whole of the Germany of that day; none which offered a more fruitful field of activity to a young man. Let us be sure that a Beethoven would not have been insensible to them. But Handel was a pure musician; he was music itself; nothing else could occupy his thoughts.
In the year in which he had completed his terms in the Faculty of Law he found a post of organist at Halle: and in a church more than strictly Lutheran, being of the Reformed order, where the organist had expressly to conform to the new cult. However, he was only seventeen years old.[1] This simple fact showed what musical authority he already exercised in the town where he had studied law.[2] Not only was he organist, but he was also Professor at the College of the Reformists; he took vocal music there for two hours every week; he selected the most gifted of his pupils and formed from them a vocal and instrumental body which was to be heard every Sunday in one church or another of the town. He included in his musical repertoire, chorales, Psalms, motets, cantatas—which were changed every Sunday. Truly an excellent school for learning to write quickly and well. Handel there formed his creative fecundity.[3] Of hundreds of cantatas which
- ↑ The yearly contract with the Cathedral church was dated March 30, 1702, a month after he had signed the faculty of law.
- ↑ Telemann, passing through Halle in 1701, said that he made the acquaintance of Handel, who was already there "a man of importance" ("Dem damahls schon wichtigen Herrn Georg Friedrich Haendel")—a singular epithet indeed to apply to a child of sixteen years! Chrysander had indeed reason to insist on the precocious maturity of Handel, "No one was his equal in that, even J. S. Bach, who developed much more slowly!"
- ↑ Already for several years he had composed "like the devil," as he said of himself once.
