Her age was thirty-two. Her
first child, born in 1684, died at birth; her second, born February 23,
1685, was baptised the following day with the name of George Frederic.
The town of Halle had originally belonged to the Dukes of Saxony, but after
the Thirty Years' War it was assigned to the Elector of Brandenburg. George
Frederic Handel was therefore born a Prussian. But Duke Augustus of Saxony
was allowed to keep his court at the Moritzburg in Halle, and it was this
prince who made George Handel his personal surgeon. After Duke Augustus's
death in 1680, Halle was definitely transferred to Brandenburg, and the new
Duke, Johann Adolf, took up his residence at Weissenfels, twenty-five miles
to the south-west of Halle. At the time of George Frederic's birth, Halle
had relapsed into being a quiet provincial town. The musical life of
Germany in those days was chiefly centred in the numerous small courts,
each of which did its best to imitate the magnificence of Louis XIV at
Paris and Versailles. But the seventeenth century, although it produced
very few musicians of outstanding greatness, was a century of restless
musical activity throughout Europe, especially in the more private and
domestic branches of the art. The Reformation had made music the vehicle of
personal devotion, and the enormous output of a peculiarly intimate type of
sacred music, both in Germany and in England, shows that there must have
been a keen demand for it in Protestant home life.
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