George Frideric Handel

by Herbert F. Peyser

Keiser, though a person of unstable character and extreme presumptuousness, had indisputable genius. He was not yet 30 when Handel came to Hamburg and under him that city experienced its golden age of opera. To be sure, the weakest feature of the Hamburg Opera was the singing. For a long time the institution had no professional singers. The roles were taken by students, shoemakers, tailors, fruiterers “and girls of little talent and less virtue,” while ordinarily artisans “found it more convenient to take female parts.” A gifted Kapellmeister named Cousser, who had been a pupil of Lully in Paris, introduced important reforms and when Handel in 1703 arrived the moment was, in truth, a psychological one. “He was rich in power and strong in will,” wrote the 22-year-old Johann Mattheson, the first acquaintance he was to make in Hamburg. Rolland pictures Handel as having “an ample forehead, a vigorous mouth, a full chin and a head covered with a biretta” (rather after the manner of Wagner, of whom throughout his life Handel reminds one in some amazing traits of character and genius).

Under Keiser the adventurous newcomer soon found employment as a second violin in the opera orchestra. His particular intimate was Mattheson, a musician of many gifts and uncommon versatility, who united in himself literary talents, a critical flair and a highly volatile temperament. It was he who helped Handel find pupils and who guided him into the town’s important musical circles. So that before long Handel had access to the organ lofts of Hamburg’s churches and opportunities to compose works for ecclesiastical purposes. Mattheson, incidentally, was a linguist and spoke perfect English; and it was through him that Handel was to enter for the first time into negotiations with what was to become his second country.

It was not very long, however, before the temperaments and idiosyncrasies of the two brought them into collision. Mattheson criticised the music of his friend, perhaps not entirely without reason, complained that Handel was not the most perfect of melodists and that he often wrote at too great length. If these opinions may have nettled the younger man they were not wholly lost on him, as time was to show. In the early months of their friendship Handel and Mattheson went to Lübeck to listen to the playing of the renowned Danish organist, Dietrich Buxtehude, whose celebrated Abendmusiken at the Marienkirche were likewise a magnet which drew Bach away from his duties in Arnstadt. The young men were deeply stirred by the music of the venerable master and Handel stored away in his incredibly retentive memory ideas which were to fertilize his imagination in later years. The two youths actually competed for the post of organist and might, like Bach, have won it but for the provision that whoever succeeded a retiring organist in Lübeck had to marry the daughter—or widow—of his predecessor. In this case the daughter seems to have been more than usually undesirable and, like their famous contemporary, the excursionists from Hamburg turned their backs on Lübeck.

Presently the friendship was imperiled once more, this time with what might have been disastrous results. In October, 1704, an opera, “Cleopatra” which Mattheson had composed to a text by a certain Friederick Feustkling, was produced with the composer in the part of Mark Antony and Handel at the harpsichord. The piece won a success, but on a later occasion Mattheson (Antony being “dead”) hastened into the orchestra and tried to push Handel from the instrument. A quarrel flared up immediately, which seems to have broken up the performance and have lasted half an hour. In the end the throng repaired to the Gänsemarkt, outside the theatre, the pair drew swords and set upon one another. Almost at once the combat came to an end, Mattheson’s blade splintering against a metal button on Handel’s coat. “The duel might have ended very badly for us both, if by God’s mercy my sword had not broken,” the young firebrand was to write later. The reconciliation was not immediate but when it did come about the two dined together, then betook themselves to the theatre to a rehearsal of Handel’s first opera, “Almira.” The representation, on January 8, 1705, was an instant triumph for its composer. The Hamburgers were completely captivated by the freshness and manifest genius which the score exhibited. Mattheson had sung the tenor part but does not seem to have been overjoyed by his friend’s spectacular success.

Handel was spurred by his fortunate operatic debut to embark on a second work. The fact that “Almira” had been sung partly in Italian, partly in German, did not keep it from obtaining twenty performances at the outset. Handel made the mistake of interrupting its run because he believed that in his next opera, “Nero, or Love Obtained Through Blood and Murder,” he had written something better. Mattheson sang the part of Nero; but the opera died after only three hearings. To aggravate matters the Keiser regime, now largely discredited, gave promise of putting an end to the Hamburg Opera; and Handel began to see himself enmeshed in the catastrophe of the wreck, a victim of elaborate jealousies and intrigues.

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In 1704 he had made the acquaintance of an Italian prince, Giovanni Gaston del Medici, an adventurer and a notorious profligate, whose father was Grand Duke of Tuscany. He was astonished that Handel seemed so little interested in Italian music, including some specimens he set before him. Handel insisted that “angels would be necessary to sing them if such stuff were to sound even agreeable.” At this time his ambition was to create a German style, independent of foreign influences. And for Keiser’s successor, Saurbrey, Handel turned out a new opera, “Florindo und Daphne”, which, like Wagner’s “Rienzi”, proved to be so long that the composer caused it to be given in two parts, “for fear”, he admitted, “that the music might tire the hearers.” Then, without taking leave of Mattheson or any of his friends, he accepted the prince’s invitation and went to Italy.

More or less mystery surrounds Handel’s arrival in Italy, though the time was not exactly propitious, what with the War of the Spanish Succession in full blast and funds in the wanderer’s pocket fairly low. But the composer did not tarry in Florence, his first stop, for long and early in 1707 went to Rome. From the operatic standpoint the Eternal City had nothing to interest him. Pope Innocent III ten years previously deciding that the opera house was immoral, had closed it; then when things promised to improve a bit for musicians a devastating earthquake renewed the religious qualms of the people, so that during the whole of Handel’s Italian sojourn, Rome had not a single performance of opera. However, there was abundant church and chamber music, which spurred him to emulation. To the Easter festivities of April, 1707, he contributed a “Dixit Dominus” and a few months later he wrote a “Laudate Pueri” and other Latin Psalms. But more important for his future were the excellent connections he made. Letters of recommendation from the Medici prince opened the Roman salons to him; and in such aristocratic circles his virtuosity on the keyboard seems to have gained him more fame than even his compositions. “The famous Saxon” (“Il Sassone famoso”), as Handel was called among the Romans even as early as the summer of 1707, was the wonder of musical soirees. And he was making inestimable artistic friendships. When we note that among those with whom he was brought into contact at one time or another in Rome included the Scarlattis, father and son; Arcangelo Corelli, Bernardo Pasquini, Benedetto Marcello—to mention only a few—we can judge to what grandly fertilizing inspirations Handel was exposed. We must mention in passing Cardinals Panfili and Ottoboni, as well as the Marquis Ruspoli, who yielded to nobody in his enthusiasm for Handel’s gifts. All these men belonged to a coterie called the “Arcadians”, which united “the nobility and the artists in a spiritual fraternity not only the most illustrious artists and aristocrats of Italy, but further included four Popes and members of foreign royalty.”

HANDEL AT THE TIME OF HIS FIRST VISIT TO ITALY.