Death of Handel's Father

him. What Möller paid for the practice no one ever knew except Frau Dorothea and perhaps Aunt Anna.

Change then began to creep into the household as the influence which had ruled inviolate over it so many years departed and left nothing of its power. Frau Dorothea cut the Schlamm house into two halves; she lived in one half with Aunt Anna and her children, and let the other. Such a thing as letting half the family domain would have shocked the pride of the dead barber-surgeon. Now that he had gone, his widow began to gain something of that sense of independence which she had never known since the days when, as Dorothea Taust, she made the barber-surgeon wait till her own chosen time for their wedding. Thirteen years of married life in the Schlamm house had not entirely crushed out that sturdiness of character which had formerly been hers in the Giebichenstein parsonage, when she arranged the affairs of the Taust household. The Schlamm house had been large and rather solitary in its extent, with its low corridors and square ugly rooms. was imposing as the barber-surgeon had always been imposing, needing space, carrying importance.

It

The Möller case settled, the Schlamm house divided up and made more comfortable and compact, Frau Dorothea devoted her life and energies to the training of her children, whom she educated to a belief in God and the best instincts of the home. Probably to this strong Lutheran faith of hers, which she so carefully passed on to her son, the great influence of religion began to stir in the boy, which later found its true expression in his Church music and Messiah. His first visits to the Liebfrauenkirche with Aunt Anna, later his work there with Zachow, had made his mind ready to receive the seeds of religious thought which came from his mother, and was an influence directly traced to that period which immediately followed the barber-surgeon's passing.

One unwritten commandment made by the barber-surgeon remained. The boy was to train himself for the Law, and, when the venerable figure had gone, George Frideric pursued his studies with greater zeal than ever. All his leisure from his legitimate studies he devoted to music; so much his father had agreed. Zachow was still helping him, and Zachow was doubt

less responsible for the boy securing certain audiences for his playing which in the ordinary way he could not have obtained. Certainly he acquired, and very quickly acquired, a local reputation. People came from a distance to hear him perform. Georg Philipp Telemann, who was later to achieve a great vogue in Germany by his Church music, heard the young Handel and wrote a great eulogy of him in the autobiography which, at a later date, he contributed to Mattheson's "EhrenPforte." Telemann was four years older than Handel. His rise was meteoric; his Passion music a forerunner of the greater qualities of Handel. But his reputation fell away after his death with the same ease as it had arisen, because, in the main his music was artificial, and had only a certain ripeness, insufficient to carry the work to posterity. He was a person of peculiar conceit, who yet had the fairness of mind to admit the genius of Handel, and there is evidence that at a later stage a warm friendship sprang up between them, which remained unspoiled by any sense of rivalry. Indeed Handel had a keen admiration for Telemann, whom he said could "write a motet for eight voices more quickly than one could write a letter.” 2 Five years almost to a day (10th February 1702) after the death of the barber-surgeon, George Frideric Handel carried out what would have been his father's most ardent wish-he entered Halle University as a student. But he did this purely for the sake of his social position, and not with the intention of embracing any particular study. His biographer, Chrysander, declares that he went to the University to study Law, but Handel did not enter himself among the Law Students, which is proof that obedience to the old barber-surgeon's dictum had ceased to count. He had already chosen his career. The University at this period was comparatively new and was the outcome of the old academy for the nobility (Ritter Akademie), which the Elector of Brandenburg had founded in 1691. When

1 Rockstro says that Telemann heard Handel play in 1701 whilst on his way to Leipzig. But he must have been in error, for Telemann went to Leipzig in 1700. If he heard Handel play at a later date it must have been during a subsequent visit to Halle. The fact that he came from Magdeburg and would therefore pass through Halle on his way to Leipzig would suggest that 1700 was the year in which he met the Handel prodigy, then fifteen years of age.

2 Hawkins, " A General History of the Science and Practice of Music," 1776.

His signature-at toot of page-as he wrote it in the book of Halle University on the day he entered as a student.

Handel as a Student

Handel signed his name on the students' record it was under the direction of Prorector Buddeus.

Student life at Halle in 1702 was far removed from drudgery or abnormal toil. Roystering was frequent, duelling openly indulged in, and sport and the copious drinking of wine and beer part and parcel of the students' day and night. The University itself possessed a privilege for a wine and beer house, which it let yearly to a magistrate or a private individual, and so found a source of income to supplement its none too plentiful funds. It also ran a coffee shop. Duelling had assumed such aggravated proportion among the students here and elsewhere, that, six weeks after Handel joined the University, a royal decree was issued that it should be excluded from all royal Universities, but the high spirits of the students soon broke out in other directions. They made periodical attacks on the town hall and other public places, and, after ringing the "storm-bell," armed citizens had to come to the aid of the town guards to quell the disturbance.1

Not that Handel had much heart for these jousts, for the extraordinary energy which characterised his life began in these years. Barely a month after he had joined the University a scandal occurred at the Cathedral, or Dom-Kirche, attached to the Moritzburg, where one Leporin, a Leipzig musician, had presided at the organ for the past four years. Leporin was a dissolute character, but a master of the instrument. He drank, he roystered. Often when the congregation forgathered to worship, the organ was lacking a player, for Leporin was either in a drunken stupor or away on one of his regular carousals. Some of the earliest biographers of Handel threw much of the blame for Leporin's behaviour on Zachow of the Liebfrauenkirche, with no reason at all. A more flagrant injustice cannot be imagined. Zachow at all times had been of temperate, even puritanical habits, and often absurdly mean in the matter of luxury. The man was too keen on his work to be otherwise, and when he died in 1712 it was in peculiarly humble circumstances.

The Leporin scandal at the Dom outraged Halle. The Lutherans at the Liebfrauenkirche blamed the Calvinists, to 1 Dreyhaupt.