A musical tour through the land of the past/Chapter VII - I

by Romain Rolland

 

 

VII

A MUSICAL TOUR ACROSS EUROPE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

I

Italy

During the whole of the eighteenth century as during the seventeenth, Italy was the land of music. Her musicians enjoyed, throughout Europe, a superiority comparable to that of the French writers and "philosophers." Italy was the great market for singers, instrumentalists, virtuosi, composers and operas. She exported them by the hundred to England, Germany and Spain. She herself con- sumed prodigious quantities of them, for her appetite for music was insatiable, and she was always asking for more. The most famous masters of Germany—Händel, Hasse, Gluck, Mozart—came to put themselves to school with her; and some of them left the country more uncompromisingly Italian than the Italians. The English melomaniacs invaded Italy; one saw them travelling from city to city, following the singers and operatic companies, passing the Carnival in Naples, Holy Week in Rome, the Ascension in Venice, the summer months in Padua and Vicenza, the autumn in Milan and the winter in Florence; for years on end they made the same tour, without ever tiring of it. Yet they need hardly have disturbed themselves in order to hear Italian opera, for they had Italy in London. England was so thoroughly conquered by the Italian taste from the beginning of the century that the historian Burney made this strange reflection—which, in his mouth, was praise of his own country:

"The young English composers, without having been in Italy, lapse less frequently into the English style than the young French composers, who have spent years in Italy, lapse, in spite of all, into the French style."

In other words, he congratulates the English musicians for succeeding in denationalising themselves better than the French. This was due to the excellent Italian companies then in London performing opera and opera buffa, directed by such masters as Händel, Buononcini, Porpora and Galuppi. Burney, in his infatuation for Italy, concluded that "England was consequently a fitter school than France for the formation of a young composer."

This observation was, unknown to Burney, somewhat flattering to France, which was, in fact, of all the nations, that which opposed the most obstinate resistance to Italian influence. This influence was brought to bear no less upon Parisian society and Parisian artists; and Italianism, which found a vigorous support among the "philosophers" of the Encyclopædia—Diderot, Grimm, and above all Rousseau—gave rise to a positive warfare in the musical world, and in the end it was partly victorious; for in the second half of the century we may say that French music was a prey which was divided up like a conquered territory, between three great foreign artists: an Italian, Piccinni; an Italianate German, Gluck; and an Italianate Belgian, Grétry.

The other nations had not held out so long before succumbing. Spain had been an Italian colony, as far as music is concerned, since an Italian operatic company had been established there in 1703, and especially since the arrival, in 1737, of the famous virtuoso, Farinelli, who was all-powerful with Philip V., whose fits of insanity he calmed by his singing. The best Spanish composers, having taken Italian names, became, like Terradellas, Kapellmeisters in Rome, or, like Avossa (Abos), professors in the conservatoires of Naples; unless, like Martini (Martin y Soler) they went forth to carry Italianism into the other European countries.

Even the northern countries of Europe were affected by the Italian invasion; and in Russia we find Galuppi, Sarli, Paisiello and Cimarosa establishing themselves and founding schools, conservatoires and opera-houses.

It will readily be understood that a country which thus radiated art all over Europe was regarded by Europe as a musical Holy Land. So Italy was, in the eighteenth century, a land of pilgrimage for the musicians of all nations. Many of them have recorded their impressions; and some of these descriptions of journeys, signed by such names as Montesquieu, President de Brosses, Pierre-Jean Grosley de Troyes, the scientist Lalande, Goethe, the Spanish poet, Don Leandro de Moratin, etc., are full of witty and profound observations. The most curious of these works is perhaps that of the Englishman, Charles Burney, who, with unwearying patience, crossed Europe by short stages to collect the necessary materials for his great History of Music. Strongly Italianate in matters of taste, but honest and impartial, he had the good fortune to be personally acquainted with the leading musicians of his day; in Italy, with Jommelli, Galuppi, Piccinni, Father Martini and Sammartini; in Germany, with Gluck, Hasse, Kirnberger, and Philipp-Emmanuel Bach; in France, with Grétry, Rousseau and the philosophers. Certain of the portraits which he has drawn of these men are the most lifelike pictures of them extant.

In the following pages we follow the steps of Burney and many another illustrious traveller who made the pilgrimage to Italy about the middle of the eighteenth century.^[1]

Scarcely had they entered Italy when they became possessed of the musical passion which was devouring a whole nation. This passion was no less ardent among the populace than amidst the elect.

"The violins, the instrumental performers, and the singing stop us in the streets," writes the Abbé Coyer, in 1763. "One hears, in the public places, a shoemaker, a blacksmith, a cabinet-maker singing an aria in several parts with a correctness and taste which they owe to nature and the habit of listening to harmonists formed by art."

