George Handel, the Barber-Surgeon the finest barber-surgeon of the district that he was appointed (in 1652) the surgeon of Giebichenstein, a suburb of the town. What he achieved in Giebichenstein is not recorded, but it is significant that shortly afterwards he was appointed Surgeonin-Ordinary and Valet-de-Chambre to Prince Augustus of Saxony, a dissolute gentleman, a past-master in the art of Love, whose mistresses were scattered high and low over the immediate district and beyond it. Meanwhile, with the coming of affluence, George Handel bought himself a house in the Schlamm in 1665. This particular locale is in the centre of the town, and only a couple of minutes' walk from the street in which his father had started his career in Halle as a coppersmith. The house was known as "Zum Gelben Hirsch" (The Yellow Stag) and the barber-surgeon determined to leave no stone unturned to make money. For nearly forty years the house had been licensed as a wine-house, and when he bought it the wine-pole, which distinguished the house as a wine-inn, was attached. Then he soon found himself in difficulties with the Governors of Halle, who refused to renew the licence. The barber-surgeon went over their heads and appealed to the Elector, who ultimately-in 1668-confirmed the privilege the house had always enjoyed. The battle between the barber-surgeon and the town of Halle over this house went on for years. In spite of the Elector's ruling, the burghers prohibited Handel's wine from coming into the town. All kinds of lawyers from the Leipzig University were called in to settle the dispute, but they made no headway. The Elector became annoyed. He threatened the town of Halle with penalties if they did not let the barbersurgeon pursue his wine-selling in peace. But things moved slowly in those days. Halle took no notice of any Elector. It appealed to forgotten Councils, who assembled in great state and put their hands together and did nothing. Meanwhile the barber-surgeon had been goaded into a fighting mood. That thin underlip had become thinner yet, and straight and firm. There was a smouldering fire in the eyes. Documents were prepared-pages of documents. It all cost money. The barber-surgeon, who hated parting with a pfennig, decided that his last pfennig should go to beat the town, since he was fighting for a right which he had bought with the house. The Elector wobbled. He decided once more against the town, but gave it the right to appeal. The barber-surgeon fought on. Then some bold fellow marched up to Handel's house with a document summoning him to appear before the Town Council, and the knave threw the summons through George's window. The blood of Handel was fired anew. The insult! If the rapscallion had only delivered the document into his hands and waited while he made suitable comments thereon! But he had hurled in his paper and run from the lion he had prodded. Again the barber-surgeon went to the Elector. Again the Elector was bored to tears. This silly squabble was becoming a nuisance. He wrote finally to the town of Halle and said that unless they desisted in annoying the barber-surgeon he would fine the town 500 gold florins and, if need be, put in troops.1 That ended the business. The barber-surgeon had won. Disgruntled burghers sneered at him in the streets. But the keen eye of the man never swerved or was afraid. He went on selling wine at The Yellow Stag for years, then, feeling that he could rest on his victory, he handed the licence over to the town-a victor who now performed a gracious act.2 It had been a bitter battle and a hard-earned victory! But its record is necessary because the whole affair is so typical of the barber-surgeon. Could a man with that mouth, that violent pugnacity sit down calmly while they stole a single right from him which his money had bought? He would have fought Europe single-handed for a case which had the vestige of right hidden somewhere in it. He was a strong man. A strong man of vast principles. Bigoted over principles. Narrow. Intensely disagreeable. If he won a victory he would, in common parlance, "rub it in." rub it in." A man with a rather withered heart that blossomed weakly at times like some late October rose, unfragrant, a little stale with the day 1 Report of the case in the State Archives at Magdeburg. Handel's Real Birthplace to which it had been born. This Handel never warmed to the sun of human understanding. He was a creature aloof. Judging from the area on which it stood, the house which the barber-surgeon took to himself after his marriage must have been of considerable size, large enough, in fact, to house three families. It is doubtful if any of the original building still remains. The biographers of George Frideric Handel, the son of this barber-surgeon, have, for some unknown reason, followed each other in making a curious mistake about the Handel-house in Halle. They have declared that the house in which the barbersurgeon lived, and in which his son George Frideric was destined to be born, was the house adjoining. They have depicted it with photograph and sketch. As a matter of fact the house that has been gilded with a fame it never earned is even now decorated with bays, with the names of George Frideric's oratorios on its plaster front, and with a bust of George Frideric over its doorway. It has been stared at, photographed, decrepit deceiving thing. But the child who was later to decoy this world with his music never stumbled down its dark passages that child's first cry on waking to a world of hurt and distress was never heard by its walls, its low dank ceilings. True, the boy must have played often in the courtyard that lies within its gate; the narrow cobbled street knew the patter of his feet, the roof, ageing then, and so much older now, stooped over him as if in benison, but that venerable house, with all its fabled romance, was never the Handel-house. The mistake has continued until it is almost old enough to claim to be veracious. But recently a Professor of Halle University and a great Handel student has discovered undeniable evidence that Handel was never born in the house that claims him, but in the adjoining building, a corner house built at right angles with fronts on two streets-or, rather, in the building that stood on the site. The present house, Nicolai Strasse 5, which stands on the site of the musician's birthplace, was built in 1800. 