Handel Read Free

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