Some wit, comparing Bach and Handel, remarked that both masters were “born in the same year and killed by the same doctor.” Born in the same year they unquestionably were, Handel almost an exact month before his great contemporary. Halle, where Handel first saw the light, is a comparatively short distance from Eisenach, where Bach was cradled. It lies not far from the eastern boundary of that Saxon-Thuringian country which harbored some of the imposing musical figures of Germany during the 17th Century. Such names as those of the famous “three S’s”—Schein, Scheidt and Schütz—of Kuhnau, Krieger, Melchior Franck, Ahle, Rosenmüller, echo powerfully through the history of that period. George Frideric Handel was born on Monday, February 23, 1685. That the name has been variously spelled need not trouble us; strict consistency in such matters lay as lightly on folks of this epoch as it did in the age of Mozart. However, it may be pointed out that in this booklet “Frideric” is retained in place of “Frederick” because Handel himself repeatedly used this form and because the British authorities thus inscribed him when he became a British citizen. The Handel family came from Silesia, where Valentine Handel, the composer’s grandfather, had been a coppersmith in Breslau. George Handel, the father, had been “barber-surgeon,” attached to the service of Saxon and Swedish armies, then to that of Duke Augustus of Saxony. For a time he prospered and in 1665 he bought himself “Am Schlamm,” at Halle-an-der-Saale, a palatial house, which in the course of years barely escaped total destruction by fire. In any case, Father Handel was to know the ups and downs of fortune; and the vicissitudes he endured did not sweeten an always morose and surly character. He has been described as “a strong man, a man of vast principles, bigoted, intensely disagreeable, a man with a rather withered heart.” A portrait of him gave Romain Rolland “the impression of one who has never smiled.” He was twice married, the first time to the widow of a barber, a woman ten years his senior, the second to Dorothea Taust, a pastor’s daughter, thirty years his junior. By the first he had six children, by the second four, of whom George Frideric was the second.