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Georg Handel


Georg Händel (German: [ˈhɛndəl]; Halle, Archbishopric of Magdeburg, 24 September 1622 – Halle, Duchy of Magdeburg, 11 February 1697) was a barber-surgeon and the father of Georg Frideric Handel.

Händel's father, Valentin Händel (1582–1636), was a coppersmith, from Breslau (present day Wrocław). In 1607 he married Anna Belching (1589–1670), the daughter of a master coppersmith in Eisleben. Both were Protestants (Eisleben was the hometown of Martin Luther), as was Breslau, even though Silesia was a Hapsburg possession.The couple decided to emigrate in 1608 to Halle, in reliably Lutheran Saxony. Georg was the sixth child of Valentin and Anna, born in 1622 in the Neumarkt section of Halle.

Valentin became a respected citizen of the city. The 1697 inscription on the vault Georg Händel purchased in 1674 refers to his father as "Councillor," presumably a member of the city council of Halle. Georg's two older brothers, Valentin and Christoph, learned their father's trade. The Thirty Years' War, however, was extremely destructive to Halle, and Georg's father died of the plague when Georg was 14. the prospect of education beyond Halle's Luthern Gymnasium was impossible.

After his father's death in 1636, Georg took up studies with the town surgeon-barber, Andreas Beger, who in 1618 had married the daughter of the English musician, William Brade, the court kapellmeister at Halle. In 1643 before he reached the age of 21 he married Anna née Katte, the recent widow of another barber, Christoph Oettinger, although she was 12 years his senior. As a result, Georg was entitled to the freedom of the town. In 1645 Georg Handel was appointed town surgeon (Amts-chirurgus) of Giebichenstein, a suburb of Halle of some importance. In 1660 Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels conferred on him the titles of Kammerdiener (court valet) and Leibchirurgus (surgeion), which titles were confirmed on the Duke's death by the Elector of Brandenburg who also added the prefix Kurbrandenburgische making the appointments applicable to Brandenburg as well.


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