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 Stoertebeker, 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 licentious description. Life
in Hamburg was probably not much unlike that of Restoration London; but
though Keiser may well be set beside Purcell, Hamburg had no dramatists to
compare with Congreve, hardly even with Shadwell. Jeremy Collier, however,
was far outdone in vituperation by the puritan clergy who, not altogether
without reason, castigated the immorality of the Hamburg stage.

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 was four years older than Handel; he was
one of those precociously gifted, versatile, attractive, and rather vain
young men who are endowed with so many talents that they never achieve
distinction in any branch of art. He is remembered now only by the literary
work of his later life, in which he shows himself as a voluminous pedant
and an embittered critic. He made friends with Handel on the spot, and took
him under his own protection, providing him with almost daily free meals
at his father's house. He evidently regarded him as a very simple and