Handel (2 page)

Most worthy sir, You have received from Herr Dr Wiesener a most humble request for payment of 100 thalers from the privy purse for the cure of Andreas Rudeluff, the knife swallower. Since I, as surgeon, have done my best in this two-year cure, and have brought out the swallowed knife from his stomach and body, with God's help and a careful hand, and thereby cured him completely, and have most humbly given His Highness the knife in its original form in a case, in your presence, I would therefore most humbly request His Highness to grant me the favour, as much as seems fit, to recompense me for my painstaking operation, in your position as highly esteemed patron. I shall thank you most humbly, and shall ask God, from the depths of my heart, to give you health and long life. I remain Your Excellency's most obedient servant, Georg Händel, medical practitioner.

The subject of the doctor's operation was a sixteen-year-old peasant boy from the village of Maschwitz, near the city of Halle in Upper Saxony. One day, while playing with his friends, he had swallowed a horn-handled knife, and his parents had taken him, after ineffectual doses of warm beer and cotton wool, to Wiesener and Händel, who then began their prolonged but ultimately successful treatment. The boy, who must have been remarkably tough, was slowly cured by the use of magnetic plasters, which drew the instrument out of the oesophagus into the throat. Finally, with the release of much ‘
überaus stinckende Materie
' the knife was pulled out and young Andreas, we are told, rejoiced and praised God.
A rather touching close to the whole episode is provided by the fact that he was impressed enough by his doctors to become a surgeon himself, and lived till a ripe old age.

Georg Händel was one of the most renowned doctors in the Germany of his time. His parents, the blacksmith Valtin (or Valentin) Händel and Anna Beichling, had moved to Halle from Breslau in Silesia (now the Polish city of Wrocław) during the early stages of the Thirty Years War, in search of a religious climate more favourable to their devout Protestantism. Valtin's business prospered and he became a member of Halle's town council. Georg, his third son, born in 1622, was apprenticed to a surgeon, gaining his first medical experience as a
Feldscher
, or military sawbones, in one of the Saxon regiments then on campaign. Study at Hamburg and Lübeck under the famous physician Andreas Konigen was followed by a spell as a ship's barber on a merchant vessel trading to Portugal.

Valtin Händel died in 1636 during one of the frequent plague epidemics following in the wake of the various armies, Catholic or Protestant, as the war continued its dreary and inconclusive course. Halle was by now under the control of Swedish forces led by King Gustavus Adolphus. Returning from his travels in 1642, young Georg Händel set up as a surgeon, earning local fame for mending the broken arm of Elector August I of Saxony, one of the foremost Protestant champions. The delighted Elector recommended him to the three princes of Anhalt and the neighbouring Count Stollberg. Soon he was appointed physician at the courts of Brandenburg and Weissenfels, and became official doctor to the village of Giebichenstein on the outskirts of Halle. In the city itself, at the Zum gelben Hirsch (The Yellow Hart) next to his house in the Kleine Klausstrasse, he was granted a licence to sell local and foreign wines.

A prosperous and gifted young doctor could have had no trouble in looking for a wife. Händel, following the custom of the day, chose within his own profession and married – ‘through priestly copulation', according to the quaint expression used by the preacher of his funeral sermon – Frau Anna Oettinger, widow of the surgeon to whom he had been apprenticed. Medicine remained a family business: of Georg and Anna Händel's six children, two of the daughters married doctors and the two sons who survived childhood followed their father's calling. It would have surprised nobody in Halle that, on Anna's death in 1682, the elderly surgeon should forthwith have contemplated a second marriage.
Disparity in age was unimportant in seventeenth-century wedlock, and in any case we have little record of the feelings of thirty-one-year-old Dorothea Taust as she prepared for priestly coupling with a man of sixty and became stepmother to a grown-up family.

The Tausts, like the Händels, had been refugees from the Habsburg empire ‘for love of the pure evangelical truth', and Dorothea's father was now the pastor of Giebichenstein and Crollwitz, villages just outside Halle. His daughter was pious, cultivated and intelligent. ‘She always took pains to ensure that as she grew older she also grew in goodness,' the preacher of her funeral sermon later noted, ‘therefore when her father became aware that his child had been gifted with an alert mind and a good memory, far superior to many of her sex, he not only allowed her access to a private teacher, but also, as far as the duties of his office allowed, he helped her to study'. Dorothea was the object of a good many proposals before the doctor's, but had rejected them all through an intense loyalty to her parents, which kept her at the parsonage even when a fever epidemic carried off a brother and sister. Doubtless it was during this period that Georg Händel met her. Some persuasion and a little private prayer seem to have brought her round to the idea of marrying him and on St George's Day 1683, Pastor Taust conducted the ceremony himself, in the church of St Bartolomaeus at Giebichenstein.

Four children were born to the Händels (it was later calculated that the old man could lay claim to thirty grandchildren and great-grandchildren). Of the two daughters Johanna Christiana died in 1709 when barely twenty and the elder, Dorothea Sophia, later married a local lawyer, Dietrich Michaelsen. A son born a year after the Giebichenstein wedding only lived for an hour. In 1685 Dorothea Händel gave birth to her second son, Georg Friedrich.

The exact date of his birth is unknown, but since the register of the Liebfrauenkirche in Halle records his baptism on Tuesday, 24 February, it is thought that he must have been born on the previous day. He was christened Georg after his father and maternal grandfather and Friedrich, probably in honour of his father's princely patron of Brandenburg. The godparents were his Aunt Anna, Philipp Fehrsdorff, one of the Elector of Saxony's stewards,
and Zacharias Kleinhampel, a medical colleague of Dr Händel's. The birth probably took place in his parents' house on the corner of the Kleine Klausstrasse and Kleine Ulrichstrasse, a tall, roomy building with early medieval foundations and one of those lofty attic storeys so typical of its period.

This attic, indeed, provides the scene for the first anecdote in a Handelian chronicle. John Mainwaring, the composer's earliest biographer, tells us that ‘from his very childhood HANDEL had discovered such a strong propensity to Music, that his father, who always intended him for the study of the Civil Law, had reason to be alarmed'. The doctor ‘strictly forbad him to meddle with any musical instrument', but young Georg Friedrich contrived to ‘get a little clavichord privately conveyed to a room at the top of the house'. Clavichords, however modestly proportioned, are not easily smuggled anywhere, and since a more or less identical circumstance is related of Handel's younger contemporary, Thomas Augustine Arne (in his case it was apparently a spinet) the story, pointing out that the young musician's clandestine keyboard practice ‘made such farther advances as were no slight prognostics of his future greatness', has a slightly suspect flavour. Mainwaring seems, however, to have based the early sections of his book (published in 1760) on Handel's personal recollections, so doubtless the episode is an authentic one. It certainly reveals a stubbornness and persistence in the boy, which became marked character traits of the grown man.

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.