Public Sale

The Handel House itself remained the property of the family until 1783. After the death of Handel’s mother in 1730 his niece, Johanna Frederike Michaelsen, Dorothea Sophia’s daughter, one of the heirs, presumably lived in the house from 1755 with her husband Dr. Johann Ernst Flörcke. She survived her husband by about ten years and died in 1771, leaving the property to her second daughter, Dorothea Luise, who had married the Halle alderman Friedrich August Reichhelm. In 1783, a year after Reichelm’s death, the property had to be publicly auctioned off. But before he died Reichhelm had had the house where Handel was born renovated, probably at considerable cost “in order to dedicate it as a permanent monument to a famous man. To this end he wanted to have in it a memorial in Handel’s honour, had he not been carried off by a sudden death.” At the beginning of 1784 the building passed to the first of a series of merchants, Christian Friedrich Pohlman. In 1817 it was acquired by Friedrich Wilhelm Rüprecht, who bequeathed it to his heirs at his death in 1847. Finally a man named Wilhelm Richard Fuss became the owner in 1872.