for students from the University of Leipzig to go to Berlin to hear the
Italian opera, which had been established by the Electress Sophia Charlotte
in 1700, and this suggests that Handel's visit to Berlin may have
taken place in 1703 rather than in his childhood. But he certainly had
opportunities for seeing operas nearer home. There had been many German
operas performed at Halle itself during the twenty years before Handel's
birth, and Duke Johann Adolf opened an opera-house at Weissenfels in 1685,
in which Philipp Krieger produced German operas regularly for the next
thirty years. There was thus every reason for young Handel's growing
ambitious to become a composer for the stage, although we have no evidence
of his having ever attempted dramatic composition until he left Halle in
1703.

The most important of all the north German opera-houses was that of
Hamburg, where the opera did not depend on the patronage of a court,
but was organised, as at Venice, as a public entertainment. Hamburg had
attempted German opera as early as 1648, and it is interesting to note that
the English composer William Brade was one of those who provided the music;
but the real history of the Hamburg opera may be said to begin with the
performance of Theile's _Adam and Eve_ in the newly built theatre in the
Goose-Market in 1678. When Handel arrived in Hamburg in the summer of 1703
the biblical operas had long come to an end, and the theatre was under the
management of Reinhold Keiser.

Keiser was a musician of remarkable genius. His father was a disreputable
organist, and his mother a young lady of noble family who had been hastily
married at the age of sixteen. Born near Weissenfels in 1674, he had begun
his operatic career at Brunswick at the age of eighteen; three years later
he took over the direction of the opera at Hamburg, where he produced a
large number of operas composed by himself. As a composer, Keiser had a