In Florence and Genoa the merchants and artisans combined, on Sundays and fête-days, to form various societies of Laudisti or psalm-singers. They used to walk about the country together, singing music in three parts.

In Venice "if two persons are walking together arm in arm," says Burney, "it seems as though they converse only in song. All the songs there are sung as duets."—"In the Piazza di San Marco" says Grosley "a man from the dregs of the people, a shoemaker, a blacksmith, in the clothes proper to his calling, strikes up an air; other people of his sort, joining him, sing this air in several parts with an accuracy, a precision and a taste which one hardly encounters in the best society of our Northern countries."

From the fifteenth century onwards popular musical performances were given yearly in the Tuscan countryside; and the popular genius of Naples and Calabria expressed itself in songs which were not disdained by the musicians: Piccinni and Paisiello exploited them to their advantage.

But the wonderful thing was the ardent delight which the people displayed in listening to music.

"When the Italians admire a thing" writes Burney, "they seem on the point of dying of a pleasure too great for their senses." At a symphony concert given in the open air, in Rome, in 1758, the Abbé Morellet states that the people "were swooning. One heard groans of: O benedetto, o che gusto, piacer di morir! (O blessed! O what delight! One could die of the rapture!")—A little later, in 1781, the Englishman, Moore, who was present at a "musical spectacle" in Rome, notes that "the public remained with folded hands and eyes half-closed, holding its breath. A young girl began to cry out, from the middle of the parterra: Dio! dove sono? Il placere mi fa morire!" (O God, where am I? I am dying of delight!) Some performances were interrupted by the sobs of the audience.

Music held such a position in Italy that the melomaniac Burney himself saw a danger to the nation in the passion which it aroused. "To judge by the number of musical establishments and public performances one might accuse Italy of cultivating music to excess."

***

The musical superiority of Italy was due not merely to her natural taste for music, but to the excellence of the musical training given throughout the peninsula.

The most brilliant centre of this artistic culture was Naples. It was the current opinion in Burney's days that the farther south one went the more refined was the musical taste encountered. "Italy" says Grosley, "may be compared with a tuning-fork of which Naples sounds the octave." President de Brosses, the Abbé Coyer, and above all Lalande, express the same opinion. "Music," writes Lalande "is the triumph of the Neapolitans. It seems that in this country the fibres of the ear are more sensitive, more harmonic, more sonorous than in the rest of Europe; the whole nation sings; gestures, the inflexion of the voice, the cadence of the syllables, conversation—everything there expresses and exhales music. Naples is the principal source of music."

Burney reacts against this opinion, which in his day was no longer quite accurate, and must always have been a little exaggerated. "More confidence is reposed in the art of the Neapolitans than they deserve to-day," he says, "notwithstanding the right they may have had to this celebrity in times past." And he claims the first place for Venice. Without going into the question of the pre-eminence of either city, we may say that Venice and Naples were, in the eighteenth century, the great seminaries of vocal music, not only for Italy but for Europe. Each was the seat of a famous school of opera; that of Venice, the earliest in point of date, which had sprung from Monteverdi, counted such names as Cavalli and Segrenzi in the seventeenth century, Marcello and Galuppi in the eighteenth; while that of Naples, which had come into being a little later (at the end of the seventeenth century) with Francesco Provenzale, had, by the eighteenth century, what with the school of Alessandro Scarlatti and its innumerable adherents, and that of Pergolesi, established its incontestable superiority in respect of dramatic music. Venice and Naples also contained the most clebrated conservatoires in Italy.

In addition to these two metropolitan centres of opera, Lombardy was a centre of instrumental music; Bologna was famous for its theorists; and Rome, in the complex of this artistic organisation, played her part of capital, less by reason of the superiority of individual production than by the sovereign judgment which Rome arrogated to herself in respect of works of art. "Rome" says Burney, "is the post of honour for composers, the Romans being regarded as the severest judges of music in Italy. It is considered that an artist who has had a success in Rome has nothing to fear from the severity of the critics in other cities."

***

The first emotion produced by Neapolitan music on foreign travellers was rather surprise than pleasure. Those who were more sincere, or finer judges, were even disappointed at the outset. They found, as Burney did, that the execution was careless, or the time and the pitch were equally at fault, or the voices were harsh, or there was a natural brutality, something immoderate, "a taste," according to Grosley, "for the capricious and extravagant." The records of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are agreed upon this point. A French traveller, J. J. Bouchard, states, in 1632:

The Neapolitan music is especially striking by reason of its cheerful and fantastic movements. Its style of song, quite different from the Roman, is dazzling and as it were hard; not indeed really too gay, but fantastic and harebrained, pleasing only by its quick, giddy and fantastic movement; it is a mixture of French and Sicilian melody^[2]; for the rest, most extravagant in respect of continuity and uniformity, which it does not respect in the least; running, then stopping short, jumping from low to high and high to low, forcing the voice to the utmost, then suddenly restraining it; and it is really by these alternations of high and low, piano and forte, that Neapolitan singing is recognised.

