Bits and Bobs: Shrove Tuesday: Handel & Hendrix Museum

Tuesday, February 25, 2020:

Today is Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday. In the UK Shrove Tuesday is also known as Pancake Tuesday, and is an occasion to prepare and eat pancakes. A traditional English pancake is thin like a crepe and is meant to be eaten right away. It can be garnished with lemon or sugar or more indulgently mantled with Grand Marnier or Bourbon. Eddie and I, however, opted to observe with doughnuts! Crosstown Doughnuts is a scratch bakery; they make all their own jams, glazes, fillings, etc. Eddie enjoyed a sea salt caramel banana cream and I relished a rhubarb, raspberry & ginger.

Today Eddie took me to a museum - actually two museums in one - that made for an awesome "experience." It was the Handel & Hendrix on Brook Street in Mayfair.

George Friderick Handel wrote his first opera at the age of 18. He made London his home in 1712 and was the first occupant of 25 Brook Street which he rented from 1723 until his death in 1759. He composed many of his most celebrated works in this home during the Baroque era, including his famed oratory Messiah. Handel's Messiah was premiered in Dublin in 1742, at a concert where women were asked not to wear hoop skirts and men to keep their swords at home, so as to make room for as many as people as possible. Handel died in this house at the age of 74.

Final page from the Messiah

The room in which the Messiah was composed

Malcolm, a volunteer at Handel House, plays the harpsichord

Some two hundred years later in 1968, the American rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix moved into an apartment at 23 Brook Street, adjacent to the Handel House. Handel's blue plaque was already on the building next door; Hendrix, out of curiosity, went to a record store on nearby Oxford Street and purchased an album of Handel's Messiah. Hendrix said, "God's honest truth, I haven't heard much of the fella's stuff but I dig a bit of Bach now and again."

Jimi Hendrix became a superstar in London. Sadly, in 1970 at the age of 27, he died there. It was just five days short of the four-year anniversary of his arrival. Curiously, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse all died at the age of 27 as well.