Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/119

Rh in conjunction with the students, a Collegium Musicum, which gave concerts that were a prelude, as it were, to the great periodical public concerts in which he was to take the initiative later in Hamburg.

In 1705 he was called to Sorau, between Frankfort-on-Oder and Breslau, as Kapellmeister to a wealthy nobleman, Graf Erdmann von Promnitz. The little princely court was extremely brilliant. The Graf had recently returned from France and was a lover of French music. Telemann proceeded to write French overtures; he read, pen in hand, the works of "Lully, Campra and other good artists."—"I applied myself almost entirely to this style, so that in two years I wrote as many as two hundred overtures."

With the French style, Telemann learned the Polish style while at Sorau. The Court sometimes repaired for a few months to a residence of the Count's in Upper Silesia: at Plesse, or in Cracow. There Telemann became acquainted "with the Polish and Hanak music in all its true and barbaric beauty. It was played in certain hostelries by four instruments: a very shrill violin, a Polish bagpipe, a Quint-Posaune (bass trombone) and a Regal (small organ). In larger assemblies there was no Regal, but the other instruments were reinforced. I have heard as many as thirty-six bagpipes and eight violins together. No one could conceive what extraordinary fantasies the pipers or the violinists invent when they are improvising while the dancers are resting. Anyone who took notes might in a week obtain a store of ideas that would last him for the rest of his life. In short, there is a great deal that is