Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB
[blocks in formation]

Through which the boy went to his music lessons.

OLD DOORWAY BESIDE HANDEL'S BIRTHPLACE,

[graphic]

AT HALLE,

Showing the stone seats-a familiar haunt of the child.

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 Aunt 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.

There was also the Lutheran Gymnasium, or Halle Grammar School, not renowned for the breeding of its scholars, for if a boy did not enter it by legitimate means he could enter it by charity. If he were the son of the poorest tradesman he could arrive there by this means or that. It was denied to no one. As often as not the Alms-treasury paid the fees for the boy. The school had a good philosophical and theological library if no standing as a seminary of teaching. It had ten classes, divided irrespective of the children's social standing.

Into this mixed quarter the barber-surgeon sent his son, for no apparent reason revealed by record except to save money. There were good private schools in Halle in plenty, but he avoided them all. And, though he meant his son to be a lawyer, which in those days entailed the best education possible, he decided to save fees by sending him to the Grammar School, a carefully thought-out move which proved a boomerang. For the head of the Grammar School when young George Frideric entered was a music-loving rector Prætorius. A puritanical spirit of pietism was spreading in Halle at that date, and the head of this school had been caught up in it, and believed in the power of music to develop religious thought. It was into the hands of this man that the barber-surgeon unknowingly pushed his son, believing that all the nonsense of music would be worried out of him by the demands of schoolwork, as the Grammar School work was notoriously excessive and unproductive and diffuse. It led nowhere, but the pupil met and rubbed shoulders with the children of common tradesmen or nobody at all, and picked up a smattering of miscellaneous knowledge, which had no beginning and no end, because it had no object. The alms-child had as good a chance as the child of the notorious barber-surgeon.

The uncouth urchins, who were his companions, and the cramped means of education, must have given the child cause for a diversion of thoughts. They taught him at this seminary

1 Some of Handel's biographers have maintained that he was first a pupil at the Latin School at Halle, but this was not opened till 1698. The register of the Stadtkinder (town-children school) does not contain his name, consequently there is only the Lutheran Gymnasium to which he could have gone. Unfortunately the school register of this seminary was not kept by the Rector Prætorius during the years of Handel's childhood, and was only recontinued in 1705.

An Historic Courtyard

Latin and the sense of his God. The latter he had already discovered under the protection of Aunt Anna in the mysterious dusk of the Liebfrauenkirche. He had never revealed it even to her. But religious music had an intense fascination for him; the range of the organ-poor in comparison to the range of that same organ to-day-on which his fingers first learned to play, was the discovery of a new soul seeking its destiny. When he was not at the Grammar School, he seems to have been left to playing with street companions. He was, as the old barber-surgeon, his father, had been in his youth, intensely lonely. There is no record of the boy George Frideric having found a single friend in his early youth. They were just companions of youth's irresponsible pathway, who pass as unknown as they come.

He had the courtyard at the back of the Schlamm and its wide garden as a playground. Beyond it some odd barns and fields. On the town side he had an old courtyard, which still stands with its surrounding buildings as he knew it-the ancient palace of Cardinal Albrecht, a mediæval ruffian, who played havoc with the Church and the hearts of women.

The child, of course, knew nothing of Cardinal Albrecht or his works and his love passages. But Albrecht had been a sixteenth-century demigod of Halle, who had left out of his riches a rather desolate courtyard between a cramped run of buildings, in which the child George Frideric Handel was to play. The story of that courtyard is worth telling, since it must have been one of the principal haunts of the boy. It stands now, as it stood in his day, opposite the place where he was born, dull and shabby and with all the overburdening sense of lost romance. The daintily-clad mistresses of the Cardinal who built it have gone down in the dust; the glories of the Moritzburg, which the Cardinal inhabited, are as a tale that is told. All the memories of high rank, of riches, of life that sailed above that which Halle knew in this age have passed just as worldly things pass in their appointed time, leaving an old courtyard, melancholy, seldom stirred by the sound of feet.

The courtyard is still as he knew it; from his bedroom window he must have viewed its solemn entrance. Originally

« AnteriorContinua »