George Frideric Handel, portrait by Balthasar Denner. National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Hamburg, 5 December 1704, the opera house on the Gänsemarkt. On stage is Johann Mattheson’s Cleopatra, and Mattheson, twenty-three, is the star of the city: composer, singer, diplomat in the making, a man who succeeds at everything. That evening he sings the part of Antony himself, who has the good taste to die halfway through; after which, as is his habit, he goes down into the pit to reclaim his place at the harpsichord, from which the performance was directed. At the harpsichord, however, sits a stubborn nineteen-year-old Saxon who will not get up: Georg Friedrich Händel, his friend, his protégé, and not at all inclined to give up the chair.
The argument continues outside, in the square, in front of the departing audience: harsh words, then swords, a real duel. At one point Mattheson’s blade strikes Handel squarely in the chest, and snaps. It has hit a large metal button on his coat. The source, and this is the best part, is Mattheson himself, who told the episode in print years later, with the elegance of a man who knows he came close to going down in history as the man who killed Handel over a chair. The two made peace quickly: a few weeks later Mattheson was standing godfather to his friend’s first opera, Almira, singing in it too.
The anecdote is irresistible, but the context is more so. That chair was really worth a duel: power sat at the harpsichord. Whoever was there governed the show, in the age when the podium did not exist, and for two ambitious men in Hamburg the question was not the furniture, it was the succession to the city’s musical throne. History then divided the roles with curious justice: Handel took the operas, London and immortality; Mattheson took theory, and wrote the books with which we still reconstruct how that music was meant to be played. Of one of those books, the greatest, we will be talking tomorrow on these pages. The button, sadly, was not preserved: it is the one relic in the history of music that deserves a display case more than many scores.