George Frideric Handel is Born

wasted less had it not been for the confounded plague which had worried and overworked him for nearly a year.

So did Dorothea Taust come to the mansion in the Schlamm, a nervous woman, very fearful of the rather celebrated personage whom she had married, the old man with lingerings of youth in him still, his certain faithfulness, his extraordinary set sense of duty in everything.

As soon as he had married, George Handel shut himself up again to his secret life as he had done before. It possibly meant very little more to him whether Dorothea Taust faced him across the dinner-table or Anna Oettinger. He was in his fashion extremely sexless to difference in women. He had never philandered; he had never really understood women. He had never wanted to understand them. They never. intrigued him; he would probably have lived and died a celibate but for ulterior reasons that made him respond in lukewarm fashion to their charms. Either of the two women who married him could and did always count on extreme fidelity, whatever his shortcomings as a husband-and apparently they were many-may have been.

A year after their marriage Dorothea brought into the world a son, a weak child, who died at birth. The Fates still juggled with old Handel. If it were not for the excuse that he ultimately reared one of the greatest children in the world's history, it might be said that he was never meant to bring children to maturity because he did not understand them. When his wife ultimately bore a child of genius he thought the child a fool.

So, when on 23rd February 1685, passers down the Nicolaistrasse or Schlamm heard the small cry of a newly-born child come from the big building at the corner, they interpreted nothing in it at all, except that they hoped, no doubt, that the doctor would have better luck this time.

Not that it could signify at all on that February morning that George Frideric Handel had been born into the world.

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.

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 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