Handel
Handel
Book Excerpt
who had been hastily
married at the age of sixteen. Born near Weissenfels in 1674, he had begun
his operatic career at Brunswick at the age of eighteen; three years later
he took over the direction of the opera at Hamburg, where he produced a
large number of operas composed by himself. As a composer, Keiser had a
singular fluency of melody in a style that hovers between those of Germany
and Italy; had he been a man of more solid character he might have
accomplished greater things. But he had inherited from his parents a love
of pleasure and debauchery; extravagant in his private life, he was no less
extravagant in his theatrical management, and was ready to provide his
audiences with anything in the way of startling sensation. One of his most
famous operas was on the subject of Störtebeker, a notorious highwayman
(1704), in which murders were represented with the most disgusting realism.
Hamburg was the Venice of the north and, like Venice, a city of pleasure; but its pleasures were often of a coarse and
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