Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/142

130 such artists as Graun, of adopting an insipid ideal of vague and abstract beauty.

At the same time, he imported into German music the qualities of impulsive animation, of clear, lively, nimble expression found in Polish music and the new Italian music. This was not a work of supererogation: German music, despite its power, was beginning to smell rather musty. It would have been in danger of asphyxiation but for the great draughts of fresh air which men like Telemann let into it through the open doors of France, Poland and Italy—until Johann Stamitz opened what was perhaps the most important—the door of Bohemia. If we wish to understand the extraordinary blaze of music that illumined Germany from the time of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, we must have some acquaintance with those who prepared this magnificent beacon; we must watch the lighting of the fire. Without this the great classics would seem a miracle, whereas they are, on the contrary, the logical conclusion of a whole century of genius.

I am about to show the reader some of the paths which Telemann opened to German music.

In the theatre, to begin with, even those who were most unjust to him recognised his gifts as a humorist. He seems to have been the principal initiator of German comic opera. No doubt we find comic touches here and there in Keiser; it was a theatrical custom in Hamburg that a clown, a comic servant, should figure in all the productions, even in the musical tragedies; and to this character were given comic Lieder with a simple accompaniment (often in unison) or none. Händel himself