Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/14

2 Dresden, whose Italian theatre, founded in 1662, enjoyed a European celebrity for a whole century, until the departure of Hasse. Leipzig, the old Saxon city, by no means escaped the plague. In 1693, the Opera proceeded to plant itself in the town, in the very stronghold of German art; its founders made no secret of the fact that they meant to make it a branch of the Dresden Opera, and in a few years they had carried their point. Opera music was no longer content with the theatre; it made its way into the Church, the last refuge of German thought. Its brilliant pathos soon superseded the seriousness of the old masters; the crowd thronged to these dramatic recitals; the singers and pupils of the Thomaskirche, deserting their posts, went over to the other camp, and a void proceeded to form about the last defenders of the national tradition.

There was in the Thomaskirche in those days a Cantor (Kappelmeister) whose name was Johann Kuhnau. This man, a most attractive type of a broadly developed genius, such as that heroic age of art produced, was, says Mattheson, "very learned in theology, jurisprudence, rhetoric, poetry, mathematics, foreign languages and music." He had defended theses in law, one of which was in Greek; he was an advocate; he cultivated Greek and Hebraic philosophy, translated works from the French and Italian, and himself wrote original works, both scientific and imaginative. Jacob Adlung says "that he did not know whether Kuhnau did greater honour to music or to science." As a musician he is quite incontestably one of the pillars of the old German art. Scheibe regarded him, with