Join us at the Foundling Museum for the continuation of our second annual A Queer Georgian Social Season as we take you back to a time when queers were more visible and accepted than you thought.
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) – one of the noted philanthropists of the eighteenth century – began supporting the Foundling Hospital (Britain’s first home for abandoned and illegitimate babies) to raise funds for the completion of its Chapel in the form of a fundraising benefit concert in May 1749. This concert was so successful that it marked the start of a long-standing association with the Hospital in the form of annual performances of The Messiah for the rest of Handel's life – he would also go on to make the Hospital a beneficiary of his will (he left “a fair copy of the Score and all the Parts” of The Messiah, which enabled the charity to continue to put on benefit performances after Handel’s death).
Handel’s understanding of abandoned individuals can be felt beyond his philanthropic work with the Foundling Hospital: more specifically in his operas – where musical representations of a wide array of betrayed, abandoned, and abused individuals can be readily projected into our contemporary epoch. The present-day community that is perhaps best-placed to appreciate the absolute modernity of the emotional and visual dimensions Handel’s music for such abandoned characters inspires is the queer community – not only because of Handel’s supposed queerness (and the abandonment he experienced when his family practically disowned him for having the temerity to walk away from the legal career chosen by them for him), but more poignantly because the present-day queer community is all too used to being abandoned by one’s family, friends, and society at large simply for daring to live authentically.
An emotional and musical journey not to be missed, this Salon Concert & Social at the Foundling Museum will feature drag king Richard Energy in the guise of Handel, Les Bougies Baroques conducted from the harpsichord by Ian Peter Bugeja & led from the violin by Sam Kennedy, as well as an impressive line-up of opera singers.
All you are required to do is leave your preconceptions at the door, fetch a libation from the bar, and come as yourself – with or without bells on!
The Queer Georgian Social Season is conceived & curated by Ian Peter Bugeja & Mark Francis-Vasey.
'Les Bougies Baroques'
Conductor-harpsichordist | Ian Peter Bugeja
Leader | Sam Kennedy
Drag King | Richard Energy