ABSTRACT
The significance of the Italian styles of instrumental, vocal and keyboard music for the later development of music in Europe, not least in Germany, in the early years of the eighteenth century can scarcely be exaggerated. In his book North German Music in the Age of Buxtehude, Geoffrey Webber points to significant contact between German and Italian musicians throughout the seventeenth century, noting that ‘When German musicians were granted leave from court employment to travel to Italy, they were often expected to engage the services of Italian musicians on behalf of their employers’.2 Contemporary Italian opera and instrumental music became well known in Germany in this way and their popularity had much to do, on the one hand, with the emergence of the star singer and, on the other, with the emergence of the string sonata da camera, the solo sonata and, in particular, the publications of the master of the genre, Arcangelo Corelli. In terms of opera, Mattheson’s years at the Hamburg Opera would have familiarized him with the Italian approach to the genre, which occupies the major focus of his discussion of Italian music in Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre. Nonetheless, he also spends some time discussing the superiority of execution by Italian musicians, which one can assume to mean instrumentalists as well as singers. And beyond the operatic stage, while Corelli’s sonatas undoubtedly had their most profound impact upon contemporary string ensemble music in Germany, as for most of Western Europe, they also had a significant impact upon a growing body of keyboard music, including that of Mattheson.
