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A Musical Tour

Scarlatti and Lotti, and for him the golden age of music was the age of these musical forbears. As Burney says, "he had been liberal and advanced … some twenty years previously."

It was much the same with Graun, and Karl Heinrich Graun was, with Hasse, the most famous name in German music in the days of Bach and Händel.[1] Marpurg calls him "the greatest ornament of the German muse, the master of pleasing melody … tender, sweet, sympathetic, exalted, stately and terrible by turns. All the strokes of his pen were equally perfect. His genius was inexhaustible. Never has any man been more generally regretted by a whole nation, from the king to the least of his subjects."

"Graun"—says Burney more soberly—"was, thirty years ago, a composer of graceful simplicity, having been the first among the Germans to renounce the fugue and all such laboured inventions!"

A poor compliment to us, who have since then returned with such singular affection to "all such laboured inventions!" But for an Italianate musician this was the best of compliments. Graun, indeed, had applied himself to acclimatising, in Berlin, the Italian operatic style, and in particular the style of Leonardo Vinci, that composer of genius

  1. Karl Heinrich Graun was born in 1701 at Wahrenbrück, in Saxony, and died in 1759. He entered the service of Frederick the Great in 1735. He organised the opera in Berlin, and wrote for it twenty-seven works. Frederick the Great was on several occasions his collaborator; he furnished him with the libretti of Fratelli Nemici, after Racine (1750), Merope, after Voltaire (1756), Coriolano (1749), Silla (1753) and Montezuma (1755). This last work—an anti-clerical opera—in which Frederick wished to show, as he wrote to Algarotti, "that even the opera may serve to reform morals and destroy superstitions," has been republished by Herr Albrecht Mayer-Reinach, in the collection of Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst (Leipzig, Breitkopf, 1904).