The three years which Handel spent in Italy at the most impressionable
period of his life fixed the characteristics of his style as a composer,
and we may well suppose that they exercised a decisive influence on his
personality and character. His youth had been spent in the respectable
middle-class environment of his home at Halle; then came the three years at
Hamburg, fantastic and exciting, yet, despite all the artistic stimulus of
Keiser's opera-house, inevitably sordid and provincial. Italy introduced
him to an entirely different atmosphere--to a life of dignity and serenity
in which a classical culture, both literary and artistic, was the matured
fruit of wealth, leisure, and good breeding. That exquisite life found its
highest musical expression in Alessandro Scarlatti, who at that period was
incontestably the greatest of living musicians. On his style Handel formed
his own, and it is interesting to note that of all Scarlatti's operas the
one which most strikingly foreshadows the genius of Handel is _Mitridate_,
which Handel may possibly have seen at Venice in the winter of 1707-08.
The musical library of Handel's English friend Charles Jennens contained a
large collection of Scarlatti's manuscripts, and there can be little doubt
that it was Handel who brought them with him from Italy.
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