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Among the objects on display is a letter from Handel to his librettist, Charles Jennens, about Messiah, and Mozart’s hand-written arrangement of a Handel fugue. There are also portraits and caricatures of the great man, including on his bedroom a magisterial bust after Roubiliac. The music room was the centre of Handel’s life here. Invited to a rehearsal of Alcina with his favourite soprano Anna Maria Strada, his close friend and society intellectual Mary Pendarves declared: “Whilst Mr Handel was playing his part,I could not help thinking him a necromancer in the midst of his own enchantments”. The music room still hosts concerts – not cramming in the 40 or 50 Handel used to invite, but 25 or so – and when NADFAS Review visited, the harpsichordist Laurence Cummings and fl autist Rachel Brown were rehearsing. Laurence was playing a new acquisition for the museum, a double manual harpsichord made in 1754 by the London maker Jacob Kirkman whose instruments Handel is known to have played. It was a gift in 2015 in memory of Ellie Warburg of the Warburg banking family, who died in 2014. The idea of the museum started with the musicologist Stanley Sadie who, with his wife Julie Anne, set up the Handel House Trust in the early 1990s to acquire the house and convert it. Its restoration to the way it would have looked in Georgian times was painstaking. Archive evidence was delved into; an inventory (now in the British Library) of the very sparse contents taken after Handel’s death, with scrapings of the original paint was examined so that the house could be returned to the way Handel would have known it. Now it has been joined by memories of Hendrix. Unlike Handel’s house next door, his tiny fl at is crammed with the personal tropes of its occupants, some bought at John Lewis, but mostly from junk shops and street stalls (including several rugs, his particular enthusiasm). “With Kathy’s help we have had to acquire everything to recreate it,” says Sarah Bardwell, former Director of the museum, who began the project. “We used some of the sources, like Portobello Road, that Kathy and Jimi did, but we were also able to haunt the websites that they could not”. Many items had to be remade to exact specifi cations, and even the brilliant white woodchip wallpaper has had to be recreated. The crimson bedspread on the divan, the carver chair, the curtains and the shawl that doubled as a bed canopy – even the unfolding fi rescape outside the window – have all been specially made. On the bed is a replica of Hendrix’s acoustic guitar, bought for $25 in New York, which was his principal song-writing instrument on which he created his famous version of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower.The fl at had a bathroom and kitchen above the main room, and a second room used to store clothes and guitars – now with a display of the covers of some of Hendrix’s vast record collection. While other rock stars of the late 60s lived in luxurious seclusion in St John’s Wood, Cheyne Walk and Weybridge, Hendrix was enjoying domestic bliss here, at the heart of the world’s trendiest city. He called it the fi rst real home of his own. Hendrix’s stay here was all too brief. He and Kathy broke up in March 1969 and he moved out that same month. Hendrix died after a barbiturate overdose in September 1970, aged 27. But today he has his own blue plaque at 23 Brook Street, next to George Frideric Handel’s at No 25. ■Left: A double manual harpsichord by Bruce Kennedy in the Handel music roomBelow: Rachel Brown and Laurence CummingsImages: © Handel House Trust; Hendrix portrait © Barrie Wentzell; Simon Tait.VISITOR INFORMATIONHandel & Hendrix in LondonAddress: 25 Brook Street, London W1K 4HB www.handelhendrix.orgOpen: 11am–6pm Mon–Sat; 12pm–6pm Sun; last admission at 5pmAdmission: adult £10, child £5Information for groups: Groups can book tours of Handel House or the Hendrix fl at, and can include a visit to nearby St George’s Church, where Handel played the organ. Exclusive live music recitals in Handel’s performance room are also possible. Call 020 7399 1953 for details.Facilities: Shop, regular concerts, disabled parking on Brooks Mews, level access to wheelchair users (lift access is in Lancashire Court)40 NADFAS REVIEW / SUMMER 2016 www.nadfas.org.ukHANDEL AND HENDRIX