Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/151

Rh Nereids, who are upholding him; she describes her fantastic journey at the bottom of the sea; corals and pearls attach themselves to her tresses; the Tritons dance around her, saluting her goddess under the name of Leucothea. Suddenly Ino sees the ocean gods returning, running and raising their arms; Neptune arrives in his car, the golden trident in his hand, his horses snorting in terror. A hymn to the glory of God closes the cantata.

These magnificent Hellenic visions lent themselves to the plastic and poetical imagination of a musician. Telemann's music is worthy of the poem. It is a marvellous thing that a man more than eighty years of age should have written a composition full of such freshness and passion. It belongs plainly to the category of musical dramas. While it is very likely that Gluck influenced Telemann's Ino it may well be that Ino, in its turn, taught Gluck many valuable lessons. Many of its pages will compare with the most famous dramatic recitatives of Alcestis or Iphigenia in Aulis. With the very first bass one is flung into the thick of the action. A majestic, rather heavy energy, like that of Gluck, animates the first aria. The orchestral passages describing Ino's terror, the arrival of Athamas, and Ino's leap into the sea, possess a picturesque power astonishing in that period. At the close we seem to see the waves opening to receive Ino, who sinks to the depths, while the sea closes up once more. The serene symphony which depicts the untroubled kingdom of the ocean possesses a Händelian beauty. But nothing in this cantata, and, to