that was intensified by the expressive power of appropriate music. The intensely subjective, sometimes even sentimental, nature of the texts made a deep appeal to the warm Protestant piety of the German people. Poetical texts of a semi-dramatic character, suited in more or less definite way to the different church days, soon came to be in great demand. The first to supply such cantata texts of real literary merit was Erdmann Neumeister (1671-1756), a preacher-poet of Sorau and Hamburg, who wrote no less than five complete cycles of texts for the church calendar. Though a host of other poets followed him in writing similar cantata texts, Neumeister seems to have been unexcelled and to have had a large influence by the sheer literary excellence of his poetry and the moving power of his pious eloquence. Both Telemann and Mattheson were appreciative collaborators with him, and among the cantatas which Bach wrote with such incredible industry for his choir at St. Thomas’ Church are several with Neumeister’s fine texts. Neumeister’s cycles of cantatas were published between the years 1704 and 1716. In the preface to the first of these cycles he frankly stated that ‘a cantata has the appearance of a piece taken out of an opera.’ The publication of these cycles of cantata texts brought on a fierce controversy between his adherents among churchmen and musicians on the one side and the Pietists and those who were swayed by an instinctive antipathy to theatrical music of any kind on the other. Even the older and more severe cantatas had been accused of worldliness, but the very idea of using in the worship of God the recitative and aria, which were the chief vehicles of musical expression in the profane opera, was repugnant to the pietistic mind. The innovators were charged with bringing into the church all sorts of ‘singable stuff’ and gay and dance-like tunes. To this Mattheson, who was chief among the musicians of his period who could wield a pen in defence of their art-theories, replied that of course a distinction must be made between a sacred and an operatic recitative, and that intelligent musicians knew well enough how to treat it in the spirit of the church service and thus preserve a true church style which would be at the same time an independent style.[58] And so the question as to what constitutes the true church style, as to what is pure church music, has been hotly discussed, with greater or less absence of brotherly love, in every generation for the last two centuries, and, it is to be observed, with much the same arguments as weapons in each succeeding generation. IV