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CHAPTER II

THE HALLE DAYS

On the day following the birth of the child in the Schlamm a few people gathered about the font in the Liebfrauenkirche, situated only five minutes' walk from the residence of the barber-surgeon. There was the barber-surgeon himself standing white-haired beside the font and looking at the small scrap of humanity carried in the arms of his sister-in-law, Anna Taust. Anna Taust, the curious spinster lady with the warm heart, who, in the process of time, was to drift into the Handel circle and exercise a wonderful influence over this child, because she understood children as neither of the Handels ever understood them.

Whatever her joy in this child may have been, however envious she may have been of her sister Dorothea, who had brought him into the world, it is doubtful if Anna Taust knew but a small part of the elation which the coming of the child had created in the heart of the barber-surgeon. This child was the child of his old age; it marked the beginning of a new family circle which was his. After all, the family that had come to him by Anna Oettinger had ceased to count in his life. Few had survived; those few who reached maturity had crept away and left him in his solitude; possibly his taciturnity had hastened their departure. Only one of those children had counted in his heart, and that was his son Gottfried, whom the plague had killed three years before. Gottfried, who had done everything he had told him to do, who had become a surgeon as he meant him to be a surgeon, and who had achieved some little fame and much respectability in Halle as the Handels had before him. He had married well, this Gottfried; he had raised unto himself a sound practice and had earned a good income. The old barber-surgeon must have seen in this son something of an ideal as it had framed itself in his mind.

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Visions

But when Gottfried fell before the plague-storm that swept the streets of Halle he left no issue, only a young widow. Had there been a child the old barber-surgeon might never have married a second time. He wanted some youth about him. All the taciturnity and sacrifice of self to the altar of success had left him a man desolate of heart. It was this searching for youth which made him marry Dorothea Taust of Giebichenstein; it was the same yearning that made him bring into the world George Frideric, whom they were baptizing this day in the Liebfrauenkirche.

"Unto us a child is born." Those words must have been very present in the mind of this man as he waited beside the font while his father-in-law, old Georg Taust, christened this child George Frideric, thereby performing an office which was to be one of the last of his official life, for within a few weeks of his leaving the church, filled as he doubtless was with the great pride of owning a first grandchild, death claimed him. "Unto us a child is born." And this And this very child upon whose forehead they set the cross of water now was to put those words to the most wonderful music in little over half a century's time.

He would have been a brave fellow who had suggested to the barber-surgeon that day that this child would in the ensuing years make his living by music. It would have horrified the barber-surgeon; it would have been a suggestion of scandal upon the whole Handel family. Music in those days had failed to find respectability. It was a sort of pedlar's calling, cheap huckstering when all else failed. The family blacklegs turned to music; people sang in the streets, wrote and sang ephemeral melodies in the taverns, and counted themselves well paid when the equivalent of a few pence rewarded them. A few escaped to higher spheres, and were included in the select and exclusive choirs that earned for them some halo of respectability.

The barber-surgeon, who had lost Gottfried and found salvation in George Frideric, had higher ambitions for this son. But George Frideric was to disappoint him, he was to frivol with musical instruments ere his parent passed to the Handel tomb. Though his mother Dorothea from the Giebichenstein parsonage was to live to see this child go out

and find fame in the doubtful ways of music, she never understood what it meant. This son was to grow up and depart from her, and would, in the fullness of time, send short messages of affection to her from his sanctuary in England. But, having no knowledge of music, she never realised his worth. He ultimately became to her a being she had created and sent forth into some strange vortex of public life. She always cared for him, though he departed from her for ever when just emerging from his teens, and when she died Death dealt the greatest blow to this son that his life ever knew.

From the time that the christening party left the Liebfrauenkirche, life for the Handel child was to drop into the common rut of the better-bred Halle children. Ere the year had ended Pastor Taust of Giebichenstein, left weak and ill as he had been by the plague, passed quietly away, and Fräulein Anna came to live with her sister Frau Dorothea Handel at the Schlamm. Her coming banished all question of the child's education in the tender years. Frau Dorothea was occupied with other cradles. She raised two girls, one of whom was in later years to have the proud knowledge of her brother's achievements. Upon Anna Taust depended the main upbringing of this boy, and his mother, left with the nurture of two tender children, watched the influence of Tante Anna work itself upon this first child she had been able to rear.

Of some things concerning that boy she remained unaware, even though Anna Taust clearly understood them. She did not know of his interest in Church music, she did not see him fascinated by the first dawning understanding of the notes of the organ. He went to the Liebfrauenkirche regularly; to Frau Handel his object in doing so was to serve his Maker as he had been taught to do. That the organ music in the Liebfrauenkirche stood in the place of his Maker to the boy who groped his way to understanding never occurred to her. And, if it had, she was doubtless so shaped in her mental outlook by the creed of her husband that she would probably have sent young George Frideric to one of the lesser places of worship of simple faith which existed in Halle at the time, and at which music was unknown.

It is not easy to understand immediately this dislike of the

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