[53] He was born at Hamburg in 1681, and died there in 1764. See L. Meinardus: J. Mattheson und seine Verdienste um die deutsche Tonkunst, 1870; and Heinrich Schmidt: J. Mattheson, ein Förderer der deutschen Tonkunst, 1897, Leipzig.
[54] He violently attacked in the Volkommene Kapellmeister (1739) the “Pythagoreans” of whom the chief was Lor. Christoph Mizler, of Leipzig, who attempted to work out music on the lines of mathematics and logic. With the “Aristoxenians” (harmonists) he wished to rescue music from an iron vice, from the hands of the skeleton of a dead science, and from scholasticism. The ear was his law. “Let your art be encompassed where the ear alone reigns: that should suffice. Where nature and experience leads you, all is well. Do it, play it, sing it; for wrong doing, avoid it, efface it” (Das forschende Orchestre). Against the scholastic, he opposed the fecund and living harmonic science (Harmonische Wissenschaft); he demanded that the latter should be taught in the universities, and offered to bequeath a large sum to found a Chair for a musical lectureship in the college of his native city.
[55] Especially in Das neueröffnete Orchestre (1713), Das beschützte Orchestre (1717), Das forschende Orchestre (1721). We might say that the most fruitful of his theoretical writings is Der Vollkommene Kapellmeister (1739), which might even to-day serve as the basis of a work on musical æsthetics, and that it was the work which produced a good part of our musicology.
[56] He warns German musicians against going to Italy, whence they return like so many birds plucked of their feathers, with their great weaknesses hidden, and an intolerable presumption. He reproached Germany with not helping her national musicians, who were languishing and becoming extinct (Volk. Kapellm. and Critica Musica).
[57] Twenty-four monthly books which appeared with interruptions from May, 1722, to 1725, Hamburg. There were musical polemics, correspondence, interviews with musicians, analyses of their books and works, a shoal of letters on the last opera, on the last concert, on the life of a musician, on a new clavier, on a singer, etc. One finds pre-eminently very solid musical critiques, perhaps the oldest which exist. The minute analysis of Handel’s Passion according to St. John was still celebrated when the work itself was forgotten. “It is perhaps,” said Marpurg in 1760, “the first good critique which was written on choral music” since it sprang into being.
[58] Critica Musica.
[59] “When I think as a tone-poet (Tondichter),” he says, “I think of something higher than a great figure.... Formerly musicians were poets and prophets.” In another place he writes, “It is the property of music to be above all sciences a school of virtue, eine Zuchtlehre” (Vollk. Kapellm.).
[60] Grundlagen einer Ehrenpforte, worin der tüchtigsten Kapellmeister, Komponisten, Musikgelehrten, Tonkünstler, etc. Leben, Werke, Verdienste, etc., erscheinen sollen, 1740.
[61] Vollkommene Kapellmeister, 1739—he devoted a very important study, which he called the Hypokritik (Pantomime), to it in this work.
[62] Ibid.