Handel’s coat button saves him in a sword fight

No one who attended the performance of Johann Mattheson’s new opera Die ungluckselige Cleopatra, Königin von Ägypten (‘Unfortunate Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt’) on the evening of 5 December 1704 at the Goose Market Opera in Hamburg could possibly have suspected it would result in the near-demise of one of classical music’s greatest composers.

It had all started innocently enough when Mattheson, then aged 21, first met 18-year-old George Frideric

Handel in the organ lo! of Hamburg’s Magdalenekirche on 9 July 1703. Mattheson was principal tenor at the opera house and widely recognised as one of Hamburg’s rising musical stars. Handel was new in town, and wisely kept his musical credentials under his wig – at least initially – when invited to join the ranks of the opera’s second violins.

The two hit it o" from the start – Mattheson described Handel as ‘rich in abilities and good intentions’ – and in addition to visiting ‘the organs and choirs of the town’ together, they attended operas, concerts and enjoyed going boating. On one occasion

Handel showed his musical mettle when standing in for the opera house’s harpsichordist and director. Mattheson was clearly impressed, noting that he ‘showed himself a man’, although he was rather less generous – envious, perhaps – towards Handel’s composing of ‘long, long arias, and almost endless cantatas’.

Barely had Handel’s musical feet touched the ground in Hamburg when he and Mattheson set o" on their first adventure together bound for Lübeck,