Handel Read Free Page B

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.
    Any preconceptions of this kind on Dr Händel’s part were to be altered by the outcome of a significant journey to the ducal court at Weissenfels, made when the boy was about ten years old. Mainwaring, whose circumstantial detail in this case makes the story credible, tells us that Georg Friedrich, who wanted to see his half-brother Karl, the Duke’s valet, was refused a place in the coach as the doctor ‘thought one of his age a very improper companion when he was going to the court of a Prince, and to attend the duties of his profession’. With typical tenacity young Handel waited until his father’s carriage left the house in the Kleine Klausstrasse, then followed it on foot. The vehicle was travelling slowly enough for the boy to catch up with it a little way from the town. The old man, impressed, gave in and the two set off together.
    Weissenfels lies a few miles east of Halle and is now a thriving industrial centre. For sixty years, from 1680 until the mid-eighteenth century, it provided a capital for the duchy originally created by the Elector of Saxony for his second son August in 1656. Under August’s son Johann Adolf I the court was a rich and cultivated establishment, dignified in later years by such figures as the palace chaplain Erdmann Neumeister, celebrated as a religious poet whose works provided Bach with cantata texts, and Johann Philipp Krieger, who had brought his skills with him from Halle when the Prussians took over.
    The Duke apparently heard Handel playing the organ in the palace chapel and ‘something there was in the manner of playing which drew his attention so strongly’ that he asked who was at the instrument. Karl Händel replied that it was his little half-brother. We can rule out Mainwaring’s tale that the Duke lectured the old doctor on what a crime it was ‘against the public and posterity, to rob the world of such a rising Genius’ but his influence as a music-loving patron was surely active in persuading Georg Friedrich’s father to let him follow where his inclination led. He may, of course, have envisaged training the lad as a house musician. At any rate the boy was able to return to Halle with a gift of money from Duke Johann Adolf and a sense that princely encouragement was behind him.
    He was even more fortunate in that his home town contained one of the finest musical teachers of the day. Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow was born in Leipzig in 1663, appropriately in the Stadtpfeiffergasslein (Town Piper Lane), where his father lived as a violinist. He had succeeded the talented Samuel Ebart as organist of the Halle Marienkirche in the year before Handel’s birth, probably owing to the influence of his grandfather, head of the city waits. He was a noted composer and performer; among the many testimonies to his skill, the most charming is Martin Fuhrmann’s comment in Die an der Kirche Gottes gebaute Satans-Capelle: ‘In my time, when in 1692 I was studying in Halle, Zachow was flourishing, whom I heard on Sundays with a true hunger and thirst. If I had to travel there, and there were no bridge over the Saale, and I could not reach the city, then truly I