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production on Almira ’s heels and ready for performance in February. The title followed the usual German Baroque practice of giving the theme first, in the ungainly form then favoured of article and noun split by an adjectival phrase, so that it reads, literally translated, ‘The Through Blood and Murder Acquired Love, or: Nero’. Handel’s music has disappeared, but Feustking’s text survives and we can note that the opera’s subject is akin to that of Agrippina , with which the composer triumphantly concluded his Italian journey in 1709. Among characters common to both pieces are Nero and Poppea, while Agrippina, true to history, is instinct, in Hamburg as in Venice, with jealousy and cunning. Seneca and Octavia are also present, to remind us of Monteverdi’s imperishable treatment of the theme nearly a century earlier. There are plenty of duets and choruses, and comedy is provided by Anicetus, des Kaysers Mignon oder Liebling , and Glaptus, Claudius’s freedman, whose long mock-meditation on philosophy is followed by an aria in which he declares that he will be a Stagiritisch , a Stoisch , an Epicurisch and an Eclectisch .
    Perhaps the total loss to us of Handel’s music has something to do with the fact that Nero was a failure, withdrawn after one, or perhaps two performances. Discussing the libretto, one of the Hamburg poets who had earlier pitched into Feustking exclaimed, ‘How is a musician to create anything beautiful if he has no beautiful words?Therefore, as in the case of the composition of the opera Nero , someone has not unjustly complained: “There is no spirit in the verse, and one feels vexation at setting such a thing to music.”’
    The someone may have been Handel, who promptly vanished from the Gänsemarkt stage. A third opera, Florindo , ultimately divided into two by its librettist Heinrich Hinsch on grounds of length, was given two years later as Der beglückte Florindo and Die verwandelte Daphne , but of the score only a handful of fragments has survived. The two operas may indeed have existed as separate libretti. *(a) He presumably went on playing in the opera band, and eked out his income by giving lessons to the children of Hamburg citizens. A sizeable amount of his keyboard music can be conjecturally dated to this period on stylistic and other grounds, and several voluminous chaconnes and pieces containing ideas figuring more solidly elsewhere may have been written as teaching exercises.
    Handel was not temperamentally cast in the mould of a great teacher. Sir John Hawkins might be a little too partial in saying that he ‘disdained to teach his art to any but princes’, but he was not one to dazzle his audience with musical science and was far too impatient and quick-tempered a man to suffer fools or slowcoaches gladly. Profoundly educative though it is to the spirit and the imagination, his music is notoriously resistant to textbook exemplification. Thus it is almost impossible to imagine him writing an Orgelbüchlein or an Art of Fugue or even compiling a notebook for some notional Anna Magdalena. Like Beethoven or Elgar, he took pupils because he needed the money. And in the autumn of 1706, when he had scraped enough of it together, he set off for Italy.

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    Caro Sassone
    With Handel’s Italian journey we enter on one of those periods of his career when conjecture is exasperatingly paramount. We can guess why he should have wanted to go to Italy since, as the nursery of established musical form, terminology and style during the period, it was the logical goal of young composers from all over Europe, but whether he was, as tradition has it, invited by Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici, son of Grand Duke Cosimo of Tuscany, is altogether more questionable. Ferdinando was indeed out of Florence at some stage immediately before Handel’s departure from Hamburg, could certainly have been visiting some of his German princely