roaring in my ears as of a tempest, a black cloud was before my eyes, my hands and my heart were trembling like leaves, my feet refused to bear me. … When I have told all this in full, shall I have even touched my grief?—Enough! No one can know what this suffering is but he who has experienced it."
And he ends with these words: "Mein Engel, gute nacht!" (My angel, good-night)…
This touching narrative, which is permeated by a sorrowful faith, makes us feel that Telemann, too, as he tells us, "became, at Eisenach, another man, in Christ." But, however deep the wound, his temperament was too active and too versatile to allow him to shut himself up with his regrets; three years later the inconsolable husband was married again to a wife who was to prove in every respect a contrast to his first.
He had left Eisenach. Despite his excellent situation at Court, his longing for change impelled him to accept, in 1712, the proposals which reached him from Frankfort-on-Maine.
"How," he says, "did I come to the land of these Republicans, among whom, by all one hears, learning is of so little value—
Où le docte savoir ne leur semble plus rien,
Où l’on hasarde tout pour acquérir du bien ?[1]
"How is that I was able to leave a Court so select as that of Eisenach? There is a proverb which says: He who wishes to live in all security should live in a Republic. And although I had nothing to fear at the moment I did not wish to find that at Court—
- ↑ Telemann had a mania for quoting French verses, and, like many foreigners, he preferred them bad.
