Free Shooting Stars by Stefan Zweig Page B

the maestro was obviously incurable—advised sending the patient to the hot baths at Aachen, which might perhaps effect some slight improvement.
    But under the frozen exterior, like those mysterious underground hot springs themselves, there lived an incalculable strength: Handel’s will, the primeval force of his nature, which had not been touched by the destructive stroke and would not yet allow the immortal part of him to founder in the mortal body. The huge man had not given up, he still wanted to live, to work; and against the laws of nature his will worked a miracle. The doctors in Aachen warned him sternly not to stay in the hot baths for more than three hours at a time; his heart would not survive any longer period, they said, it could kill him. But his will defied death for the sake of life and his burning desire: to recover his health. To the horror of his doctors, Handel spent nine hours a day in the hot baths, and with his will his strength too grew. After a week he could drag himself around again, after a second week he could move his arm, and in a mighty victory of will-power and confidence he tore himself free from the paralysing toils of death to embrace life once again, more warmly, more ardently than ever before, and with that unutterable joy known only to the convalescent.
    On the last day before he was to leave Aachen, fully in control of his body, Handel stopped outside the church. He had never been particularly devout, but now, as he climbedto the organ loft with the easy gait so mercifully restored to him, he felt moved by something ineffable. Experimentally, he touched the keys with his left hand. The notes sounded, rang clear and pure through the expectant room. Now he tentatively tried the right hand that had been closed and paralysed so long. And behold, the silver spring of sound leapt out beneath his right hand too. Slowly, he began to play, to improvise, and the great torrent of sound carried him away with it. The masonry of music towered miraculously up, building its way into invisible space, the airy structures of his genius climbed magnificently again, rising without a shadow, insubstantial brightness, resonant light. Down below, anonymous, the nuns and the worshippers listened. They had never heard a mortal man play like that before. And Handel, his head humbly bent, played on and on. He had recovered the language in which he spoke to God, to eternity, to mankind. He could make music, he could compose again. Only now did he feel truly cured.
    “I have come back from Hades,” said George Frideric Handel proudly, his broad chest swelling, his mighty arms outstretched, to the London doctor who could not but marvel at this medical miracle. And with all his strength, with his berserk appetite for work, the convalescent instantly and with redoubled avidity immersed himself in composition again. The battle-lust of old had returned to the fifty-three-year-old musician. We find him now writing an opera—his right hand, cured, obeys him wonderfully well—a second opera, a third, the great oratorios
Saul
and
Israel in Egypt
, he writes
L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato
; his creative desires well inexhaustibly up as if from a long-dammed spring. But the times are againsthim. The queen’s death halts theatrical performances, then the Spanish war begins, crowds assemble daily in the public squares, shouting and singing, but the theatre remains empty and debts mount up. Then comes the hard winter. Such cold falls over London that the Thames freezes over, and sleighs with bells jingling glide over the mirror surface of the ice; all the concert halls are closed at this sad time, for no angelic music dares defy such terrible frosts. Next the singers fall ill, performance after performance must be cancelled; Handel’s financial difficulties grow worse and worse. His creditors are dunning him, the critics are scathing, the public remains silent and indifferent, and gradually the desperately