GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL CHAPTER I OF SOME RELATIONS GENIUS is seldom admitted as such save when it can achieve over Circumstance. And the Circumstance that governs the ways of Mankind is so contrived as to hinder rather than help the weakling idea. Existence, as humanly conceived, would mock at and poke into seclusion those tendrils of thought which, if developed, would produce a voice to which the world might listen. This same Circumstance did its utmost to snuff out the genius of George Frideric Handel. It pegged him about from his early years with absurd obstacles. It fought him with all the strength of precedent in its favour. Nor did it yield him even the favour of happy chance. It tried to stifle a voice that ultimately turned a world to melody. For the child who was born at the little Saxon town of Halle on 23rd February 1685 was never followed by what is known as good luck. In a gamble with chance he was safe to lose every time. But he made his way to his ultimate destiny by the triumph of sheer courage and personality. To begin with, nothing was expected of George Frideric Handel when he was born except a commonplace yet circumspect life. His father had reared many children, and George Frideric, following after by the grace of a second wife, was just one of a herd, as ordinary as his name. No great ability was 1 For the purpose of this book, and to avoid confusion, the name of Handel, both as applied to the composer and his relatives, is spelled in English fashion. There are documents in existence in which the composer spelled his name in several ways, notably Hendel. This form of spelling was usually adopted by his relatives, and to this day his descendant has a bookshop in Halle with the name OTTO HENDEL over the door. In England, however, the composer always kept to the English form of Handel. anticipated of him; the suspicion of any musical genius in him would probably have shocked his father, the barbersurgeon, into disowning him. All that his parents demanded was that he should become a good citizen and pay his way in some respectable craft; be God-fearing, if not God-chosen ; ultimately marry and rear children, and, in the fullness of time, pass to an honoured corner in the Halle churchyard, and be remembered with respect. The Handels had always done things that way. They had never been original, but ever respectable. From the time that they first settled in Breslau in medieval ages, till and after grandfather Handel-Valentine by name-came and established the Handel respectability at Halle, they had been the same. He opened a small coppersmith's shop to which he very vigilantly attended. He was unimaginative, and unsuspecting, this man, that any grandchild of his would one day demand the silence of kings. In 1685, when the birth of the future musician occurred in the Am Schlamm at Halle, Middle Europe was in a curious mood of unoriginality. It had its own scheme of things; its slow progress was a change as slowly conceived. It was rather hidebound with Lutheranism, relieved with patches-very eruptive patches of Judaism, and occasional upheavals of Catholicism and free thought. Its business was as respectable as its religion. It did not wish to do anything in a new way. It made things and sold them. This Middle Europe of 1685 wanted to go on making things and selling them in the same fashion for ever. There was no political disturbance that tore at the roots of industry and thrust them rudely up into the glare of progress. One was born and educated and trained to narrow issues, and taught above all things to be supremely careful. But to strike out and be a pioneer-it was one of those acts which the better circle abhorred because such peculiar conduct was not understood. It was a form of heresy usually purged from the higher families by disowning the offender. Á pioneer in a Saxon family in 1685 was not talked about. The drawing-rooms, which were dovecotes of righteousness, insincerity and trivial scandal, did not mention these pioneers, these few. Its people were too well bred. As a matter of On Ancestry fact, the few pioneers usually drifted into the cities, became debauchees, and died very namelessly, as those families that had once owned them hoped they would do. There was a singular connivance between Fate and the smug conscience in those days. Moreover, 1685 was a rather mean age. It was an age of snobbery in saving money. It was ungenerous. It was interested in the suffering, in the charities of the time, only by an occasional mild mood of religious revivalism, and extreme Church ceremony. There was no secret charity. To trample on the weak was the act of a man who really had achieved some object in getting born. The weak were there to be trampled upon, and a man was the better listened to at the dinner-table according to the heaviness of his step. The Handels were a rather peculiar family. They succeeded in Middle Europe at this age because they were so clearly typical of their age. They were extremely efficient, quiet people. They had no family scandals, no skeletons in the family cupboard. They made no noise; they rose to no honours. They did not attempt to govern. They married just the kind of people they were themselves, for they adventured neither in business nor in marriage. They made their profits