Biographers of
musicians often attempt to deduce their characters from their musical
works, but it need hardly be said that such a procedure is thoroughly
unreliable.
Portraits are notoriously unsafe as guides to the interpretation of
character, but if the miniature reproduced by Mr. Flower as having been
painted in Rome is an authentic likeness of Handel as a young man and it
certainly bears some resemblance to the portrait by Denner painted about
1736 or 1737--he must have been singularly attractive in those days. It
cannot have been his musical abilities alone that won him the immediate
friendship of Telemann at Halle and Mattheson at Hamburg; and, although he
seems from his earliest days to have been ambitious and determined to make
a career for himself, his contemporaries give the impression that he was
retiring rather than self-assertive. In later life he was often described
as bearish and rough-mannered, but this cannot have been the case in his
youth, or he would never have achieved the position which he held in the
most cultured and distinguished society of Rome and Naples. His visit to
Italy must inevitably have been a wonderful education in the humanities,
otherwise he could never have been received as he was on his first visit
to London by the society which most nearly resembled that of his Italian
friends and patrons.
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