from the school at the time when his father, intending him for the legal profession, forbad him to have anything to do with music. All the musical instruments in the house were burnt, and the boy's passion for the art must have satisfied itself merely with listening to the town musicians as they played chorales each evening from the tower of the Liebfrauenkirche, had not a kind relation managed to secrete a clavichord in a loft, where its gentle tones could not be heard as Handel taught himself to play. In 1688 his father was appointed surgeon and 'Kammerdiener' to Duke Johann Adolf I of Weissenfels, and before Handel was seven years old he went with his father on a visit to that court (cf. Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the late G. F. Handel, 1760, p. 2). There little Handel was completely happy, for he was allowed not only to attend the rehearsals of the duke's band, but on a certain Sunday to try his skill on the organ ; the duke was struck with his performance, asked who he was, and urged the old surgeon to give the boy a musical education. Accordingly, on his return to Halle, Handel's father allowed him to study music under Zachau, then organist of the Liebfrauenkirche, with whom he remained for some three years, learning the organ, harpsichord, violin, and oboe, besides counterpoint and fugue. He was required to produce a new composition every week, and an important specimen of his work at this time is extant in a set of six sonatas for two oboes and bass, discovered, many years after their composition, by Lord Polwarth (afterwards Earl of Marchmont) when travelling in Germany. They were given by Polwarth to his flute-master, Weidemann, and were shown by Weidemann to Handel himself, who said, as he recognised his early performances, 'I used to write like the devil in those days.' The book disappeared for many years, but a copy of the three parts was found by Mr. W. G. Cusins among the manuscripts at Buckingham Palace, and the works were published in vol. xxvii. of the German Handel Society's edition (see the preface to that volume).
That his father took Handel in the spring of 1696 to Berlin is more probable than that he was sent there in charge of a friend, as Chrysander (i. 52) says, in the autumn of that year. In either case there is no doubt that his appearance at the court of the elector of Brandenburg took place before 1698, the date assigned to it by Mainwaring. The two illustrious musicians whom he met there treated him very differently ; Attilio Ariosti gave him much good advice and encouragement, while Buononcini, as if prescient of the future, was cold and reserved, and tried to confound him by presenting him with a very difficult composition to be played at sight, an ordeal which the child passed through with perfect success. The elector was anxious to keep Handel in his band and to send him to Italy to study, but the father declined the offer on the ground that he required his son's presence at home. He died a few months later, on 17 Feb. 1697 (cf. funeral sermon by J. C. Olearius and memoir by Archdeacon Jahn in Professor J. O. Opel, 'Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Tonkünstlers Händel' in the Neue Mitteilungen des thilringisch-sdchsischen Vereins, bd. xvii.) A poem was written on the occasion by the composer, who subscribes himself as 'der freien Künste ergebener' 'devoted to the fine arts' (Opel, 'Der Kammerdiener Georg Händel und sein 'Sohn Georg Friedrich' in the Zeitschrift fur allgemeine Geschichte, 1885, p. 156). A volume of musical extracts from works by Zachau, Heinrich Albert, Froberger, Krieger, Kerl, Ebner, Adam Strungk, and other writers of the period, signed 'G. F. H.' and dated 1698, was in existence down to 1799, the year of the publication of the Rev. W. Coxe's 'Anecdotes of Handel,' but since that time it has disappeared (Schoelcher, Life of Handel, p. 8).
A casual mention of his name in Telemann's autobiographical contribution to Mattheson's 'Ehrenpforte' shows that even in 1701 Handel had won the esteem and respect of his contemporaries. On 10 Feb. 1702 he was entered as a student at the Friedrichs-Universität, in obedience, it has been sup- posed, to the wish of his father that he should become a lawyer. This theory cannot be sustained in the face of the fact that he was not entered as studiosus juris (Opel, Zeitschrift, &c., p. 159). On 13 March following he was appointed organist of the Schloss und Domkirche at the Moritzburg, the chief church of the reformed Lutheran body at Halle (E. Heineich, G. F. Handel, ein deutscher Tonmeister, Leipzig, 1884). His duties as organist comprised the regular composition of church cantatas for Sundays and festivals, as well as the instruction of the pupils at the school connected with the church on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons (Opel, p. 158). It is uncertain whether we have in the two oratorios and a church cantata accepted by von Winterfeld (Evang. Kirchengesang, iii. 159-64) any of the 'several hundred' works which Chrysander supposes him to have written at this period. Chrysander considers the cantata 'Ach Herr, mir armer Sunder' to be genuine, but its authenticity is very doubtful. At the close of the year of proba-
