Birth and parentage—studies under Zachow at Halle—Hamburg—friendship and duel with Mattheson—Almira—departure for Italy.

The name of Handel suggests to most people the sound of music unsurpassed in massiveness and dignity, and the familiar portraits of the composer present us with a man whose external appearance was no less massive and dignified than his music. Countless anecdotes point him out to us as a well-known figure in the life of London during the reigns of Queen Anne and the first two Georges. He lies buried in Westminster Abbey. One would expect every detail of his life to be known and recorded, his every private thought to be revealed with the pellucid clarity of his immortal strains. It is not so; to assemble the bare facts of Handel's life is a problem which has baffled the most laborious of his biographers, and his inward personality is more mysterious than that of any other great musician of the last two centuries.

The Memoirs of the Life of the late George Frederic Handel, written by the Rev. John Mainwaring in 1760, a year after his death, is the first example of a whole book devoted to the biography of a musician. The author had never known Handel himself; he obtained his material chiefly from Handel's secretary, John Christopher Smith the younger. Mainwaring is our only authority for the story of Handel's early life. Many of his statements have been proved to be untrue, but there is undoubtedly a foundation of truth beneath most of them, however misleading either Smith's memory or Mainwaring's imagination may have been. The rest of our knowledge has to be built up from scattered documents of various kinds, helped out by the reminiscences of Dr. Burney and Sir John Hawkins. For the inner life of Mozart and Beethoven we can turn to copious letters and other personal writings; Handel's extant letters do not amount to more than about twenty in all, and it is only rarely that they throw much light on the workings of his mind.

The family of Handel belonged originally to Breslau. The name is found in various forms; it seems originally to have been HÄndeler signifying trader, but by the time the composer was born the spelling HÄndel had been adopted. This is the correct German form of his name; in Italy he wrote his name Hendel, in order to ensure its proper pronunciation, and in England he was known, for the same reason, as Handel. The Handels of Breslau had for several generations been coppersmiths. Valentine Handel, the composer's grandfather, born in 1582, migrated to Halle, where two of his sons followed the same trade. His third son, George, born 1622, became a barber-surgeon. At the age of twenty he married the widow of the barber to whom he had been apprenticed; she was twelve years older than he was. In 1682 she died, and George Handel, although sixty years of age, married a second wife within half a year. Her name was Dorothea Taust; her father, like most of his ancestors, was a clergyman. Her age was thirty-two. Her first child, born in 1684, died at birth; her second, born February 23, 1685, was baptised the following day with the name of George Frederic.

The town of Halle had originally belonged to the Dukes of Saxony, but after the Thirty Years' War it was assigned to the Elector of Brandenburg. George Frederic Handel was therefore born a Prussian. But Duke Augustus of Saxony was allowed to keep his court at the Moritzburg in Halle, and it was this prince who made George Handel his personal surgeon. After Duke Augustus's death in 1680, Halle was definitely transferred to Brandenburg, and the new Duke, Johann Adolf, took up his residence at Weissenfels, twenty-five miles to the south-west of Halle. At the time of George Frederic's birth, Halle had relapsed into being a quiet provincial town. The musical life of Germany in those days was chiefly centred in the numerous small courts, each of which did its best to imitate the magnificence of Louis XIV at Paris and Versailles. But the seventeenth century, although it produced very few musicians of outstanding greatness, was a century of restless musical activity throughout Europe, especially in the more private and domestic branches of the art. The Reformation had made music the vehicle of personal devotion, and the enormous output of a peculiarly intimate type of sacred music, both in Germany and in England, shows that there must have been a keen demand for it in Protestant home life.

George Handel, the surgeon, seems to have hated music. There is no evidence that either his wife or her sister, who shared their home after her father's death in 1685, was musically gifted, but the mere fact of their being the daughters of a Lutheran pastor makes it probable that they had had some education in the art. We may safely guess that the composer inherited his musical talents from the Taust family. He showed his inclination for music at a very early age, with such insistence indeed that his father forbade him to touch any musical instrument. There is a well-known story of his contriving to smuggle a clavichord into a garret without his father's knowledge in order to practise on it while the rest of the family were asleep, but for this tale Mainwaring is our only authority. It is very probable that old Handel was irritated by the sound of his son's early efforts and regarded music as a waste of time; his wife may perhaps have encouraged the child's obvious abilities, taking care that he made music only in some part of the house where he would not disturb his father.

