Handel (3 page)

Any preconceptions of this kind on Dr Händel's part were to be altered by the outcome of a significant journey to the ducal court at Weissenfels, made when the boy was about ten years old. Mainwaring, whose circumstantial detail in this case makes the story credible, tells us that Georg Friedrich, who wanted to see his half-brother Karl, the Duke's valet, was refused a place in the coach as the doctor ‘thought one of his age a very improper companion when he was going to the court of a Prince, and to attend the duties of his profession'. With typical tenacity young Handel waited until his father's carriage left the house in the Kleine Klausstrasse, then followed it on foot. The vehicle was travelling slowly enough for the boy to catch up with it a little way from the town. The old man, impressed, gave in and the two set off together.

Weissenfels lies a few miles east of Halle and is now a thriving industrial centre. For sixty years, from 1680 until the mid-eighteenth century, it provided a capital for the duchy originally created by the Elector of Saxony for his second son August in 1656. Under August's son Johann Adolf I the court was a rich and cultivated establishment, dignified in later years by such figures as the palace chaplain Erdmann Neumeister, celebrated as a religious poet whose works provided Bach with cantata texts, and Johann Philipp Krieger, who had brought his skills with him from Halle when the Prussians took over.

The Duke apparently heard Handel playing the organ in the palace chapel and ‘something there was in the manner of playing which drew his attention so strongly' that he asked who was at the instrument. Karl Händel replied that it was his little half-brother. We can rule out Mainwaring's tale that the Duke lectured the old doctor on what a crime it was ‘against the public and posterity, to rob the world of such a rising Genius' but his influence as a music-loving patron was surely active in persuading Georg Friedrich's father to let him follow where his inclination led. He may, of course, have envisaged training the lad as a house musician. At any rate the boy was able to return to Halle with a gift of money from Duke Johann Adolf and a sense that princely encouragement was behind him.

He was even more fortunate in that his home town contained one of the finest musical teachers of the day. Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow was born in Leipzig in 1663, appropriately in the Stadtpfeiffergasslein (Town Piper Lane), where his father lived as a violinist. He had succeeded the talented Samuel Ebart as organist of the Halle Marienkirche in the year before Handel's birth, probably owing to the influence of his grandfather, head of the city waits. He was a noted composer and performer; among the many testimonies to his skill, the most charming is Martin Fuhrmann's comment in
Die an der Kirche Gottes gebaute Satans-Capelle:
‘In my time, when in 1692 I was studying in Halle, Zachow was flourishing, whom I heard on Sundays with a true hunger and thirst. If I had to travel there, and there were no bridge over the Saale, and I could not reach the city, then truly I would swim across the river like Leander for his Hero, even to hear famous pupils of his such as Herr Kirchhoff.'

Gottfried Kirchhoff, Zachow's successor at the Marienkirche, was one of several eminent students, and Fuhrmann's praise clearly suggests the enduring effect on them of excellent teaching by an original musical mind. This is borne out by Zachow's surviving compositions, all of them, bar a trio sonata and a handful of keyboard pieces, religious works designed for Lutheran church services. From him Handel learned not only a great deal about the line and shape of an aria, about strong, adventurous bass lines and solid choral writing, but also about those delicacies of instrumental colouring, which he later perfected in his own style. Zachow, like his famous pupil, seldom falls easily into a traditional mould. The musical language of his cantatas, with their formal anticipations of Bach,
is a strikingly personal blend of German with Italian. A commonplace book belonging to Handel while under Zachow's tutelage, which has since, alas, disappeared, is known to have contained examples culled from works by Kerll, Froberger and Krieger whose compositional styles bore a markedly international stamp.

What sort of lessons were actually offered? Zachow seems to have begun by giving Handel a solid grounding in harmony, and then exposing him to various contemporary styles by providing scores for analysis and discussion from his own extensive library. In addition the boy learned to work fugue subjects and copy out music, as well as taking his master's place now and then as organist and composer. Whether he ‘actually did compose a service every week for three years successively' is doubtful. At any rate not one of these 156 services survives, and no single work can positively be ascribed to this period apart from a number of keyboard pieces. The early setting for soprano and strings of Psalm 112,
Laudate Pueri
, traditionally dated to the Halle years, may well have been written soon after Handel's arrival in Italy and reveals little of future promise. The vocal lines feature inelegant, overlong melismatic passages and awkward word setting and the piece ends with a fifty-three-bar Amen. Some typical Handelian features are there, however, in the opening string figures and the germ of a melody which later became ‘O had I Jubal's lyre' in
Joshua
some forty years later.

