The elder Handel’s motive was, according to his own lights, perhaps quite as defensible. He had no wish to see a son of his degraded to the rank of a lackey or some form of vagabond, than which a musician at that time hardly seemed any better. The barber-surgeon fully shared the prejudice of the average “strong man” against the artist. Rolland describes the bourgeois middle class German attitude of the 17th Century on the subject of music: “It was for them a mere art of amusement, and not a serious profession. Many of the masters of that time, Schütz, Kuhnau, Rosenmüller, were lawyers or theologians, before they devoted themselves to music.” And old George Handel is supposed to have threatened: “If that boy ever shows any further inclination towards music or noises disguised as such, I will kill it!” There was, indeed, one way in which the boy could with a certain impunity satisfy his craving for music—in church, by listening to the organ and the singing of the choir. Such enjoyment supplanted to some extent the games and childish pleasures of ordinary boys. He was, it appears, a somewhat lonely child, who made few friends and whose “playground” was a dismal courtyard opposite his home. The father settled on the law as a fine, honest and lucrative profession for his son. Jurisprudence was to rescue Handel from the snares of music, just as in time it was to be the “salvation” of Schumann, as school mastering was by paternal decree to be the destiny of Schubert, and medicine that of Berlioz. Here, too, it was quite as ineffectual! All the same, the youth was not to escape his share of legal study; and by the time he reached 16 he entered the University of Halle as “studiosus juris.” About eight years earlier, however, fate in the paradoxical shape of Father Handel himself took a hand in George Frideric’s future. He had his son accompany him on a journey to nearby Weissenfels, the residence of the Duke of Saxony. That personage asked the lad to play something on the chapel organ and was so stirred by what he heard that he counselled the obdurate father not to thwart the child’s ambition. From an ordinary person the hard-boiled parent would have taken such advice in very bad part; coming from the mouth of a prince it acquired the force of a command. So he decided to allow his son to study music with the unspoken reservation, however, that he must belong first and foremost to the law. Actually, these musical studies might be said to have begun in Weissenfels, for here young Handel had a chance to hear some of the works of the Nürnberg master, Johann Krieger; and in this same town, a mere stone’s throw from Halle, he had his first taste of opera, which was to thrust deep roots in his soul.