Page:Romain Rolland Handel.djvu/31

Rh 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, 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"). He played his