THE BAPTISMAL ENTRY IN THE BOOK OF THE LIEBFRAUENKIRCHE AT HALLE. Showing the record of Handel, and proving the year of his birth-1685.

Musical Halle

Handels towards any form of music, without inquiring a little into the life of Halle at the time when George Frideric was in his childhood. Halle was then a small town confined within the radius of its medieval town walls, a town of houses constructed of wood and plaster covered with thatched roofs. As a house fell into disrepair it was pulled down and a new building created out of the remains of the old, with the addition of more modern material. Thus the town kept in its own little circle, with only the suburbs of Glauchau and Neumarkt apart, and it was in the latter that the barber-surgeon had his practice.

Moreover, the people of Halle were severely solitary in their existence. They were situated in the centre of a group of warring tribes, which had fought and triumphed over each other since very early times. Halle was a sort of buffer state ringed about by the denizens of the salt-marshes, a strange people of ancient Wend and Frankish blood, who from the beginning of time had worked the salt wells, and been a law unto themselves—a people so powerful that they were able to support an army of six hundred men. But music had always been an art, ardently pursued and much better practised at Halle than in all Saxony. The glories of the old courts, the moods of successive rulers with the pomps and ceremonies at the old Moritzburg in the town, whence archbishops and princes ruled with rods of iron, had kept song alive throughout Halle. And the glorious memory of Halle's court music, which lasted until shortly before the birth of the child George Frideric, was undoubtedly still alive in the people at the time of his infancy. Many choirs existed in the town at the time when his infant intelligence first began to understand. The town choir, and choirs from the schools-choirs that sang in the streets in front of citizens' houses, and thrived on chance charity cast from the windows to put an end to what was too frequently an irritating noise. Someone was always singing somewhere in public in Halle in those days. Occasionally the singers were given pieces of cloth and a spasmodic education

1 G. F. Hertzberg, "Geschichte der Stadt Halle.”
Brockhaus, Lexikon "Halloren."

Built 1478 when the Archbishop conquered the town.

4 Dr Weissenborn.

by some ancient charity according to the regularity of their singing. To become musical, therefore, was to ally oneself with a species of street vagrants, to descend in public esteem, and to be the certain occupier of a charitable cubicle as the end of it all.

Such a prospect for their son jarred badly on the Handels. It was not entirely his fault that the barber-surgeon strove to exterminate, as he might some rank weed, the first interest in music which showed in his son. The Handel pride was considered a God-given gift above music; it had found its birth in a great record of honourable men, and it was not going to slip into the mire of common huckstering of sounds and noises if the old barber-surgeon could help it. Aunt Anna, when she cast aside neutrality and threw all the weight of her sympathies to the child in whom the first knowledge of melody was dawning, who took him to the Liebfrauenkirche that he might listen to a wonderful organ on Sundays, and brought him back again, was risking a great deal in what she did. Had her lack of neutrality been revealed, it is certain that she would not have been tolerated for very long in the Handel household. In aiding this child to understand the meaning of music to the soul, in cultivating that new-born creed in him, she was hiding a secret sin. It is certain that the barbersurgeon did not know, and equally certain that his wife, Dorothea, did not know that the saintly Anna was leading a double life. If she did smuggle in the clavichord for the child, which the biographers will insist upon, then she was a woman of still greater daring than history has ever credited her with possessing. The barber-surgeon was weary of hearing the various choirs sing daily sacred airs in chorus manner and in parts under the conductorship of a Præfectus at stated hours in front of the citizens' houses. They were a sort of public nuisance in the Schlamm, the melancholy nuisance familiar in our Christmas waits. Daily repetition may well have urged a certain decision in his mind when thinking about his son: If that boy ever shows the first inclination towards music or noises disguised as such, I will kill it." And all the while that delightful old maid in his house, Aunt Anna, was deceiv1 G. F. Hertzberg, "Geschichte der Stadt Halle."

Handel Begins School-Life

ing him, tolerating little George Frideric, if she did not actually encourage him, in this awful vice. Tremendously proud of his rebellion in her secret soul no doubt. Trammelled about as they were by the fussation and importance of the barber-surgeon in the Schlamm House, it is so easy to see how it all happened. Probably if there had been no Áunt Anna there might have been no Westminster Abbey for George Frideric, though it is hard to believe that a soul so strewn with melody would have failed to find its destined and appointed place.

The greatest characteristic about the barber-surgeon throughout his life had been selfishness. He had been selfish from his youth, and his selfishness had been aided by great strength of personality. Everything he did—as far as history reveals had been guided by self-motives. His marriage with Anna Oettinger, a diplomatic move for self; his great honours the result of cleverness, but as cleverly planned. His second marriage, a sop to self. A supremely selfish, clever man, he had ever been with two weak women, one after the other, vainly striving to play a very inferior second fiddle, a half-dumb instrument in the family orchestra, which was all "George Handel, barber-surgeon of some renown."

When the child of his late years was seven years old a new problem occurred to the barber-surgeon. He had to educate him. Halle at that date was full of schools, both good and bad. There were poor schools and orphan schools in the Glauchau, and in the Vineyards. There was a school of Catholics, a school of French commune, a great number of private schools. There was also a Jewish school in the town conducted by a Rabbi, and free to pupils. The Rabbis usually came from Poland and were married men, whose wives and children remained in Poland. By their laws these Rabbis were compelled to return to their wives after two years in Halle, and live with them for at least one year. If, at the end of that time, they came to the end of their earnings they were considered free to go back to Halle for another term and so continue on the jog-trot of life, now here, now there.1 1 Dreyhaupt.