Froberger came under the influence of Denis Gaultier and Chambonnières during the years he spent in Paris, and he adopted their style and made it his own. He wrote, it is true, several sets of ricercars, capriccios, canzonas, etc., for organ or harpsichord, and in these the strict polyphonic style prevails, according to the conventionally more serious nature of the compositions. But his fame rests upon the twenty-eight suites and fragments of suites which he wrote expressly for the harpsichord. These are closely akin to lute music, and from the point of view of style are quite as effective as the music of Chambonnières. In harmony they are surprisingly rich. Be it noted, too, in passing, that they are not lacking in emotional warmth. Here is perhaps the first harpsichord music which demands beyond the player’s nimble fingers his quick sympathy and imagination--qualities which charmed in Froberger’s own playing. Kuhnau as a stylist is far less interesting than Froberger, upon whose style, however, his clavier suites are founded. His importance rests in the attempts he made to adapt the sonata to the clavier, in his experiments with descriptive music, and in the influence he had upon his contemporaries and predecessors, notably Bach and Handel. Froberger is the real founder of pianoforte music in Germany, and beyond him there is but slight advance either in style or matter until the time of Sebastian Bach. What we may now call the harpsichord style, as exemplified in the suites of Chambonnières and Froberger, is relatively free. Both composers had a fondness for writing in four parts, but these parts are not related to each other, nor woven together unbrokenly as in the polyphonic style of the organ. They cannot often be clearly followed throughout a given piece. The upper voice carries the music along, the others accompany. The arrangement is not wholly an inheritance from the lute, but is in keeping with the general tendency in all music, even at times in organ music, toward the monodic style, of which the growing opera daily set the model. But the harpsichord style of this time is by no means a simple system of melody and accompaniment. Though the three voice parts which support the fourth dwell together often in chords, they are not without considerable independent movement. They constitute the harmonic background, as it were, which, though serving as background, does not lack animation and character in itself. In other words, we have a contrapuntal, not a polyphonic, style.