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But seated in the half-light of the diningroom, sitting stiffly before the shaded candles on the table, she seemed a power, a presence. She listened and attended with a drugged attention. The party was gay and extravagant in appearance, everybody had put on evening dress except Birkin and Joshua Mattheson.
Unfortunately Mattheson, whose chronology is always rather uncertain, does not tell us when this occurred. In addition to his duties in the orchestra, Handel earned a living by teaching private pupils, and through Mattheson he was engaged by Mr. John Wyche, the English Envoy, as music-master to his small son Cyril.
He evidently regarded him as a very simple and provincial young musician, a notable organist indeed, and a master of such learned devices as counterpoint and fugue, but a dull composer, turning out endless arias and cantatas with no sense of the fashionable Italian taste. It was Mattheson, by his own account, who introduced Handel to the musical life of Hamburg.
It is not needful here to tell the story of his brilliant life and the big events it crowded into the four and seventy years between 1685 and 1759. His friend Mattheson, like Beethoven, spent his later years in the dungeon of deafness.
Little is known about the composition of this work; Handel apparently had a copy made after his return to England and sent this to Mattheson, and it was performed at Hamburg in 1717. Handel does not seem to have had it performed in England; he used up the music afterwards for other works.
Handel seems to have arrived in Hamburg in early summer of 1703, for we first hear of him there on July 2, when he met Johann Mattheson in the church of St. Mary Magdalen. It seems to have been a chance acquaintance, to judge from Mattheson's account; it stuck in Mattheson's memory for many years and he remembered especially the pastry-cook's boy who blew the organ for Handel and himself.
Mattheson, always eager to exhibit his versatility, sang the part of Antony himself, and, not content with that, came into the orchestra as soon as Antony had died on the stage and kept himself in view of the audience by conducting at the harpsichord.
Early in 1704 Mattheson went to Holland, where he had some success in organising concerts at Amsterdam, and was offered the post of organist at Haarlem. He seems to have had some idea of seeking his fortune in England; he spoke English well, and may have had useful connexions in England through Mr. John Wyche.
Almira, the libretto of which was partly in German and partly in Italian, ran continuously for about twenty performances until February 25, when it was succeeded by Nero, another opera which Handel had hastily composed for the occasion. Nero, in which Mattheson sang the title part, was a failure. The music is lost, but the libretto survives, and that is enough to account for the collapse.
On December 30 a town councillor effected a reconciliation; the rivals dined together at Mattheson's house and went on to the rehearsal of Almira, which was brought out on January 8, 1705, with Mattheson as the principal tenor.
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