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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