Leading composers, such as George Frideric Handel and Georg Philipp Telemann, and less-well-known musicians, such as Johann Caspar Bachofen and Johann Hövet, contributed to its popularity by creating musical settings for arias and entire poems. A man of broad interests, Brockes translated from the Latin of Seneca and Lucan; the Italian of Marini; the Spanish of Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas; the French of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, and Voltaire; and the English of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Edward Young, James Thomson, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury. Moreover, his political career brought him into contact with various representatives of the German nobility, including Emperor Charles VI and his brother Clemens August, archbishop and elector of Cologne. He was also probably familiar with the unpublished critiques of biblical narratives written by his friend Hermann Samuel Reimarus.
The third and only male child of Bernhard and Margaretha Elmhoff Brockes, Barthold Heinrich Brockes was born in Hamburg on 22 September 1680. His mother was the daughter of a textile merchant who had immigrated to Hamburg from Wismar; his father could trace his ancestry from a long line of Lübeck businessmen prominent in civic affairs to his own father, Barthold, a merchant who had become a citizen of Hamburg in 1628 and head of the Hamburg Bank in 1642.
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