Handel and Heidegger

cried I, 'I would burn my instrument!' Such was the innocent presumption of childish ignorance." 1

Thus did Handel, aided by Heidegger and Aaron Hill, work his way through drawing-rooms of the town. His amazing Rinaldo, and the introduction of musical friends, obtained the entrées for him, but it was his performances on the harpsichord that made him popular. He had lifted London's music up from decay they said. He played at the harpsichord, he improvised. And soon that little circle which clustered about Piccadilly knew that a rather unobtrusive giant had indeed arrived, and somehow been accepted on his own guarantees. An unheard-of performance.

Mary Granville's record is important, because it proves Handel's early association with Heidegger, although they were not to be partners in productions during Handel's first visit to England. Heidegger at the time was manager of the opera house; an enterprising person, astute, stupidly generous. He had come to England a beggar three years previously, under very peculiar circumstances. The Heideggers were an old Nüremberg family. The grandfather of this man of ugliness had departed from the German town and gone to Zürich on a business tour. He had only intended to stay in the town a few days before leaving for the Strassburg Fair, and during this period he ordered a suit of clothes from a tailor which was to be ready in time for his departure by the lake boat. The clothes did not arrive. Heidegger could not go without them, so the boat departed, leaving him rather melancholy on the landing-stage. But ere it had reached Fahr it was wrecked and everyone on board was drowned.'

Heidegger was evidently pleased with the tailor's sloth, since he owed the preservation of his life to it. So he settled. in Zürich. His grandson, grim and ugly, had a love affair in the town, and, on being thrown over, travelled as a valet throughout Germany. In 1707 he turned up in England to confer with the English Government upon some unknown subject on behalf of the Swiss." He was probably an opportunist, glib of tongue, who failed. The English Government 1 "Life and Correspondence of Mrs Delany," pp. 5 and 6. 2 Theodor Vetter," Johann Jakob Heidegger.'

3 Ibid.

would have none of him, so he entered the Queen's Life Guards as a private.

People like Heidegger never really fail. He got out of the Guards. He connived his way into the highest social circles by "his elegant manners and amiable personality." They called him the "Swiss Count," simply because he looked the part. He gathered together some money from loiterers round Society's dinner tables and began to produce operas. Out of one he cleared five hundred guineas. So he went on, a delightful opportunist, so revoltingly ugly that women feared to look upon him.

Heidegger was a hypnotic personality. His hideous appearance began to be out-balanced by his sheer cleverness. When Handel came to England he was probably the most brilliant adept at stage-craft in London. His sense of drama was astonishing. He made money, drank it, tossed it away. He stalked through the drawing-rooms as Poe's plague-figure did at a later age in the Masque of the Red Death. And then the very ugliness of him seemed to create a sense of fascination. He had a wonderful, mellow voice that made it difficult to break away when he was speaking. WomenSociety-women-from sheer revulsion, changed to interest in the man. The The way he commanded, the way he talked, the way he drew a whole room towards him, wrapped him about with a subtle mystery. Then he began to receive offers of marriage, and was soon accepted as a hero who had somehow been forgotten by God-a man, handicapped by his hideous appearance, who fought and conquered adversity through open courage and direct personality.

This was the Heidegger who introduced Handel to that child Mary Granville. What his age was no one knew, for he seemed to pass year after year without changing. He found his triumphs, and later, beside Handel, found the heights and the depths, to fade away in the end as secretly as he had come, mysterious and never understood. Some said that he rejoiced in the fact that his ugliness made him ever distinctive. Be that as it may, no one understood John Jacob Heidegger save the person of that name. But few people understood Handel as well as he.