Handel Read online

  Doctor Händel was in any case noted for his good nature. ‘In common life’, noted the writer of a contemporary tribute to him, ‘he was friendly with everyone and modestly mild and good to the needy and to paupers.’ In all probability Georg Friedrich’s was a secure and happy childhood, as part of a prosperous, upwardly mobile family in a community that was far from being provincial or backward-looking. Set on a range of low hills descending to the River Saale, a tributary of the Elbe, in the rolling cornlands of the Saxon plain, Halle was girdled by ramparts and reached by paved causeways to avoid the frequent floods. Like other towns in central Germany (nearby Magdeburg offering the most gruesome example) it had borne the brunt of two sieges in the Thirty Years War. At the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the conflict in 1648, the city, till then belonging to the Bishops of Magdeburg, was to pass to Saxon control until the reigning elector’s death, when it was to be handed over to the neighbouring duchy of Brandenburg.

  The transfer of authority was a mixed blessing for Halle. When the Saxon court, now headed by Duke Johann Adolf, moved from the old Moritzburg castle on the hilltop to a newly built palace at Weissenfels, twenty miles to the south, nothing existed to take its place as a cultural focus in the city. The religious tolerance encouraged by its new overlord, the Prussian Elector Frederick William, ushered in a new prosperity however. He re-established the Jews in the city and welcomed the manifold technical skills of the Huguenots, expelled from France at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Huguenot expertise made Halle a centre for wig-making, glass-blowing and carpet-making. It was already well known for the production of woollen and silk stockings, exported to England, Poland and Russia, and for a type of dark beer known as ‘Puff’.

  As a focus of musical and literary activity it had become noted during the Renaissance and early Baroque periods. A troupe of English players visiting the town in 1611 had given performances of The Merchant of Venice and eleven years later Don Quixote received here its first German translation by Joachim Caesar. Musical life was always buoyant: there was a band of city waits and a tradition of fine organ building, embodied at its best in the great organ of the Domkirche, built at the end of the sixteenth century by Esaias and David Beck, and considered worthy of mention by Michael Praetorius in his ‘Syntagma Musicum’ (1619) where the specification is listed in detail. Among the city’s outstanding composers had been the prolific Samuel Scheidt, notable for his loyalty to his birthplace, despite the plagues and warfare of the 1630s. Later during the seventeenth century the Nuremberg-born composer Johann Philipp Krieger had arrived at the Moritzburg to write operas for the ducal court.

  Halle was not all sophistication and prosperity. Travellers noted with displeasure its curiously gloomy air, created by the dingy-looking house fronts along the narrow, tortuous streets. Little of importance, however, marked the life of the city and its surrounding villages during Handel’s early years. There was a plague of field mice in 1686 (it had been caterpillars five years previously), a miraculous hail formed of pine resin in 1690 ‘so great that it might be gathered up by handfuls’, and a deformed child was born to a woman whose husband was suspected of having committed sodomy with her. The severe weather conditions prevailing throughout Europe during the last decade of the century brought an especially hard winter in 1692 and from time to time the unpredictable Saale overflowed its banks and flooded the fields between the raised roadways.

  No record exists of Handel’s schooling, though it is obvious that he was well taught. Protestant Germany provided some of the finest education in contemporary Europe and Halle boasted two outstanding academies. One of these had been founded as a private establishment by August Hermann Francke, a member of the Lutheran group known as the Pietists, the influence of whose humane, broadly sympathetic view of erring mankind can be found throughout Handel’s work, colouring the mood of the late oratorios such as Susanna and Theodora, and traceable even in Messiah. The other was the public Stadtgymnasium, which Handel probably attended.

  The curriculum at the Gymnasium was more ambitious than any of the study programmes offered by similar schools in other countries during the late seventeenth century. While pupils in England or France concentrated almost exclusively on classical languages and mathematics, a Halle schoolboy of the 1690s could expect to learn, besides these subjects, geography, letter-writing, logic, ethics, oratory, the composition of German poetry and ‘elegant style’. Music lessons were given each day, and the boys occasionally performed serenades and musical plays.

  An education of this quality helps to explain Handel’s sophisticated response to the literary qualities of his libretti, both in selecting his texts and in their musical setting. He was undeniably gifted with a well-defined literary taste and an extraordinary knack of tongues. Friends in later life, treasuring his powers as a raconteur, found that they needed to know at least four or five languages in order to appreciate his stories. More than any other Baroque composer, he developed an acute sensitivity to the echo and association of words and images, and in studying his music we can begin also to gauge the powers of an amazingly complex memory. One of his chief London amusements was visiting picture auctions (he was the owner of two so-called Rembrandts) and his work is suffused with an intense visual awareness.

  If such traits as these were developed in the schoolroom, the young Handel is likely to have found out for himself the pleasures of the countryside which, as contemporary maps and prospects make clear, came right up to the foot of Halle’s city walls. Like many other eighteenth-century musicians he responded passionately to nature, seizing avidly on opportunities for portraying the sights and sounds of country life. His rural muse is not that of the townsman viewing the peasantry with a patronizing smile or indulging pastoral nostalgia, but the product of a true feeling for the natural world.

  His parents’ choice of a career for him is likely to have been dictated by considerations of a secure profession. Two of his half-brothers were doctors and his maternal uncles were clergymen, so it is not surprising that his father apparently designed Georg Friederich to be bred to the law. Several of his musical contemporaries and friends, such as Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Mattheson, were law students, and some, such as Johann Kuhnau, Bach’s predecessor as cantor of the Leipzig Thomaskirche, managed successfully to combine the two professions.

  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 eponymou
s 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.