At the age of seven he was sent to the Lutheran Grammar School, and he may very likely have had some instruction in singing while there. In any case there can be no doubt that he was taught more than the mere rudiments of music in childhood, however severe his father's opposition may have been. He was between seven and nine when his father took him to Weissenfels, where he was required to attend on the Duke. It is quite probable that the child may have been taken there several times, especially as a relative of his was in regular service in the Duke's establishment. One day he was allowed to play on the organ in the palace chapel; the Duke happened to hear him, made enquiries as to who the player was, and at once urged on the father the duty of having him properly trained for a musical career.

Old Handel remained obstinate; he was determined that his son should have a liberal education and become a lawyer. By his own efforts he had raised himself to a position of some distinction and affluence; it was only natural that he should wish his son to enter on life with better advantages than he himself had enjoyed. He at any rate followed the advice of the Duke so far as to place the boy under the musical tuition of Friedrich Zachow, the organist of the Lutheran church at Halle.

The next episode in George Frederic's career has considerably puzzled his biographers. Mainwaring asserts that in 1698 he went to Berlin, where he was presented to the Electress Sophia Charlotte and made the acquaintance of Ariosti and Giovanni Battista Buononcini, two famous Italian opera composers whom he was to encounter again, in London, many years later. But it is known that Ariosti did not arrive in Berlin until the spring of 1697, and Buononcini not until 1702. And as old Handel died in February 1697, his son cannot have been in Berlin later than about the end of 1696, if it is true (as Mainwaring says) that the Elector offered to send him to Italy, an offer which the father firmly refused to accept for him. If, on the other hand, Mainwaring is right in saying that young Handel went to Berlin with a view to obtaining a musical post there, it is hardly likely that he should have made the journey at ten years of age, and while his father was still living. It seems much more probable that if he ever did visit Berlin it was when he was of an age to form his own judgments as to his future career.

Three days before his seventeenth birthday he matriculated as a law student of the University of Halle, but music must have been the chief occupation of his time. The composer Telemann, four years his senior, spoke of him as being already a musician of importance at Halle when he first met him there, probably in 1700. In March 1702 he was appointed organist at the Cathedral, although he belonged to the Lutheran Church, whereas the Cathedral was Calvinist; considerable scandal had been caused by the intemperance of the Cathedral organist, one Leporin, who was finally dismissed. That Handel should have been given the post at so early an age points to his ability and trustworthiness of character; it also suggests that efficient organists were rare among the Calvinist musicians.

Mainwaring unjustly credited Zachow with Leporin's love of a cheerful glass, and other biographers have perhaps for this reason greatly underrated Zachow's musicianship. Zachow cannot indeed be classed as a great composer, but he was considerably more than merely a sound average teacher. For one thing, he possessed a large library of music. Handel was not only made to master the arts of counterpoint and fugue, but he was also set to study the works of other composers, and to train his sense of style by writing music in direct imitation of them. In those days there was no possibility of buying all sorts of music ready printed. Printing was expensive, and generally clumsy in execution as well; most music was copied by hand, and a musician who wished to acquire a library of music generally did so by borrowing it and copying it. Zachow employed Handel to copy music for him, and no doubt he copied a great deal for himself. Although the opportunities for hearing music would not be very liberal in a town like Halle, Handel, under Zachow, became a well-read musician as well as an accomplished one.

During the seventeenth century the chief contribution of Germany to the art of music was religious, just as the German hymns were her chief contribution to poetry. In Italy, on the other hand, sacred music was of minor importance as compared with the development of opera. But in all music Italy led the way, and German sacred music was constantly influenced by the Italians, with the result that Italian dramatic methods were often used by German composers of sacred music, not with any loss of seriousness and dignity to its character, but rather to the intenser expression of that deep personal religious feeling which characterised both the poetry and the music of the Protestant nations.