1 Dr Bernhard Weissenborn. 2 In an advertisement which appeared in the Wöchentliche Hallische Anzeiger on December 1783, the house which stands on the site of Handel's birthplace is Eleven years after the barber-surgeon had bought his palatial house in the Schlamm, disaster overtook the district. On 2nd May 1676, a house in the quarter suddenly burst into flames.1 House after house was involved as a strong wind, rushing up the narrow lanes, hurled the sparks and flaming débris in all directions. The parsimonious builders of those days had bunched the houses together in huge clusters, separated only by the narrowest alleys, and in a very short time the Schlamm was a blazing cauldron. It was night-the original fire was only discovered at ten o'clock-and most of the respectable citizens of the Schlamm were in bed. In a short time the adjoining streets, the Great Ulrichstrasse, the Dachritz, the Barfüsser (Bare-foot monks' street) made a palisade of fire about the Handel mansion, and before very long thirty-eight houses lay in heaps of charred and smoking wood. Those houses which escaped actual destruction had their backs burned away; eleven barns followed the houses to the ashheap, and women and children were killed and injured, or disappeared in the flames. How far the Handel mansion-and it undoubtedly was a mansion for the period-suffered in the conflagration there is no record, but the barber-surgeon saved himself and his family. Thereafter, the disaster was closely followed by others, which brought increasing anxiety into the lives of the Handels. Four years later Prince Augustus of Saxony died, described as the former house of Handel, afterwards of Flörke, who was the husband of George Frideric Handel's niece. This house then bore the number 976; the old number was 528, afterwards 528A. The next following building, 975 (old number 529), which was rebuilt about 1720, was put up for sale in 1801 in the Hallisches Patriotisches Wochenblatt, and described in detail. The large courtyard, extensive garden, side wings and a front of twelve windows" can only be applied to the building which to-day (1923) appears decorated as the Handel-house." Through my discovery of these two advertisements it is proved that the house in which Handel was born therefore stood on the spot where the corner house stands to-day-Nicolai Strasse 5.-Dr Weissenborn. Further evidence that the house at the corner of Nicolai Street and Kleine Ulrichst is the house in which Handel was born is to be found in this letter which was published in the Wiener Theaterzeitung, 22nd October 1806, over the signature of a man named Pokels. "The widow of the late Ratmeister, Mrs Reichhelm has told me that her great-uncle, the famous Handel, was born in the corner house of the Kleine Ulrichstrasse,' and that her late husband had for that reason caused the house to be rebuilt to dedicate it to the lasting memory of this famous man, and that he had intended to erect therein a special monument in honour of Handel, if sudden death had not overtaken him." This Mrs Reichhelm was a granddaughter of Mrs Michaelsen, Handel's elder sister. 1 Dreyhaupt, Chronik des Saal Kreises," vol. ii. Family Affairs and the town of Halle passed from Saxony to Brandenburg. All the honours which George Handel had striven for and attained in royal circles thus fell away at a stroke, and the removal of royal patronage, even by death, was a catastrophe of the utmost magnitude in those days. The silent surgeon of the Schlamm was not content to drop back from the proud position he had fought for. One imagines the varying emotions of depression and hopelessness that passed in succession across his mind, and can picture him daily growing more morose as he had been ever morose, more difficult in the family as he always had been difficult in the family since those days when the burden of his affairs first occupied his every thought. And Anna, dropping a little more into that subservience, that easy slide downhill from the independence she had known as Christoph Oettinger's widow. Handel was disgruntled, his pride was smashed. Then the Halle Council, consisting as it did of many of his enemies, brought a charge against him of intriguing against the late Prince by supplying information about his condition to the Elector of Brandenburg, who had become the successor. They tried to harass Handel in Halle; perhaps they hoped to drive out so gloomy a person from their midst. But with the tough courage, which he eventually passed on to his son, the barber-surgeon refused to budge an inch. A little later his health began to fail. Possibly it was only a mental miasma that had caught him, a melancholia provoked by the agitation at the loss of his honours. He took a bold step; he wrote to the famous Privy-Councillor von Dancklemann. “I wish," he said, " to thank you herewith most humbly and obediently to pray, to be so gracious, as I am an old most humble servant, and according to the will of God have only to live one or two years, that on the occasion of the present visit of His Electoral Highness (to Halle) I may receive the document," i.e. the renewal of the appointment to the various offices he held.1 It may have been the humility of his letter-had the pompous old fellow ever grovelled so completely before ?-or it may have been out of pity for an old servant of the Court, 1 Opel. |