HANDEL.
The time may come when Music will be universally recognised as the highest branch of Art; as the most powerful divulger of the intellect’s profoundest conceptions and noblest aspirations; as the truest interpreter of the heart’s loves and hates, joys and woes; as the purest, least sensual, disperser of mortal care and sorrow; as the all-glorious tongue in which refined, good, and happy beings can most perfectly utter their thoughts and emotions. Perhaps this cannot be till the realm of the physical world be more fully subdued by man. The human faculties have hitherto been, necessarily, too much occupied with the struggle for existence, for security against want and protection from the elements, with the invention of better and swifter modes of locomotion and of transmission of thought, to advance to a general apprehension of the superior nature of Music. “Practical men”—men fitted for the discharge of the world’s present duties by the manifestation of the readiest and fullest capacity for meeting its present wants—are, naturally and justly, those whom the world most highly values in its current state of civilisation.
This necessary preference of the practical to the ideal may lead many, who cannot spare a thought from the every-day concerns of the world, to deem hastily that the stern and energetic quality of Perseverance cannot be fully developed in the character of a devotee to Music. But, dismissing the greater question just hinted at, it may be replied that it is the evident tendency of man to form the lightest pleasures of the mind, as well as his gravest discoveries, into what is called “science;” and the lives of numerous musicians show that vast powers of application have been continuously devoted to the elaboration of the rules of harmony, while others have employed their genius as ardently in the creation of melody. These creations, when the symbols are learnt in which they are written, the mind, by its refined exorcism, can enable the voice, or the hand of the instrumental performer, to summon into renewed existence to the end of time. Before symbols were invented and rules constructed, the wealth of Music must necessarily have been restricted to a few simple airs such as the memory could retain and easily reproduce. Perseverance—Perseverance—has guided and sinewed men’s love of the beautiful and powerful in melody and harmony, until, from the simple utterance of a few notes of feeling, rudely conveyed from sire to son by renewed utterance, Music has grown up into a science, dignified and adorned by profound theorists, like Albrechtsberger, and by sublime creative geniuses, such as the majestic Handel and sweetest Haydn and universal Mozart and sublime Beethoven.
For their successful encounter of the great “battle of life,” a hasty thinker would also judge that the extreme susceptibility of musicians must unfit them; extreme susceptibility, which is, perhaps, more peculiarly their inheritance than it is that even of poets. Yet the records of the lives of musical men prove, equally with the biographies of artists, authors, and linguists, that true genius, whatever may be the object of its high devotion, is unsubduable by calamity and opposition. The young inquirer will find ample proof of this in various biographies: our limits demand that we confine ourselves to one musician, as an exemplar of the grand attribute of Perseverance.
GEORGE FREDERICK HANDEL,
The first of the four highest names in Music, was the son of a physician of Halle, in Lower Saxony, and was designed by his father for the study of the civil law. The child’s early attachment to music—for he could play well on the old instrument called a clavichord before he was seven years old—was, therefore, witnessed by his parent with great displeasure. Unable to resist the dictates of his nature, the boy used to climb up into a lonely garret, shut himself up, and practise, chiefly when the family were asleep. He attached himself so diligently to the practice of his clavichord, that it enabled him, without ever having received the slightest instruction, to become an expert performer on the harpsichord. It was at this early age that the resolution of young Handel was manifested in the singular incident often told of his childhood. His father set out in a chaise to go and visit a relative who was valet-de-chambre to the Duke of Saxe-Weisenfels, but refused to admit the boy as a partner in his journey. After the carriage, however, the boy ran, kept closely behind it for some miles, unconquerable in his determination to proceed, and was at last taken into the chaise by his father. When arrived, it was impossible to keep him from the harpsichords in the duke’s palace; and, in the chapel, he contrived to get into the organ-loft, and began to play with such skill on an instrument he had never before touched, that the duke, overhearing him, was surprised, asked who he was, and then used every argument to induce the father to make the child a musician, and promised to patronise him.
Overcome by the reasonings of this influential personage, the physician gave up the thought of thwarting his child’s disposition: and, at their return to Halle, placed young Handel under the tuition of Zackau, the organist of the cathedral. The young “giant”—a designation afterwards so significantly bestowed upon him by Pope—grew up so rapidly into mastery of the instrument, that he was soon able to conduct the music of the cathedral in the organist’s absence; and, at nine years old, composed church services both for voices and instruments. At fourteen he excelled his master; and his father resolved to send him, for higher instruction, to a musical friend who was a professor at Berlin. The opera then flourished in that city more highly than in any other in Germany; the king marked the precocious genius of the young Saxon, and offered to send him into Italy for still more advantageous study: but his father, who was now seventy years old, would not consent to his leaving his “fatherland.”