in their occupations, and paid their debts, and were buried, as they would have wished to be buried, with the little pompous funerals of seventeenth-century Germany. They lived very gamely and straightly round the narrow arc which their mentality perceived, and came to the same very revered end. Just dust to the earth that had yielded it. Dust and no memories. Suddenly this very circumspect family developed an eruptive mood. Early in the seventeenth century Valentine Handel packed himself up, bag and baggage, at Breslau and went south to Halle. He followed the usual custom of the time for an apprentice who had become "Gesell" to take to the road. The Saxon town had no special call for him. But he responded to a mood. Like some irresponsible bird of passage, he did what no Handel had ever done hitherto-he went out to discover. To fight. It is possible that en route he stopped at the neighbouring town of Eisleben and worked in the copper-mines for some time. Scarcely a year before his arrival at Halle, he married an Eisleben girl, Anne, the daughter of the master coppersmith, Samuel Beichling, who was to be the grandmother of the musician. At all events it is on record that on Tuesday after "Reminiscere" (14th March) 1609, he took the oath as a Halle citizen, and paid the citizen-right's fee of six guilders. He was then twenty-six years of age. He arrived at Halle with his few sticks of belongings, and the knowledge of his craft as a coppersmith-the only stable things to which he had pegged his adventure. Often he must have meditated on the complete lack of object which had drawn him to Halle. It was just a call from some vague destiny, just as the sea in these days will drag a man from an office stool, or a sudden mood will send a driven city slave to the wildest ends of the earth in pursuit of a shadow. Valentine Handel settled down in a little narrow street off the Markt-platz known as "Unter den Kleinschmieden " (street of the small smith). There were other coppersmiths there before him, but the records show that he was a brilliant craftsman in the more delicate forms of the work. He became known; he prospered. Rapidly he climbed the ladder till the citizens of Halle held such respect for him that they put him into the council with the position of bread-weigher.1 In a short time his shop was one of the foremost of the period. We can picture this man approaching old age, busying himself in his shop, a rather mournful but efficient figure with a small, close-fitting cap on his head. A man more than a little mean, but a man whose word was his bond. 2 Valentine Handel made money, and he saved money. As proof of it, let it be said that he bought two of the principal houses in the adjoining main street. No tradesman in those days could afford to buy houses unless he were making money heavily. The Handel stock was particularly strong in this man. He had no ideas outside his business. He did not know one note of music from another. He was conscious of no appeal from 1 Julius Otto Opel, Periodical for General History, 1885. Valentine Handel any Art. He lived a rather closeted, furtive life, taking no chances unless he had previously measured every step of the way. But he was alert, and very conscious that in his epoch commercial Germany was about to be sold to the Jews. So he prospered; he prospered because he had been manufactured so closely to the pattern of his age. And he lived in manner that became his lineage, a clean-trading, rather ignorant person, with ideals and beliefs in the hereafter for those who kept themselves unsullied from the Jewish vices that were breaking out in gross and disturbing fashion in the larger cities. A person rather dour and sanctimonious. He died in the same unostentatious fashion in which he had lived, just as the Handel precedents ordained; his financial affairs very simple and arranged, and with a clear conscience that those for whom he had worked should never be troubled with any irritating annoyances about their heritage. He had thought it all out beforehand, and so planned his death that it should be as simple and understood as his life had been. He had always been a very safe person, rather difficult to live with at times, one may gather, but worthy of the elegant inscription they put upon his tomb. And when he died at the coppersmith's shop that had borne his name for so long and honourably over its portal, he left his two elder sons, Valentine and Christoph-already trained to his own pattern as coppersmiths to succeed him. Two other sons he had lost, but the fifth, George by name, never appears to have interested him. George had no inclinations towards the crafts of the smith. He was ambitious, dreamy; he lived a solitary life, out of joint with the family and its affairs. Yet Destiny was to choose him for the father of one of the world's greatest musicians. This youth had just turned fourteen years when he followed his father's bier to its last resting-place, and he was of no more importance in that procession through the Halle streets than the family cat might have been. A small, insignificant creature in a great concourse of people. A solitary child. Valentine and Christoph, in the strenuous life which followed immediately upon taking over the business, had no use whatever for him. His mother left the shop to the sons |