Handel | Page 4

Torgau, ten years earlier. Vienna introduced
Italian opera in 1631, and, generally speaking, the Catholic princes of
Germany, who one after another followed the example of Vienna,
preferred opera in Italian. Protestant Germany inclined more to opera in
its own language, though towards the end of the century Italian
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 Störtebeker, 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