Handel | Page 4

gradually gained the upper hand at the more important courts. Native German opera owed its origin partly to the visit of the English comedians early in the century, and partly to the musical plays acted by school-boys; from the English "jigs" came the use of short popular songs, and from the school plays the tendency of the early German operas to be of a more or less sacred or edifying character.
Handel's friend, the composer Telemann, tells us that it was not unusual for students from the University of Leipzig to go to Berlin to hear the Italian opera, which had been established by the Electress Sophia Charlotte in 1700, and this suggests that Handel's visit to Berlin may have taken place in 1703 rather than in his childhood. But he certainly had opportunities for seeing operas nearer home. There had been many German operas performed at Halle itself during the twenty years before Handel's birth, and Duke Johann Adolf opened an opera-house at Weissenfels in 1685, in which Philipp Krieger produced German operas regularly for the next thirty years. There was thus every reason for young Handel's growing ambitious to become a composer for the stage, although we have no evidence of his having ever attempted dramatic composition until he left Halle in 1703.
The most important of all the north German opera-houses was that of Hamburg, where the opera did not depend on the patronage of a court, but was organised, as at Venice, as a public entertainment. Hamburg had attempted German opera as early as 1648, and it is interesting to note that the English composer William Brade was one of those who provided the music; but the real history of the Hamburg opera may be said to begin with the performance of Theile's Adam and Eve in the newly built theatre in the Goose-Market in 1678. When Handel arrived in Hamburg in the summer of 1703 the biblical operas had long come to an end, and the theatre was under the management of Reinhold Keiser.
Keiser was a musician of remarkable genius. His father was a disreputable organist, and his mother a young lady of noble family who had been hastily married at the age of sixteen. Born near Weissenfels in 1674, he had begun his operatic career at Brunswick at the age of eighteen; three years later he took over the direction of the opera at Hamburg, where he produced a large number of operas composed by himself. As a composer, Keiser had a singular fluency of melody in a style that hovers between those of Germany and Italy; had he been a man of more solid character he might have accomplished greater things. But he had inherited from his parents a love of pleasure and debauchery; extravagant in his private life, he was no less extravagant in his theatrical management, and was ready to provide his audiences with anything in the way of startling sensation. One of his most famous operas was on the subject of St?rtebeker, a notorious highwayman (1704), in which murders were represented with the most disgusting realism.
Hamburg was the Venice of the north and, like Venice, a city of pleasure; but its pleasures were often of a coarse and licentious description. Life in Hamburg was probably not much unlike that of Restoration London; but though Keiser may well be set beside Purcell, Hamburg had no dramatists to compare with Congreve, hardly even with Shadwell. Jeremy Collier, however, was far outdone in vituperation by the puritan clergy who, not altogether without reason, castigated the immorality of the Hamburg stage.
Handel seems to have arrived in Hamburg in early summer of 1703, for we first hear of him there on July 2, when he met Johann Mattheson in the church of St. Mary Magdalen. It seems to have been a chance acquaintance, to judge from Mattheson's account; it stuck in Mattheson's memory for many years and he remembered especially the pastry-cook's boy who blew the organ for Handel and himself. Mattheson was four years older than Handel; he was one of those precociously gifted, versatile, attractive, and rather vain young men who are endowed with so many talents that they never achieve distinction in any branch of art. He is remembered now only by the literary work of his later life, in which he shows himself as a voluminous pedant and an embittered critic. He made friends with Handel on the spot, and took him under his own protection, providing him with almost daily free meals at his father's house. He evidently regarded him as a very simple and provincial young musician, a notable organist indeed, and a master of such learned devices as counterpoint and fugue, but a dull composer, turning out endless arias and cantatas with no sense of the fashionable Italian taste.
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