model for all the class in which vocal melody and the art of singing had blossomed into perfection: the Italian opera. The oratorios of Telemann, Hasse and Graun and the masses of the period are in the style of opera.[1] In his Musikalische Patriot (1728), Mattheson breaks a lance against the contrapuntal style of church music: here as elsewhere he wishes to establish "the theatrical style," because this style, according to him, enables the composer to attain better than any other the aim of religious music, which is "to excite virtuous emotions." All is, or should be, he says, theatrical, in the widest sense of the word theatralisch, which denotes the artistic imitation of nature. "All that produces an effect upon men is theatrical. … Music is theatrical. … The whole world is a gigantic theatre." This theatrical style will permeate the whole art of music, even in those of its departments that seem most remote from it, the Lied and instrumental music.
***
- ↑ Händel and J. S. Bach themselves were not immune from the contagion. Not only did Händel write forty operas, but his oratorios, his Psalms, his Te Deums abound in dramatic elements. As for J. S. Bach, it is characteristic that he chose as the librettist of his first cantatas Erdmann Neuminster, who wrote that a cantata "is nothing more than a fragment of an opera," and introduced the religious cantata in operatic style into Germany. In upholding religious cantatas of this kind, with recitatives and arias, Bach shocked a great many people. The pietists of Mühlhausen, when he was Kapellmeister in 1708, forced him to resign, being offended by his unduly frivolous cantatas, and because his church music savoured of the concert-hall and the opera. We find reminiscences of Keiser's operas in his most famous cantatas. Need we also recall his profane cantatas, some mythological, others realistic and comic, and the use which he made of considerable fragments of these compositions in his religious works? He did not always perceive a definite boundary between the profane and the religious style. Bach and Händel were protected from the excesses of the operatic style by their choral and contrapuntal ingenuity, which harmonised but ill with the opera of that period.
