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
provincial young musician, a notable organist indeed, and a master of such
learned devices as counterpoint and fugue, but a dull composer, turning out
endless arias and cantatas with no sense of the fashionable Italian taste.
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