Zachow was well acquainted with the Italian masters, and his own Church music shows a vivid dramatic sense; it is easy to see how much Handel learned from him. But although Church cantatas and organ music may have sufficed for the majority of the innumerable worthy German musicians of those days, the form of music which excited the curiosity and interest of the livelier spirits was certainly opera. By 1700, opera had established itself all over Italy, supported mainly by the great princes, but at Venice maintained on a commercial basis by the citizens themselves since 1637. The first attempt at a German opera was made by Heinrich SchÜtz, at Torgau, ten years earlier. Vienna introduced Italian opera in 1631, and, generally speaking, the Catholic princes of Germany, who one after another followed the example of Vienna, preferred opera in Italian. Protestant Germany inclined more to opera in its own language, though towards the end of the century Italian gradually gained the upper hand at the more important courts. Native German opera owed its origin partly to the visit of the English comedians early in the century, and partly to the musical plays acted by school-boys; from the English "jigs" came the use of short popular songs, and from the school plays the tendency of the early German operas to be of a more or less sacred or edifying character.

Handel's friend, the composer Telemann, tells us that it was not unusual for students from the University of Leipzig to go to Berlin to hear the Italian opera, which had been established by the Electress Sophia Charlotte in 1700, and this suggests that Handel's visit to Berlin may have taken place in 1703 rather than in his childhood. But he certainly had opportunities for seeing operas nearer home. There had been many German operas performed at Halle itself during the twenty years before Handel's birth, and Duke Johann Adolf opened an opera-house at Weissenfels in 1685, in which Philipp Krieger produced German operas regularly for the next thirty years. There was thus every reason for young Handel's growing ambitious to become a composer for the stage, although we have no evidence of his having ever attempted dramatic composition until he left Halle in 1703.

The most important of all the north German opera-houses was that of Hamburg, where the opera did not depend on the patronage of a court, but was organised, as at Venice, as a public entertainment. Hamburg had attempted German opera as early as 1648, and it is interesting to note that the English composer William Brade was one of those who provided the music; but the real history of the Hamburg opera may be said to begin with the performance of Theile's Adam and Eve in the newly built theatre in the Goose-Market in 1678. When Handel arrived in Hamburg in the summer of 1703 the biblical operas had long come to an end, and the theatre was under the management of Reinhold Keiser.

Keiser was a musician of remarkable genius. His father was a disreputable organist, and his mother a young lady of noble family who had been hastily married at the age of sixteen. Born near Weissenfels in 1674, he had begun his operatic career at Brunswick at the age of eighteen; three years later he took over the direction of the opera at Hamburg, where he produced a large number of operas composed by himself. As a composer, Keiser had a singular fluency of melody in a style that hovers between those of Germany and Italy; had he been a man of more solid character he might have accomplished greater things. But he had inherited from his parents a love of pleasure and debauchery; extravagant in his private life, he was no less extravagant in his theatrical management, and was ready to provide his audiences with anything in the way of startling sensation. One of his most famous operas was on the subject of StÖrtebeker, a notorious highwayman (1704), in which murders were represented with the most disgusting realism.

Hamburg was the Venice of the north and, like Venice, a city of pleasure; but its pleasures were often of a coarse and licentious description. Life in Hamburg was probably not much unlike that of Restoration London; but though Keiser may well be set beside Purcell, Hamburg had no dramatists to compare with Congreve, hardly even with Shadwell. Jeremy Collier, however, was far outdone in vituperation by the puritan clergy who, not altogether without reason, castigated the immorality of the Hamburg stage.

Handel seems to have arrived in Hamburg in early summer of 1703, for we first hear of him there on July 2, when he met Johann Mattheson in the church of St. Mary Magdalen. It seems to have been a chance acquaintance, to judge from Mattheson's account; it stuck in Mattheson's memory for many years and he remembered especially the pastry-cook's boy who blew the organ for Handel and himself. Mattheson was four years older than Handel; he was one of those precociously gifted, versatile, attractive, and rather vain young men who are endowed with so many talents that they never achieve distinction in any branch of art. He is remembered now only by the literary work of his later life, in which he shows himself as a voluminous pedant and an embittered critic. He made friends with Handel on the spot, and took him under his own protection, providing him with almost daily free meals at his father's house. He evidently regarded him as a very simple and provincial young musician, a notable organist indeed, and a master of such learned devices as counterpoint and fugue, but a dull composer, turning out endless arias and cantatas with no sense of the fashionable Italian taste.