Handel's progress as student and composer was to be halted in 1697 by the death, on 17 February, of his father at the age of seventy-five. Late in the previous year Dr Händel had developed a fever and slowly sank under it, despite consultation with medical colleagues. The respected figure was given a dignified funeral, with an oration delivered in the family house by the distinguished pastor Johann Christian Olearius. Following contemporary custom, it was published alongside a clutch of mourning elegies, including a turgid sixty-eight-line effusion by Andreas Roth, ‘Pfarrer zu Grosskugel', a distinctly cheerful poem in tetrameters by a certain J. G., and, from the dead man's father-in-law Pastor Taust, an affecting dialogue between the ‘
selig Verstorbenen
' and the miserable mourners. ‘Ah sorrow, ah misery, how shall we begin?' they cry, to which the parting soul rejoins, ‘Be still, children, do not weep, I live in a thousand joys,' rounding off with an abrupt ‘
Nun, gute Nacht
'.

Of more immediate interest are the verses by the twelve-year-old Handel himself. Though these may well have been retouched by a kindly adult, there is no good reason for doubting Handel's authorship. This was an age of forward children – limited life expectancy could scarcely make it otherwise – and the idea of the composer as poet is no odder here than it is in the era of Wagner and Berlioz. We may note that the boy signs himself impressively ‘Georg Friedrich Händel, dedicated to the liberal arts'.

February was a significant month for him. Five years later, a week or so before his seventeenth birthday, he signed the register of Halle University. His chosen faculty is unknown and whether he actually pursued any studies at all is a mystery. Perhaps the gesture was made to please his family, who must in any case have been delighted when, on 13 March 1702, he was appointed to the prestigious post of organist of the Domkirche to succeed the unsatisfactory Johann Christoph Leporin. This cathedral church was Calvinist, but the elders seem not to have objected to the Lutheran appointment. The job was tenable initially for a single probationary year and the stipulations, besides requiring Handel to ‘perform such duties in a way that will seem to an upright organist suitable and fitting', and ‘to have due care for whatever might be needful to the support of beautiful harmony', also included keeping the instrument in good repair and leading ‘a Christian and edifying life'. He was granted a salary of fifty thalers a year in quarterly instalments and free lodgings.

Handel fulfilled the terms of this contract satisfactorily, as documents make plain, and might well have gone on to pursue a career similar to that of his direct contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach, serving as organist in some other cathedral city or as kapellmeister at one of the princely courts, and following the accepted pattern of professional life for a German musician. There is evidence, in any case, that during this period the organist, still in his teens, was starting to look about him. His reputation drew the ebullient and companionable Georg Philipp Telemann to Halle and the pair formed a friendship that only ended with Handel's death nearly sixty years later. Dutifully reading law at the university in nearby Leipzig, where Handel often visited him, Telemann was not going to let his formidable gifts as a musician lie fallow and had begun composing cantatas for the city's mayor. From there it was a short step to establishing a concert series and becoming musical director at the theatre.
Leipzig's musical establishment felt justifiably threatened. At its head was no less a figure than Johann Kuhnau, arguably the finest keyboard master in Germany at the time. This bitterest of Telemann's foes was a strong influence on both him and Handel, but though they looked to the older composer for guidance as to fugal writing and counterpoint, their melodic inspiration came less from him than from each other.

Kuhnau complained of young Leipzigers ‘running after operas' instead of coming to hear his church music. Enthusiasm for opera was just as strong in Berlin, where the Prussian Electress Sophie Charlotte had recently opened a little theatre with a lyric drama by her kapellmeister, the Italian musician Attilio Ariosti. A monk of the Servite order, he maintained a slightly precarious position as a Catholic at a Protestant court, depending on the Electress's patronage, but there was no doubt as to his professional skill. In 1702 he was joined in Berlin by a still more prestigious Italian master, Giovanni Maria Bononcini, whose short opera
Polifemo
was given its première that year.

