Friday, December 5, 2008

This Day in Music History (Handel Survives Sword Duel--Barely)


December 5, 1704—The future composer of one of the most beloved pieces sacred music in the Christmas season, George Frideric Handel, became involved in a dispute with another composer that rapidly escalated into a sword duel. The two hotheaded young antagonists might have found themselves in a terrible holiday tragedy except for an act of God: the blade of his opponent was stopped by a button on Handel’s coat.

Once, the great humorist Robert Benchley wrote an essay that, to my surprise, has not dated in the slightest, more than three-quarters of a century later. As he surveyed “What College Did to Me,” the Harvard graduate did not bring to mind the great thoughts of civilization’s masterminds, but the oddball trivia that stuck to the mind like Velcro. (For instance: Charlemagne “either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.”)

I experienced something like this at Columbia University. Our Music Humanities instructor, Doug Stumpf, was just the kind of genial, well-prepared, well-informed instructor who makes required courses such as this one as painless as you can get. (And I’m happy to see, judging from the jacket of a recent book of his, that he’s not only an editor at Vanity Fair but that he’s aged considerably better than many of his students.)

But for all his skill, I’m afraid that I don’t remember the fine points about the basso continuo, development, or the Gregorian chant, but instead some bizarre phenomena of musical and religious history: the castrati. When I learned about the contretemps involving Handel and frenemy Johann Mattheson, I found another incident that, I’m afraid, I won’t be able to forget anytime soon.

Several years ago, I recall, The New Yorker ran a wickedly funny piece imagining several of the great figures in the Great American Songbook (Cole Porter? George Gershwin?) engaging in hip-hop style gunplay. The piece was so hilarious because of how incongruous those 1930s swells seem in comparison with Sean “Puffy” Combs, Tupac, etc.

But classical music is even more sedate than that, even. Or at least it was, the last time I checked. But the war-of-words-turned-swordplay between 19-year-old Handel and 23-year-old Mattheson suggested something else entirely.

Let’s get this out of the way immediately, folks: the fight, believe it or not, did not involve a woman. Not, that is, unless you regard an opera named Cleopatra—the handiwork of Mattheson—as a stand-in for the real thing. (Well, it would involve something with that hussy, wouldn’t it? For the latest evidence of the trouble she could create between two males, see the Season 2 DVD episodes of the HBO series Rome.)

As the opera was being performed, Mattheson wanted Handel to yield the harpsichord to him. Nothing doing, said Handel, who, by common agreement, was a big guy with an “explosive temperament,” according to critic Harold C. Schonburg.

At this point, I figure, what the two needed was a peacemaker, another young guy who could speak their language. Someone (if he could get past that German thing, that is), like Jeff Spicoli, the stoned-out surfer played by Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I can just imagine how he’d separate the combatants: “Dudes, what are you doing here? Chill out! Lighten up! Increase the peace! Pass the bong (not necessarily in that order, of course!).”

Well, I’ve just described above the events of that day. I didn’t mention the most oddball fact of all: Just before the new year, the two men broke bread, reconciled over dinner, and, in the words of Mattheson, became “better friends than ever.” A good thing, too, because it allowed Handel not only to live to see his first opera, Almira, performed in the new year, but also to live till nearly 40 years later, when his Messiah premiered in Dublin.

The way I figure it, Handel was saved by God so he (and we) could live to sing His praises.

The only other time I’ve heard about two men becoming excellent friends after a duel came in 1813. As you might expect, one of the figures was Andrew Jackson, who seemed to have gotten involved in affairs of honor with nearly half the males of North America. The other was Thomas Hart Benton, the Missouri senator whose flamboyance as well as his political bravery made him a natural for John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.

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