Back to Hamburg the two friends go, and the next year their friendship suffers a serious strain.  The elder, now aged twenty-three, is producing “Cleopatra,” an opera of his own composition, and incidentally playing the role of Antony.  The younger of the friends is the conductor, and presides, as is the custom of the time, at the clavecin.  There is another custom in the performance of that opera, a curious one, too.  For it is the wont of the composer-singer, when he has died as Antony, to come to life again and conduct the rest of his opera at the clavecin.

But the younger friend, now full of the importance of nineteen years, and being the successor to the great Reinhard Keiser, is not disposed to yield the clavecin, even to his versatile friend.  A quarrel that narrowly escapes ruining the melodious swan-song of Cleopatra, is postponed till after the final curtain.  Then it takes the form of a duel.  The composer manages at last to elude the parry of the conductor; he throws all his weight and venom into a lunge that must prove fatal,—­but a large brass button sheds the point of the sword and saves its wearer for a better fate.

By the strange medicinal virtue of duels, the wound in the friendship is healed, honour is poulticed, and the friendship begins again, lasting with healthful interruptions until the younger musician goes his way toward the fulness of his glory; the elder his way along the lines of versatility—­which leave him in the eyes of posterity rather valued as a writer than aught else.

The old organist whose death had brought these two younkers on their wild-goose chase was Dietrich Buxtehude, the famous man whom Johann Sebastian Bach walked fifty miles on foot to hear, and whose compositions he studied and profited from.  Old Buxtehude, himself the son of an organist, had himself married the daughter of the organist who had preceded him.  The daughter he left behind to frighten away aspiring candidates did not languish long.  According to Chrysander, a certain J.C.  Schieferdecker, who is famous for nothing else, wed the daughter, and “got the pretty job” ("erhielt den schoenen Dienst").

The elder of the two young men was Johann Mattheson (1681—­1764), a sort of “Admirable Crichton,” who married in 1709 Catherine Jennings, daughter of an English clergyman and the relative of a British admiral.  That is all of his story that belongs here.

The younger man, whose life hung on a button, was that great personage whose name has been spelled almost every way imaginable between Hendtler and Handel—­the later form being preferred by the English, who, as somebody said, love to speak learnedly of “Handel and Glueck.”  It is not needful here to tell the story of his brilliant life and the big events it crowded into the four and seventy years between 1685 and 1759.  His friend Mattheson, like Beethoven, spent his later years in the dungeon of deafness.  Haendel, like his great rival Bach (who was born the same year), spent seven years in almost total blindness, three operations having failed.  In almost every other respect the careers of these two men were unlike, particularly in the obscure and prolific married life of the one and in the almost royal prominence of the other’s bachelorhood.