Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/224

212 Scarlatti and Lotti, and for him the golden age of music was the age of these musical forbears. As Burney says, "he had been liberal and advanced … some twenty years previously."

It was much the same with Graun, and Karl Heinrich Graun was, with Hasse, the most famous name in German music in the days of Bach and Händel. Marpurg calls him "the greatest ornament of the German muse, the master of pleasing melody … tender, sweet, sympathetic, exalted, stately and terrible by turns. All the strokes of his pen were equally perfect. His genius was inexhaustible. Never has any man been more generally regretted by a whole nation, from the king to the least of his subjects."

A poor compliment to us, who have since then returned with such singular affection to "all such laboured inventions!" But for an Italianate musician this was the best of compliments. Graun, indeed, had applied himself to acclimatising, in Berlin, the Italian operatic style, and in particular the style of Leonardo Vinci, that composer of genius