in the heart of the City's financial district, where he lived.Footnote 42 Professionally Ellis, like Mendes, was a denizen of the Royal Exchange and surrounding streets, the traditional haunts of scriveners and stockjobbers. Also like Mendes, Ellis inhabited London literary circles. Dr Johnson knew Ellis well and remarked that the most literary conversation he ever enjoyed ‘was at the table of Jack Ellis, a money-scrivener behind the Royal Exchange, with whom I at one period used to dine generally once a week’.Footnote 43 Here Johnson refers to the informal Friday-night poetry society that Ellis hosted at the Cock Tavern, near the Royal Exchange, and to which Mendes belonged. In Ellis's notebook we find a poem about this club, written in eight light-hearted verses and called ‘A Song by Mr Mendes’. It is addressed to Ellis and was added to the notebook about 1755, to judge from adjacent dated material. In it Mendes praises those Friday night meetings at the Cock Tavern, while criticizing other nearby taverns – the Pope's Head, the King's Arms, the Black Swan and the Fountain. The ‘song’ begins and ends as follows:
The ‘My Dear Moses Mendes’ poem appears in the notebook just a few pages after ‘A Song by Mr Mendes’, and it gives the very clear impression that the entire collection of anecdotes, literary extracts, song lyrics, poems and poetical translations is representative of the literary fare shared by Ellis and his boon companions during their Friday-night gatherings. Ellis was probably the author of ‘My Dear Moses Mendes’, since he was clearly a very dear friend to Mendes (‘Of his poetical friends . . . Moses Mendes Esq. appears to have been the most intimate with him’),Footnote 45 and Ellis acted as a witness to Mendes's will.Footnote 46
In his own will of December 1788 Ellis bequeathed all his poetical works in print and manuscript, along with the copyright of them, to the bookseller John Sewell (died 1802), who traded at 32 Cornhill and published the European Magazine and London Review from 1782 to 1802; Sewell was also the executor of Ellis's will.Footnote 47 This explains the first publication by the European Magazine and London Review of some Mendes poems from the Ellis notebook, such as ‘To the Well Conceited Maister [sic] John Ellis’ in February 1792 to accompany a biography of Ellis.Footnote 48 A biography of Mendes himself, ‘Some Account of Moses Mendez Esq.’, appeared in the October 1792 issue.Footnote 49
THE HANDEL LIBRETTOS
The link explored here between Handel's Solomon and the works of Moses Mendes is strengthened by the extensive use in both of natural imagery. Ruth Smith reinforces this point with regard to the oratorio libretto when speaking of Solomon as ‘an English pastoral. The limpid brook, the shepherd, the hundred different flowers in the balmy, fertile pastures form an idyllic picture of the English countryside . . . an Arcadian version of the audience's own landscape.’Footnote 50 The Drury Lane librettos that Mendes created for Burney and Boyce in the years immediately following Solomon are also rich in natural imagery in bucolic English settings, and likewise deal with themes of love and virtue, albeit more light-heartedly. And Mendes made much of the English countryside and of nature generally in his poetic works, a preference remarked upon by John Percy Simpson: ‘Many of the most graceful and pleasing lines in the . . . poems of Mendez relate to the Thames, and the beauties of its scenery, particularly in the neighbourhood of Richmond and Ham . . . and descriptive of scenes on the Thames, from Richmond to Oxford.’Footnote 51 Dwight L. Durling subsequently called attention to Mendes's ‘genuine taste for nature and pleasure in observing the life of the country’.Footnote 52 A sense of this natural scene-setting is provided by the opening of Mendes's poem ‘To the Well Conceited Maister John Ellis’, urging Ellis to visit Mendes at Ham:Footnote 53
Winton Dean suggested that Solomon and Susanna were both the work of the same author, arriving at this conclusion after noticing strong stylistic similarities between the two librettos. He was particularly struck by their extensive use of natural imagery (with some images and phrases found in both librettos) and inclusion of the unusual rhyme scheme AAAB–CCCB.Footnote 54 Dean's position has subsequently been adopted by a number of Handel scholars.Footnote 55 If he is correct, then Mendes is possibly the librettist of both Solomon and Susanna. Following Dean's premise that distinctive nature references in Solomon and Susanna are key authorial traits, I have matched them in Table 1 against Mendes's three Drury Lane musical entertainments, these being closer to the oratorio librettos in form than Mendes's poetry.
Nature imagery in the librettos of Susanna, Solomon, The Chaplet, Robin Hood and The Shepherd's Lottery
CONCLUSION
The discovery of a contemporary poem identifying Moses Mendes as the author of the libretto for Handel's Solomon is intriguing. Because the notebook containing the poem is of the same period and from Mendes's own literary coterie, the claim of authorship is highly credible. And if Dean and his followers are correct that the regularly recurring use of natural imagery in both Solomon and Susanna indicates they shared the same author, then Mendes may have been responsible for both librettos. Certainly there is a strong congruence with regard to natural imagery in Mendes's three Drury Lane librettos and poetic output. But the discovery requires additional scrutiny: an expert literary analysis of Mendes's style and working method would prove most useful in pursuing Dean's statements about the oratorio librettos’ vocabulary, rhyme and metre, while a thoroughly researched biography of Mendes might move us closer to determining whether he and Handel could have worked together. Certainly the tantalizing appearance in Handel subscription lists of a Moses Mendes and various other members of the intermarried Mendes, da Costa and Mendes da Costa families suggests that the paths of the two men were not so very far apart.
