George Frideric Handel

HERBERT F. PEYSER

Written for and dedicated to
the
RADIO MEMBERS
of
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
of NEW YORK

Copyright 1951
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
of NEW YORK
113 West 57th Street
New York 19, N. Y.

HANDEL IN MIDDLE AGE.
From the Portrait by Kneller.

FOREWORD

Handel’s long career resembles a gigantic tapestry, so bewilderingly crowded with detail, so filled with turmoil and vicissitude, with vast achievements, extremes of good and ill fortune, and unending comings and goings that any attempt to force even a small part of it into the frame of a tiny, unpretentious booklet of the present sort is as hopeless as it is presumptuous. Handel is far more difficult to reduce to such minuscule dimensions than his greatest contemporary, Bach, whose worldly experiences were infinitely less diverse and colorful, for all the sublimity, mystical quality and epochal influence of his myriad creations. The supreme master of florid pomp, Handel bulked much larger in the perspective of his own day than did, in his, the composer of the “Passion According to St. Matthew.” In spite of an everlasting monument like “Messiah,” the most popular choral masterpiece ever written, we may, however, ask ourselves if the body of Handel’s music is as widely known and as intimately studied as it deserves to be. How many today can boast of a real acquaintance with Handel’s operas (there are more than forty of them alone) apart from a few airs sung in concert; how many can truly claim to know by experience any of the great oratorios apart from “Messiah” and, possibly, “Judas Maccabaeus” and “Israel in Egypt?” Yet outside of such monumental works, Handel was time and again a composer of exquisitely delicate colorations, and sensuous style, not to say a largely unsuspected master of many subtle intricacies of rhythm. The present pamphlet, wholly without originality or novelty of approach, may, perchance, induce the casual reader to renew his interest in Handel’s prodigious treasury, so much of it neglected, not to say actually undiscovered by multitudes of music lovers.

H. F. P.

George Frideric Handel

By
HERBERT F. PEYSER

Some wit, comparing Bach and Handel, remarked that both masters were “born in the same year and killed by the same doctor.” Born in the same year they unquestionably were, Handel almost an exact month before his great contemporary. Halle, where Handel first saw the light, is a comparatively short distance from Eisenach, where Bach was cradled. It lies not far from the eastern boundary of that Saxon-Thuringian country which harbored some of the imposing musical figures of Germany during the 17th Century. Such names as those of the famous “three S’s”—Schein, Scheidt and Schütz—of Kuhnau, Krieger, Melchior Franck, Ahle, Rosenmüller, echo powerfully through the history of that period.

George Frideric Handel was born on Monday, February 23, 1685. That the name has been variously spelled need not trouble us; strict consistency in such matters lay as lightly on folks of this epoch as it did in the age of Mozart. However, it may be pointed out that in this booklet “Frideric” is retained in place of “Frederick” because Handel himself repeatedly used this form and because the British authorities thus inscribed him when he became a British citizen.

The Handel family came from Silesia, where Valentine Handel, the composer’s grandfather, had been a coppersmith in Breslau. George Handel, the father, had been “barber-surgeon,” attached to the service of Saxon and Swedish armies, then to that of Duke Augustus of Saxony. For a time he prospered and in 1665 he bought himself “Am Schlamm,” at Halle-an-der-Saale, a palatial house, which in the course of years barely escaped total destruction by fire. In any case, Father Handel was to know the ups and downs of fortune; and the vicissitudes he endured did not sweeten an always morose and surly character. He has been described as “a strong man, a man of vast principles, bigoted, intensely disagreeable, a man with a rather withered heart.” A portrait of him gave Romain Rolland “the impression of one who has never smiled.” He was twice married, the first time to the widow of a barber, a woman ten years his senior, the second to Dorothea Taust, a pastor’s daughter, thirty years his junior. By the first he had six children, by the second four, of whom George Frideric was the second.

Father Handel was 63 when his great son came into the world. The future composer of “Messiah” was born, not in the elaborate edifice which carries his bust and is inscribed with the titles of his oratorios, but in the house adjoining it which stands on a street corner and whose official address is Nicolai Strasse 5. Yet even this statement must be qualified. For this presumable “birthplace” was not built till 1800 and, according to the researches of Newman Flower, stands on the site of the house in which Handel was born. As for the town of Halle, it had definitely passed after the death of the Duke Augustus of Saxony, to Brandenburg; so that, strictly speaking, Handel was born a Prussian. But, as Rolland has noted, “the childhood of Handel was influenced by two intellectual forces: the Saxon and the Prussian. Of the two the more aristocratic, and also most powerful was the Saxon.” At all events, after the Thirty Years’ War the city of Halle, during the Middle Ages a center of culture and gaiety, had fallen into a drab provincialism.

The house at Halle where Handel was supposed to have been born, decorated with laurels and the names of his oratorios. And—

—The house next door in which he was born.

Apparently the child’s musical susceptibilities developed early and rather like Mozart’s, even if unlike the latter, he had not the benefit of a friendly and understanding father. Who has not seen at some time or other the picture immortalizing the precocity of “the Infant Handel?” The story goes that the indulgent mother had smuggled a clavichord into the garret. In the dead of night the child crept to the attic till the father, aroused by faint tinklings, came with a lantern to investigate. Whether or not the clavichord was confiscated the result of the parental raid was a stern prohibition of all sorts of music-making. Some of us may be reminded by this apparent heartlessness of a rather similar punishment visited on the youthful Bach, when his elder brother deprived him of music he had painfully copied out by moonlight for his own use.

The elder Handel’s motive was, according to his own lights, perhaps quite as defensible. He had no wish to see a son of his degraded to