stately grief might have been written by Handel himself.[1] Keiser was, then, full of lessons and of models for Handel, who was not slow to take them,[2] but he also set him several bad examples too. The worst was the renunciation of the national language. Whilst Postel and Schott had been at the head of the Hamburg Opera the Italian language had been kept within bounds,[3] but since Keiser had become Director he had changed all that. In his Claudius (1703) he made the first barbarous attempt at a mixture of Italian and German languages. It was for him a pure fanfare of virtuosity, and he wished to show, as he explained in his Preface, that he was capable of beating the Italians on their own ground. He took no account of the detriment to German Opera. Handel, following his example, mixes, in his first operas, the airs with Italian words with those set to German words.[4] Since that time he no longer wrote Italian operas; and after that, his musical theatre was without foundation and without public. The sanction of this error resulted in Germany's neglect of Keiser's operas and even of those of Handel, despite the genius of both composers.
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- ↑ Such as the Song of the Imprisoned Croesus, which calls to mind certain airs in The Messiah.
- ↑ I need only cite one example: it is the air of Octavia with two soft flutes, "Wallet nicht zu laut," one of the most poetic pages of Keiser, which Handel reproduced several times in his works, and even in his Acis and Galatea, 1720.
- ↑ Postel, who used seven languages in the Prologues of his Libretti, was opposed to this mixture in poetical works, "for that which ornaments learning," he says, "disfigures poetry."
- ↑ Certain German operas mix High German, Low German, French and Italian.