And Burney, in 1770, writes:

"The Neapolitan singing in the streets is much less agreeable, although more original than elsewhere. It is a singular kind of music, as barbarous in its modulations, and as different from that of all the rest of Europe, as Scottish music. … The artistic singing has an energy, a fire, which one does not perhaps meet with in any other part of the world, and which compensates for the lack of taste and delicacy. This manner of execution is so passionate that it is almost frenzied. It is owing to this impetuosity of temper that it is an ordinary thing to see a Neapolitan composer, starting with a gentle and sober movement, set the orchestra on fire before he has finished. … The Neapolitans, like thoroughbred horses, are impatient of the bit. In their conservatoires they find it difficult to obtain pathetic and graceful effects; and in general the composers of the Neapolitan school endeavour less than those of other parts of Italy to obtain the delicate and studied graces."

But if the characteristics of Neapolitan singing had remained almost the same from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, its value had altered greatly. In Bouchard's day Neapolitan music was behind that of the rest of Italy. In Burney's time the Neapolitan composers were renowned not only for their natural genius, but for their science. And here we see what artistic institutions may do, not indeed to transform a race, but to make it produce what it has in reserve, and what, but for them, would probably never have sprung from the soil.

These institutions, in the case of Naples, were its famous conservatoires for the musical training of poor children. An admirable idea, which our modern democracies have neither conceived nor revived.

Of these conservatoires, or Collegii di musica, there were four of the highest standing:

1. The Collegia de' poveri di Gesu Cristo (college of the poor of Jesus Christ), founded in 1589, by a Calabrian of the third order of St. Francis, Marcello Fossataro di Nicotera, who gave harbour to poor little children dying of cold and hunger. Children of all nations were admitted, from seven to eleven years of age. There were a hundred of them. They wore a red cassock and sky-blue cymar. In this college— and we need say no more—Pergolesi was trained.

2. The Collegio di San Onofrio a Capuana, founded about 1600, by the friars of San Onofrio for orphans of Capua and the country round about. The number of scholars varied from ninety to a hundred and fifty. They wore a white cassock and grey cymar.

3. The Collegio de Santa Maria di Loreto, founded in 1537 by a protonotary apostolic of Spanish nationality, Giovanni di Tappia, "to receive the sons of the poorest citizens and educate them in religion and the fine arts." This very large college contained at first as many as eight hundred children, boys and girls. Then, about the middle of the eighteenth century, it ceased receiving girls and began to teach music exclusively. When Burney visited it there were two hundred children. They wore a white cassock and cymar.

4. The Collegio de la Pietà de Turchini, founded at the end of the sixteenth century by a confraternity which accepted the poor children of the quarter. In the middle of the eighteenth century there were a hundred pupils. They wore a blue cassock and cymar. The most celebrated Neapolitan composers were professors in this college. Francesco Provenzale was one of the first masters in this college.

Each of these conservatoires had two head-masters: one to correct compositions, the other to teach singing. These were also assistant masters (maestri scolari) for each instrument. The children, as a rule, remained in the college for eight years. If, after a few years' training, they did not prove to be sufficiently talented, they were sent away. A certain number were received as paying boarders. The best pupils were retained, after this period of training, to become teachers in their turn.

Burney gives a picturesque description of a visit to the Collegio di San Onofrio:

On the first-floor landing a clarinet was pegging away; on the second-floor landing a horn was bellowing. In a common room seven or eight harpsichords, a still larger number of violins and some voices were performing each a different composition, while other pupils were writing. The beds served as tables for the harpsichords. In a second room the violoncellos were assembled; in a third, the flutes and oboes. The clarinets and horns had no other place than on the stairs. In the upper part of the house, and quite apart from the other children, sixteen young castrati had warmer rooms on account of the delicacy of their voices. All these little musicians were working unremittingly from rising (two hours before daybreak in winter) to going to bed (about eight o'clock in the evening); they had only an hour and a half for rest and dinner and a few days' vacation in the autumn.

These conservatoires, which were a mine of opera singers and composers for all Europe, were already nearing their decline in Burney's day. Their most brilliant period seems to have been in the first thirty years of the eighteenth century, in the lifetime of Alessandro Scarlatti.

There were in Naples foreign musical agents whose sole business it was to recruit musicians and sopranos for their managements. Such was a certain M. Gilbert whom Lalande met with, who was working for the benefit of France.

