Handel, Hendrix & Halloween
By Estefanía Pérez
If these walls could speak they’d probably be singing. Within them lived two of the most influential musicians in history: George Frideric Handel and Jimi Hendrix. Separated by genres and centuries yet united at 25 Brook Street. Coincidence? Fate? Whatever brought them to London is the same thing that brought a crowd to the museum last Friday night: a penchant for music. Well, and a Halloween party.
A mysterious melody emanated from the first floor. I spotted a group of old ladies already climbing up the stairs, giggling and whispering like teenagers. Behind me a man dressed as a crow was smiling at the skulls on the walls, tapping the wooden rail with his fingers. Two 17th century ghosts cast a spell on all present. The man sang, the woman played the harpsichord, and together they made the clock reverse, as if we’d been invited to a private interpretation of Total Eclipse from the composer’s Samson. The two ghosts moved on to the next room, followed by the applause of their audience, to read some poetry. It was a fragment from The Grave by Robert Blair: “Sudden he starts! and hears, or thinks he hears, the sound of something purring at his heels.” Handel’s light eyes looked enthused from his portrait on the wall.
I left the poetry behind as I walked upstairs, to the place where Handel died in 1759. However, it wasn’t him who I found haunting his bedroom, but the ghosts of two opera divas, who looked angrily at each other before Handel’s bed. One, all dressed in black and with a lace ribbon covering her eyes, held the end of the other’s necklace, while the other woman, dressed in white, had her hands wrapped in her attacker’s long skirt. In 1726, the opera singer Faustina Bordoni started working with Handel, something that Francesca Cuzzoni, who had been singing for the composer for four years, did not like at all, for the newcomer was younger and more beautiful. A rivalry began, and, apparently, it was fierce and intense enough to persist in their afterlife.
“This is a life drawing, or rather death drawing, session,” Molly from Art Macabre explained. Art Macabre salons introduced the concept of “death drawing” as a response to the average — and boring — life drawing lessons. Jason Attfield, another member of the team, says: “There is beauty in all this macabre, and it is not often captured, especially in life drawing.”
Under the dim — and almost cosy — lights, the different faces, old and young, uncovered and hidden behind makeup or masks, looked similar, as if their character faded once they stepped inside the room. I pointed this out to Jon, who smiled and said that’s the best part of death drawing as well as people coming together to bring their own subjectivity to what they’re seeing. “With photography, you’re capturing what the lenses sees, but with a person’s eye and their own interpretation you get to see many different versions of the same image.”
I followed Voodoo Child upstairs, abandoning Handel’s world to enter Hendrix’s. Vinyls, newspapers, cigarettes, his hat, a little box decorated with seashells next to the bed, rugs and cushions on the floor… one almost expected to see Jimi sitting cross-legged on the bed, jamming on his guitar. “We didn’t want a museum with things behind glass or a rope. We wanted people to be able to come in and get the feel.” says Sharron Day, a volunteer at the museum, who also collaborated with the recreation of Hendrix’s flat. “We wanted to make it look like it did back in the day,” she explains. “Luckily for us, the sixties isn’t that far away.” Friends of Jimi, his ex-girlfriend Kathy, the waiter who worked at the restaurant downstairs… They all came with their memories, with their own pieces of a puzzle that seemed lost in time and put it back together.
It wasn’t until I was sitting on a rug at the feet of Jimi Hendrix’s bed that I really understood what Sharron meant by “get the feel”. A black haired woman started to sing, and by the end of the first song, the room was packed and people gathered at the door, hungry for more music. The black haired woman’s name was Emma Tricca. She had known Tim Rose very well, and when she was asked to perform at Handel and Hendrix, she felt like “it was the right thing to do”. The effect the performance had had on the guests was still visible, for there were still people inside who seemed like they would never leave, like they had chosen to remain in the 1960s forever. I asked Emma if she had always been a fan of Hendrix. The way she moved her head back made it look like she was trying to remember an old friend. “The first time I heard Jimi’s version of All Along the Watchtower…” she paused and laughed, “some magic happened that I can’t explain.” Was that magic what we experienced in there? “Absolutely! And I think everybody felt it.”
