Alla Breve Book

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This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
II GEORGE FREDERIC HANDEL There exists a well-known painting which pictures the boy Handel, in his night-shirt, seated before the old harpsichord in the dead of night, and surprised by the astonished family, which is headed by the father, lantern in hand, all pressing into the room and bewildered at seeing the youngster's calm disregard for paternal injunctions. History does not tell whether the immediate consequences of the discovery were sensibly painful for little George; but if they were, they did not deter him from pursuing, all his life, a vocation to which his singular genius called him in spite of his father's wish that he should be a lawyer. And the little player in a nightie grew up to be a great master in a fine periwig, clothed in silk and velvet, decked with jewels, the friend ofkings and dukes, basking in the glorious rays of popular and universal veneration. Handel was born at Halle, in Saxony, on February 23 of the year 1685, or a little less than a month before the birth-date of J. S. Bach, whom he survived by nine years, dying at London on April 14, 1759. But the lives of these two great contemporaries have little in common, save that both lost their eyesight with advancing age. Bach married twice, Handel not at all. Bach never left the shadow of the church; Handel was always drawn to the footlights of the stage. Bach is the luminous daybreak, Handel the towering sunset cloud. Simultaneous, they are well nigh antipodal. Providence played an important role in the life of Handel. A chance visit with his father, a bleeder and surgeon, to the court of a German princeling who expressed his delight when he happened to hear the boy play, was the cause of his receiving music lessons. He made such rapid strides that,ten years old, he was a performer of no mean...