It was Mattheson, by his own account, who introduced Handel to the musical life of Hamburg. The opera was closed for the summer, and Keiser's celebrated winter concerts, at which the wealthy society of Hamburg listened to the most famous singers and regaled themselves with tokay, had not yet begun; but there was no lack of social distractions, in which music no doubt played its part. In August the two friends made a journey to Lubeck, to compete for the post of organist at the Marienkirche in succession to Dietrich Buxtehude, who was nearly seventy and ready to retire. But both Buxtehude and the town council insisted that the new organist should marry his predecessor's daughter, in order to save the town the necessity of providing for her; she was considerably older than the two youthful candidates, and they both withdrew in haste. Late in life Mattheson married the daughter of an English clergyman; Handel remained a bachelor to the end of his days.

It was no doubt through Mattheson that Handel, in the autumn, entered the opera band as a humble second violinist. He seems to have been of a very retiring and quiet disposition, although of a dry humour. Opera management at Hamburg was no less precarious than it was in London; Keiser could not afford the Italian singers patronised by the German princes, and his performances had often to be helped out by amateurs of all classes. On one occasion the harpsichord-player failed him; Handel took his place at short notice, and his musicianship was at once recognised. Unfortunately Mattheson, whose chronology is always rather uncertain, does not tell us when this occurred. In addition to his duties in the orchestra, Handel earned a living by teaching private pupils, and through Mattheson he was engaged by Mr. John Wyche, the English Envoy, as music-master to his small son Cyril.

Early in 1704 Mattheson went to Holland, where he had some success in organising concerts at Amsterdam, and was offered the post of organist at Haarlem. He seems to have had some idea of seeking his fortune in England; he spoke English well, and may have had useful connexions in England through Mr. John Wyche. But in March Handel wrote to him that the Hamburg opera could not get on without him, and to Hamburg he returned. It soon must have become clear to him that Handel was rapidly outgrowing any need of his condescending patronage. A Passion according to St. John, the words of which had been written by Postel, an opera-poet turned pietist, had been set to music by Handel, and performed on Good Friday with marked success. Mattheson arrived too late to hear it, but it is significant that twenty years later he published a scathing criticism of it, although it is a work of little importance in relation to Handel's complete career, and can seldom have been performed. A Passion oratorio by Keiser was produced at the same time, it may well have been that Handel's work, youthful and conventional as it is, was enough to arouse the jealousy of both Keiser and Mattheson.

Shortly after Easter, Keiser began the composition of a new opera, Almira, on a libretto by the local poet Feustking, but for some reason or other he found it necessary to call in Handel's assistance, and eventually left the whole work to Handel to compose. It was to be produced in the autumn. Handel seems to have consulted Mattheson over every detail of the opera; there exists a complete score in Mattheson's handwriting, with corrections and additions by Handel. Mattheson spent the summer enjoying a country holiday in Mecklenburg; Handel probably went on with his opera, at Hamburg. In October, just as the opera season was reopening, Mattheson contrived to get himself engaged by Sir Cyril Wych as tutor to his son; he also took over the boy's musical education, hinting that Handel was dismissed for neglect of his duties. In view of Handel's strictly honourable character it is difficult to believe that he was guilty of neglect, and we may naturally suppose him to have resented the loss of a lucrative appointment.

The first opera of the autumn was not Handel's Almira, but an opera by Mattheson, called Cleopatra. Mattheson, always eager to exhibit his versatility, sang the part of Antony himself, and, not content with that, came into the orchestra as soon as Antony had died on the stage and kept himself in view of the audience by conducting at the harpsichord. For several performances Handel made no objection and gave up his seat to Mattheson when the moment came, but on December 5, for some reason or other, he refused, to the surprise and indignation of the composer. German musicians in those days were a quarrelsome crew; at the court of Stuttgart the musicians were so much given to knocking each other on the head with their instruments, even in the august presence of His Serene Highness, that there was hardly one left undamaged. It was only to be expected that the friends of Handel and Mattheson should egg them on to fight a duel in the street; luckily Mattheson's sword broke on a button of Handel's coat, and the duel ended. On December 30 a town councillor effected a reconciliation; the rivals dined together at Mattheson's house and went on to the rehearsal of Almira, which was brought out on January 8, 1705, with Mattheson as the principal tenor.

