good in this music if one knows how to profit by it. … I found this of service to me later on, even in the case of many serious compositions. … I have written long concertos and trios in this style, which I then gave an Italian dress, making Adagio alternate with Allegro."
Here, then, we see popular music beginning frankly to permeate the scholarly style. German music recruits itself by steeping itself in the music of the races which surround the German frontier; it is about to borrow from them something of their natural spontaneity, their freshness of invention, and to them it will in time owe a renewed youth.
From Sorau Telemann proceeded to the Court at Eisenach, where he again found himself in a musical environment permeated by French influences. The Kapellmeister was a virtuoso of European celebrity, Pantaleon Hebenstreit, the inventor of an instrument called by his name of Pantaleon or Pantalon—a sort of improved dulcimer,[1] a forerunner of our modern piano. Pantaleon, who had won the applause of Louis XIV., had an unusual skill in composition and in the French style; and the Eisenach orchestra was "installed as far as possible in the French manner." Telemann even claims "that it surpassed the orchestra of the Paris Opera." Here he completed his French education.—As a matter of fact, there was, in Telemann's life, a great deal more of French musical training—and Polish, and Italian—but above all French—than of German. Telemann wrote, at Eisenach, a quantity of concertos in the French style and a
- ↑ Hebenstreit's instrument had gut and metal strings, which were struck with small mallets. (Trans.)
