Handel arrived at Hamburg during the summer of 1703. One can imagine him there at that time of life as in the portrait painted by Thornhill, which is in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge: a long face, calm, but a little coarse, large and serious eyes, large and straight nose, ample forehead, vigorous mouth, with thick lips, cheeks and chin already full, very straight head without wig, and covered with a biretta after the manner of Wagner. "He was rich in power, and strong in will," says Mattheson, who, by the way, was the first acquaintance he made in Hamburg. Mattheson, who was then twenty-two,[1] four years older than Handel, came from a rich Hamburg family, and possessed vast knowledge. He spoke English, Italian, French, was trained for the law, well grounded in music, could play nearly all the instruments, and wrote operas, of which he was the poet, the composer, and the actor all in one. Above all he was a master theorist, and the most energetic critic of German music. With an immense amour-propre and many passionate dislikes, he had a robust spirit, very sound, and very honest, a sort of Boileau or of Lessing in music half a century before la Dramaturgie. On the one side he combated scholastic routine and abstract science in the name of nature, and laid down the rule that "music is that which sounds well" ("Musik, müsse schön klingen").[2] He played his
- ↑ He was born at Hamburg in 1681, and died there in 1764. See L. Meinardus: J. Mattheson und seine Verdienste um die deutsche Tonkunst, 1870 ; and Heinrich Schmidt: J. Mattheson, ein Förderer der deutschen Tonkunst, 1897, Leipzig.
- ↑ He violently attacked in the Volkommene Kapellmeister (1739) the "Pythagoreans" of whom the chief was Lor. Christoph Mizler, of Leipzig, who attempted to work out music on the lines of mathematics and logic. With the "Aristoxenians" (harmonists) he wished to rescue music from an iron vice, from the hands of the skeleton of a dead science, and from scholasticism. The ear was his law. "Let your art be encompassed where the ear alone reigns: that should suffice. "Where nature and experience leads you, all is well. Do it, play it, sing it; for wrong doing, avoid it, efface it" (Das forschende Orchestre). Against the scholastic, he opposed the fecund and living harmonic science (Harmonische Wissenschaft); he demanded that the latter should be taught in the universities, and offered to bequeath a large sum to found a Chair for a musical lectureship in the college of his native city.