Georg Händel held an honorary post as court physician to Sophie Charlotte's husband, Elector Friedrich. The doctor's musical son almost certainly visited Berlin, probably not in 1698, as Mainwaring's biography tells us, but soon after Bononcini's arrival. Perhaps he even heard
Polifemo
, whose eponymous hero is the very same ‘monster Polypheme' appearing in
Acis and Galatea
. This encounter with the newest sophistications of Italian operatic style was surely valuable for the young Handel, but both Ariosti and Bononcini were destined to play much more significant roles in his professional life nearly two decades later.

The Elector, who became ‘King in Prussia' in 1701, had his own ideas as to Handel's future. Friedrich's plan appears to have involved sending Handel to Italy, ‘where he might be formed under the best masters, and have opportunities of hearing and seeing all that was excellent in that kind'. Having completed his studies, the young man would then presumably be expected to return to Berlin and join the musicians at court. Some of Handel's friends seem to have urged this as a worthwhile career path, others ‘who better understood the temper and spirit of the court at Berlin' realized the potential dangers involved. If the King liked the finished product of his patronage, then Handel would be bound to his service for the foreseeable future.
If, on the other hand, the composer, for all his newly acquired Italian sophistication, were to displease his princely employer, a similar post at another court might be hard to secure. Handel had the good sense to make his excuses and decline Friedrich's offer. In the summer of 1703, once his contractual year as organist at the Domkirche was up, he set off instead for Hamburg.

The great port city was among Germany's most prosperous but its jealously guarded privileges as a free community were maintained against a background of constant bickering among the various groups and factions involved in its administration. Smart, rich and sybaritic, its citizens were noted as deep drinkers, a fact which must have appealed to Handel, always fond of his bottle. Joseph Addison, arriving more or less at the same time as the composer, wrote to Lord Winchelsea: ‘the great Business of the place is commerce and Drinking: as their chief commoditie, at least that which I am best acquainted with, is Rhenish wine. This they have in such prodigious Quantities that there is yet no sensible diminution of it tho Mr Perrot and myself have bin among 'em above a Week. The principal curiositie of ye town and what is more visited than any other I have met wth in my Travails is a great cellar filld with this kind of Liquor. It holds more Hogsheads than others can bottles and I believe is capable of receiving into it a whole Vintage of ye Rhine.'

Increasing wealth and international importance brought sophistication to Hamburg. A proof of this lay in the splendid opera house begun in 1677 in the Gänsemarkt, built to designs by Girolamo Sartorio, a Venetian working as principal architect to the ducal court in Hanover. Equipped with state-of-the-art machinery and a stage of sufficient depth to facilitate spectacular scenic effects, the house could seat an audience of almost 2,000 and ranked as the largest theatre in northern Europe at that time. Building took a year and the inaugural performance featured an opera by the Saxon composer Johann Theile based on the story of Adam and Eve.

The cosmopolitan background of the Theater am Gänsemarkt's patrons produced a uniquely eclectic style of opera. French taste introduced elements of ballet and spectacle, and the powerful impress of Venetian lyric theatre conditioned the handling of texts and subject matter. German composers and librettists took readily to the drift towards a species of extravagant theatrical realism,
which had characterized late seventeenth-century Venetian opera. In Morselli's
L'Incoronazione di Dario
, for example, a scene in a philosopher's study, showing ‘
Globi, libri, stromenti chimici, matematici, e da musica
', has the sage Niceno composing a cantata subsequently sung by Queen Statira. In Pietro Dolfin's libretto for Antonio Sartorio's
L'Adelaide
the heroine seeks refuge in a marble quarry, where the quarrymen sing as they work. One of the blast charges goes off prematurely, killing several of the workmen who are standing too close, and the foreman later threatens to rape Adelaide: Sartorio omitted the first of these episodes from his musical setting. The prime Venetian exponent of this trend was Matteo Noris, whose lyric dramas demand a technical expertise worthy of Bayreuth, and certainly imply that in the annals of opera there is nothing new under the sun. His
Marcello in Siracusa
features such coups as a ray of sunlight cast on the Roman ships by Archimedes's burning-glass and a dance by his scholars wielding geometrical instruments. In
Il Totila
, written for Giovanni Legrenzi, the heroine Marzia jumps off a balcony into the arms of the eponymous Ostrogoth – ‘
Cieli, dove mi trovo?
' ‘
Fra le braccia d'un Re
' – but the ultimate absurdity is plumbed in the presentation to Totila of a huge gilded elephant which, unbeknown to him, contains the general Belisarius and an entire army, all soon disgorged.