George Frideric Handel was a binge eater and problem drinker whose gargantuan appetites resulted in lead poisoning that eventually killed him, according to a study.

By the time of his death 250 years ago this month, aged 74, the composer of Messiah had for 20 years been fighting severe health problems, including blindness, gout, bouts of paralysis and confused speech.

According to David Hunter, music librarian at the University of Texas and author of more than 60 articles on Handel, these ailments were all linked to lead poisoning brought on by his notoriously heavy consumption of rich foods and alcohol.

Surprisingly little is known about Handel’s private life but evidence from portraits and contemporary descriptions supports the theory that he began to suffer from lead poisoning in 1737, when he temporarily lost the use of his right hand, an incident previously attributed to a stroke.

Times Archive, 1949: Mysterious Handel

Even if we think we know Handel the composer, we still find Handel the man as elusive as Shakespeare

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• Handel House Museum

In search of a cure, he travelled to Aachen, where he was immersed up to his chin in hot spring water.

“People said that he made a miraculous recovery and that was what got me thinking,” Dr Hunter said yesterday. “It’s exactly the way that they treated lead poisoning at the time.”

Handel continued to have attacks and recoveries until, on the evening of April 13, 1759, he announced that he would no longer receive guests as he had “done with the world”. He died the following morning at the house in Brook Street, Mayfair, where he had lived for 36 years. The building in London is now the Handel House Museum and Dr Hunter’s theory is explained in the catalogue to its forthcoming exhibition Handel Reveal’d .

A small number of doctors were just beginning to become aware of the dangers of lead poisoning during Handel’s lifetime but their researches were restricted to working men who were overexposed to the metal, such as plumbers, roofers and cider-makers (who often used lead to line their presses).

The risk to the wealthy was not yet recognised but lead contaminated their wine, beer, cider, rum, gin, water and food, and Handel was more exposed than most. Although he wrote some of the most magnificent Baroque music and was rewarded handsomely with a court pension, his gluttony disgusted those who knew him.

Accounts from the time speak of his “inordinate extravagant Hunger”, and the year after Handel died John Mainwaring, his first biographer, accused him of “excessive indulgence in this lowest of gratifications”.

Dr Hunter believes that “Handel had an eating disorder and was probably a binge drinker, too”.

His relationship with food was certainly obsessive. On one occasion he invited the artist Joseph Goupy to dine with him but warned him that only plain fare was available.

After dinner Handel absented himself from the table and sometime later Goupy found him in a back room tucking into “such delicacies as he had lamented his inability to afford his friend”. A furious Goupy responded with a vicious cartoon of Handel as a “charming brute” playing an organ festooned with game birds and hams.

Handel’s eating and drinking habits may also have altered his musical trajectory. After the 1737 episode Handel abandoned opera, whose 50-performance seasons were exhausting to rehearse and conduct, for the oratorio.

His later works were also darker and more meditative, which Dr Hunter attributes to his worsening health.

The final note

Henry Purcell The baroque composer died suddenly at the age of 36, one theory being that he caught a chill after being locked out by his wife

Charles-Valentin Alkan It was revealed 90 years after the 19th-century French composer’s death that he was not killed by a falling bookcase, reaching for the Talmud, as thought, but perished under a heavy coat rack

Ernest Chausson The 19th-century French Romantic composer lost control of his bicycle on his estate, careered into a brick wall and was killed instantly

Source: Times archive

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