Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/85

Rh canonists. At the source of the movement is Keiser, whose artistic influence over Hasse, Graun and Mattheson (as well as Händel, for that matter) was profound and decisive. But the first to express these feelings definitely, emphatically and repeatedly, was Telemann.

As early as 1704, confronting the old musicologist Printz, he assumed the attitude of Democritus opposing Heraclitus:

In 1718 he quoted this French couplet in support of his attitude:

This is a frank declaration for the moderns against the ancients. And what do the moderns mean to him ? The moderns are the melodists.

Telemann adds that a young artist must turn to the school of the Italian and young German melodists, not to that "of the old writers, who write counterpoint till all is blue, but are devoid of invention, and write for fifteen and twenty voices obbligati, in which Diogenes himself with his lantern would not find a drop of melody."

The greatest musical theorist of the age, Mattheson, was of the same opinion. In his Critica Musica