Questioning Handel’s links to the slave trade
SIR – You report (May 23) that the Royal Academy of Music is considering the deacquisition of instruments, manuscripts, sculpture and portraiture related to George Frideric Handel “due to his investment in the slave-trading Royal African Company in the 1720s”.
Such a statement on Handel’s investment is misleading. Handel’s accounts with the Royal African Company were “pass-through” accounts used as a mechanism for payment. He “owned” five shares of Royal African Company stock for two weeks in May 1720 and one additional share for four weeks in summer 1720.
These shares, I have argued, were payments for the composition of Radamisto. He sold them to obtain his fee, and avoided investing any of his own money in this company.
All of Handel’s investment accounts from 1720 to 1732 are pass-through accounts. His longterm account in South Sea Annuities (1723-1732) contains, I have argued, his salary from the Royal Academy of Music (the opera company) as “Master of the Orchester”. He received exactly £700 every year from 1725 to 1732 (or the closest the Academy could come to that figure) and sold these shares quickly, leaving the account empty for months at a time and once for more than a year.
Handel never made money while he was composing operas and never had money to invest during those years.
Of course, though Handel did not invest in the slave-trading Royal African Company, he was supported by patrons who did (like the Duke of Chandos). But this is true of 18thcentury British and American culture in general, including not only music, but also large art collections, great libraries, and historical buildings (such as, in the United States, the White House). This needs to be reckoned with, but not by pointing the finger without having the facts.
Professor Emeritus Ellen T Harris Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States