He was, moreover, a true master of _recitative_; one might say that he created the German _recitative_. He attached extreme importance to it, saying that the expression in _recitative_ often gave the intelligent composer much more trouble than the invention of the air.[45] He sought to note with exactitude, accent, punctuation, the living breath itself, without sacrificing anything of the musical beauty. His _Recitative arioso_ takes an intermediate place between the oratorical _recitative_ of the French, and the _recitative secco_ of the Italians, and was one of the models for the _recitative_ of J. S. Bach,[46] and even not excepting Bach and Handel, Mattheson persists in seeing in Keiser the master of this style.--But the real supreme gift of Keiser was his melodic invention. In that he was one of the first artists in Germany, and the Mozart of the first part of the eighteenth century. He had an abundant and winning inspiration. As Mattheson said, "His true nature was tenderness, love...." From the commencement to the end of his career he could reproduce voluptuous feelings with such exquisite art that no one could surpass him. His melodic style, much more advanced than that of Handel--not only at this particular epoch but at any moment of his life--is free, unsophisticated and happy. It is not the contrapuntal style of Handelian Opera, but it inclines rather to that of Hasse (who was trained entirely in it), to the symphonists of Mannheim, and to Mozart. Never has Handel, greater and more perfect as he was, possessed the exquisite note which breathes in the melodies of Keiser--that fresh perfume of the simple flower of the field.[47] Keiser had the taste for popular songs and rustic scenes,[48] but he knew also how to rise to the very summits of classical tragedy, and some of his airs of stately grief might have been written by Handel himself.[49] Keiser was, then, full of lessons and of models for Handel, who was not slow to take them,[50] 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,[51] 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.[52] 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.