Almira, the libretto of which was partly in German and partly in Italian, ran continuously for about twenty performances until February 25, when it was succeeded by Nero, another opera which Handel had hastily composed for the occasion. Nero, in which Mattheson sang the title part, was a failure. The music is lost, but the libretto survives, and that is enough to account for the collapse. The opera had three performances only. In the very same season Keiser re-set Nero to music himself, and brought it out under the title of Octavia; shortly afterwards he did the same with Almira, which was performed in August of the same year. Although Keiser's operas were no more successful than Handel's, and his extravagance and mismanagement forced him to leave Hamburg for three years in order to avoid imprisonment, it is evident that he had made Handel's position in the theatre impossible. Handel withdrew into private life and devoted himself to earning a living by teaching. Mattheson says that Handel remained in Hamburg until 1709, and that he still worked in the theatre, but the first of these statements is certainly untrue, and the second probably so. Mattheson himself left the theatre after the failure of Handel's Nero, and his friendship with Handel seems to have come to an end. About Handel's subsequent life in Hamburg we know nothing, until the theatre was taken over by one Saurbrey in the autumn of 1706. Saurbrey commissioned an opera from Handel, but, owing to the confusion in which Keiser had left the affairs of the theatre, it could not be brought out until January 1708, when it was found to be so long that it had to be divided into two operas, Florindo and Daphne, both of which were put on the stage successively. By that time Handel had left Hamburg for Italy; he evidently took little interest in the production of these works, neither of which has survived.

It was during the run of Almira, says Mainwaring, that Handel made the acquaintance of Prince Gian Gastone de' Medici, son of the Grand Duke Cosmo III of Tuscany. Mainwaring's date is wrong, for it is known that Gian Gastone at that time was in Bohemia with his wife, a German princess, to whom he had been married against his will. But it is also known that he was in Hamburg for a few months during the winter of 1703-04, and, if he met Handel at that time, the rest of Mainwaring's story becomes much more credible than subsequent biographers have been willing to admit. According to Mainwaring, Handel became almost an intimate friend of the Prince; they often discussed music together, and the Prince lamented that Handel was unacquainted with the music and musical life of Italy. "Handel confessed that he could see nothing in Italian music which answered the high character His Highness had given it. On the contrary, he thought it so very indifferent, that the singers, he said, must be angels to recommend it." Gian Gastone urged him to come to Italy and hear for himself, intimating "that if he chose to return with him, no conveniences should be wanting." Handel declined the invitation, but resolved to go to Italy as soon as he could do so "on his own bottom."

Gian Gastone was a spendthrift and a profligate; his moral reputation was of the worst, and he was chronically in debt. That, however, would not make it unthinkable that after a glass of wine he should invite Handel to come to Italy with him, but Handel may well have known enough about the Prince even then to reply to the proposal with tactful evasiveness. From what Mattheson says of Handel on his first arrival in Hamburg, it is quite likely that he was contemptuous of Italian opera music, and it is equally likely that after the success of Almira his views on Italian opera underwent a change. It is obvious that Hamburg had no further chances to offer him, and the attraction of Italy was at that time so vivid to all young German musicians that not one of them would have refused an opportunity of making the journey.

The date of Handel's departure from Hamburg is unknown, nor have we the slightest information as to his whereabouts until we hear of him at Rome in January 1707. Chrysander's statement that he spent Christmas 1706 with his mother at Halle is manifestly untrue. Mattheson says that he travelled to Rome with a Herr von Binitz, but nothing is known of this gentleman. His most natural route into Italy would be by the Brenner, the historic road of all German pilgrims.

Handel may well have been glad to leave Hamburg, but Hamburg did not forget him. He is mentioned in a theatrical manifesto of 1708 as being already "beloved and celebrated in Italy"; Barthold Feind, one of the Hamburg librettists, who in 1715 translated Handel's Rinaldo, called him "the incomparable Handel, the Orpheus of our time"; and from 1715 to 1734 almost all of Handel's London operas were represented on the Hamburg stage.