was represented by a remarkable artist settled at Hanover from 1689 to 1696, who produced ten operas; Agostino Steffani from the province of Venice.
This dual model from Italy and France, aided by the personal example of Cousser, played the chief part in producing the best musician of the Hamburg Opera, Reinhärd Keiser, a man who, despite his character and presumptuous knowledge, had certainly genius.[1]
Keiser was under thirty years old when Handel arrived, but he was then at the zenith of his fame. Kapellmeister of the Hamburg Opera since 1695, then director of the theatre since the end of 1702, very highly gifted, but of scanty culture, dissipated, voluptuous, careless, he was the incontestable ruler of the German Opera; the artist type of that epoch, overflowing with material life, and devoting itself to the love of pleasure. The influence of both Lully[2] and that of Steffani[3] is shown in his first operas. But his own personality is easily recognizable under these traces of borrowing. He has a very fine sense of instrumental colour, widely
- ↑ Reinhärd Keiser was born in 1674 at Teuchern, near Weissenfels, and he died in 1739 at Copenhagen.
See Hugo Leichtentritt: Reinhard Keiser in seinen Opern, 1901, Berlin; Wilhelm Kleefeld: Das Orchester der ersten deutschen Oper, 1898, Berlin; F. A. Voigt: Reinhärd Keiser (1890 in the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft)— the Octavia and the Croesus of Keiser have been republished.
- ↑ For instance in the overtures in 3 parts, with French indications "Vitement, Lentement"; also in the instrumental preludes, and perhaps in the dances.
- ↑ Principally in the duets, which have a slightly contrapuntal character.
