Andrys Basten wrote:
>... Some of the most inventive writing was done in the 17th century
>and is not austere or stark, as you know. Froberger is emotional, ironic,
>devilish in his harmonies and just isn't stark, nor is Frescobaldi! Nor
>Louis Couperin though he's less adventurous. As others have said, the
>same for Locke, Lawes (H and W), Marini, Castello, Uccelini, Turini, early
>Purcell, whom, actually, young listeners today would find of interest at
>least as an adjunct to the great forms that came later.
As Romain Rolland had his hero, Jean-Christophe, consider, as he lies dying
at the end of the novel of the same name, which first appeared about 1910:
"He saw clearly...how surely all modern music was doomed to destruction.
More quickly than any other the language of music is consumed by its
own heat; at the end of a century or two it is understood only by a
few initiates. For how many do Monteverdi and Lully still exist?"
Walter Meyer
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