progressively blended and gave birth to the ‘Goût Mêlé’. In that era, the forces of the orchestra, one of the most imposing of its time, exceeded forty musicians, and the flautists Buffardin4, Quantz and Blochwitz rubbed shoulders with the oboists Le Riche, Richter and (later on) Besozzi, the pantaleonist Hebenstreit, the bass player Zelenka, and the already legendary lutenist Weiss. But even more, it was the brilliance of the horns that gave the orchestra its incomparable sound: Johann Adalbert Fischer and Johann Adam Franz Samm had pushed the mastery of that instrument to peaks that still impress to the present day5. The glory of the Dresden orchestra would undergo no decline... but come to an abrupt end in 1760, brought about by the destructive bombardments of the Prussian army, led by Frederick the Great, the same impassioned musician who, thirty years earlier, had so admired the music of Dresden. Cruel irony, cruel revenge of a music-loving but pitiless sovereign, the terrible supremacy of War over the Arts… The ravages would leave Dresden – the splendid, proud Venice of the Elbe, the ‘Athens of modern times’ (dixit Charles Burney) – on its knees and provoke the exile of the musicians responsible for its glory6.
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