Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/112

100 good humour, drollery and exuberance; he stuffs them with quotations in every language, verses of his own concoction, and moral anecdotes; he conceals nothing; after the death of his first wife he writes in verse the story of his love, his betrothal, his marriage; of his wife's illness and her death; he spares us no details; he insists on taking the world into his confidence as regards his joys and sorrows. How far is all this from Händel and the silence in which he wrapped his grieving heart while he wrote the serene music of Poro in the days when he had just lost his mother! The personality of the artist demands its place in the sun; it displays itself with indiscreet satisfaction. We shall not complain of this; it is to this change of mind, to this disappearance of the moral constraint that weighed upon the expression of personal emotion that we owe the free and living music of the close of the century, and the passionate utterances of Beethoven.

Georg Philipp Telemann was born at Madgeburg, on the 14th of March, 1681. He was the son and grandson of Lutheran pastors. He was not yet four years old when he lost his father. At an early age he displayed a remarkable facility in all subjects: Greek, Latin, music. The neighbours diverted themselves by listening to the little fellow, who played on the violin, the zither and the flute. He had a great love of German poetry—a very exceptional characteristic in the German musicians of his time. While still quite young—one of the youngest students in the college—he was chosen by the Cantor as his assistant in the teaching of singing.