canonists. At the source of the movement is Keiser, whose artistic influence over Hasse, Graun and Mattheson[1] (as well as Händel, for that matter) was profound and decisive. But the first to express these feelings definitely, emphatically and repeatedly, was Telemann.
As early as 1704, confronting the old musicologist Printz, he assumed the attitude of Democritus opposing Heraclitus:
He bitterly lamented the extravagances of the melodists of to-day. As for me, I laughed at the unmelodious works of the old writers.
In 1718 he quoted this French couplet in support of his attitude:
Ne les élève pas (les anciens) dans un ouvrage saint,
Au rang où dans ce temps les auteurs ont atteint.
This is a frank declaration for the moderns against the ancients. And what do the moderns mean to him ? The moderns are the melodists.
Singen is das Fundament zur Music in allen Dingen,
Wer die Composition ergreifft, muss in seinen Sätzen singen.
(Song is the foundation of music in all things.
Who composes must sing in all that he writes.)
Telemann adds that a young artist must turn to the school of the Italian and young German melodists, not to that "of the old writers, who write counterpoint till all is blue, but are devoid of invention, and write for fifteen and twenty voices obbligati, in which Diogenes himself with his lantern would not find a drop of melody."
The greatest musical theorist of the age, Mattheson, was of the same opinion. In his Critica Musica
- ↑ Graun, at Dresden, devoured the scores of Keiser. Hasse, in 1772, still professed his unbounded admiration for this musician, "one of the greatest the world has ever possessed." As for Mattheson, he was, in many respects, Keiser's mouthpiece.
