Even when he flew into a rage people felt that he was laughing in his sleeve. Thus, when he seized the irascible Cuzzoni, who refused to sing one of his airs, by the waist, and, carrying her to the window, threatened to throw her into the street, he said, with a bantering air: "Now, madame, I know very well that you are a regular she-devil; but I'll make you realise that I am Beelzebub the prince of devils!"[1]
***
All his life he enjoyed a wonderful amount of freedom. He hated all restrictions and avoided all official appointments; for we cannot so describe his position of teacher to the princesses; the important musical posts about the Court and the fat pensions were never bestowed upon him, even after his naturalisation as an English citizen; they were conferred upon indifferent composers.[2] He took no pains to humour these; he spoke of his English colleagues with contemptuous sarcasm. Indifferently educated, apart from music,[3] he despised academics and academic musicians. He was not
- ↑ In the text cited by Mainwaring this is in French.—Händel was fond of speaking French, of which he had a very good knowledge, and employed almost exclusively in his correspondence, even with his family.
- ↑ He was professor of music to the royal princesses, with a salary of £200—a salary lower, as Chrysander points out, than that of the dancing-master, Anthony l'Abbé, who received £240, and whose name always headed the list. Morice Green, organist at Westminster and doctor of music, for whose benefit two important musical posts were united in 1735—the directorship of the Court orchestra and that of the Chapel Royal, until then exercised by John Eccles and Dr. Croft—drew a salary of £400.
- ↑ But according to Hawkins he had been a diligent student. His father had intended him for the law, and in 1703 Händel was still inscribed on the rolls of the faculty of law at Halle, where the famous Thomasius was his teacher. It was not until he had passed his eighteenth year that he finally devoted himself to music.