They recruited composers also. The two most famous Neapolitan composers of the middle of the eighteenth century—Jommelli and Piccinni—were recruited, the one, Jommelli, for Germany, where he remained for fifteen years at Stuttgart; the other, Piccinni, for Paris, where he was set up in opposition to Gluck. He died there after having been professor at the Royal School of Singing and Declamation, and Inspector of the Paris Conservatoire. These two men formed a perfect contrast. Piccinni, small, thin, pale, with a tired face, extremely polished, gentle and vehement at the same time, rather serious as to the outer man, with an affectionate heart, impressionable to excess, was above all inimitable in musical comedy, and it was a misfortune for him that his little comic operas in the Neapolitan dialect could not be transplanted beyond the limits of his native country, where they were all the rage; but, as the Abbé Galiani said, "it was really impossible that this style of music should find its way into France since it did not even reach Rome. One had to be a Neapolitan to appreciate the masterly state of perfection to which Piccinni had brought comic opera in Naples."—Jommelli, on the contrary, was appreciated abroad better than in Naples. The Neapolitans resented the fact that he had become unduly Germanised at Stuttgart. Physically he was like a German musician. "He was an extremely corpulent man," says Burney; "his face reminded me of Händel's. But he is much more polished and pleasant in his manners." A true artist, exalted and emotional, but a trifle heavy, he brought back from Germany a love of harmony and compact orchestration; he contributed in no small degree to the revolution which was brought about in his time in Neapolitan opera, in which the orchestra began to rage and roar to the detriment of the singers, who were compelled to shout. "As for the music," says Burney, "all the chiaroscuro is lost; the half-shades and the background disappear; one hears only the noisy parts."

***

Venice was distinguished from Naples by the delicacy of its taste. In place of the Neapolitan conservatoires it had its famous conservatoires for women; the Pietà, the Mendicanti, the Incurabili and the Ospedaletto di S. Giovanni e Paolo.

These were hospitals for foundlings, under the patronage of the leading aristocratic families of the city. Young girls were kept there until their marriage, and were given a thorough musical education. "Music" says Grosley, "was the principal part of an education which seemed more adapted to form Laïs and Aspasias than nuns or mothers of families." But it must not be supposed that all were musicians. At the Pietà barely seventy out of a thousand were such; in each of the other hospitals forty to fifty. But nothing was left undone to attract musical pupils thither; and it was a common practice to admit children who were not orphans provided they had fine voices. They were brought thither from all Venetia: from Padua, Verona, Brescia and Ferrara. The professors were: at the Pietà: Furlanetto; at the Mendicanti, Bertoni; at the Ospedaletto, Sacchini; at the Incurabili, Galuppi, who followed Hasse. The rivalry that existed between these illustrious composers excited the emulation of the pupils. Each conservatoire had five or six assistant masters for singing and instrumental music; and the elder girls, in turn, taught the youngest. The pupils learned not only to sing but to play all instruments; the violin, the harpsichord, even the horn and the bass viol. Burney says that they were able, as a rule, to play several instruments and that they changed from one to another with facility. These women's orchestras gave public concerts every Saturday and Sunday evening. They were one of the principal attractions of Venice; and no foreign traveller who visited the city has failed to describe them for us. They were as pleasant to look at as to hear. "Nothing could be more delightful" says President de Brosses, "than to see a young and pretty nun in a white habit, with a bunch of pomegranate-flowers over one ear, conduct the orchestra and beat time with all the grace and accuracy imaginable." He adds that "for fine execution and as conductor of an orchestra the daughter of Venice is second to none." Some of these fair musicians were famed all over Italy; and Venice used to be split into hostile camps in support of this or that singer.

But the somewhat fantastic tales of galant travellers might give us a false impression of the serious nature of the musical training given in these conservatoires. Burney, who carefully inspected them, speaks of their learning with admiration. The best of the schools was the Incurabili, which was directed by Galuppi. Galuppi was then seventy years of age; but he was still lively and alert, and the fire in him burned even brighter as he grew older. He was very slender, with small face full of intelligence. His conversation sparkled with wit. His manners were distinguished, and he had a love of all the arts; he owned some magnificent canvases by Veronese. His character was esteemed no less than his talents; he had a numerous family and lived a quiet, respectable life. As a composer he was one of the last representatives of the old Venetian tradition; one of those brilliant and impulsive geniuses in whom imagination, natural talents and scholarship are allied with a fascinating brilliance. A true Italian, full of the classic spirit, he defined good music, in his conversation with Burney, as "beauty, limpidity and good modulation." "Extremely busy in Venice, where he combined the functions of senior choirmaster of St. Mark's and the Incurabili and organist in aristocratic houses with that of a composer of operas, he neglected none of his duties and his conservatoire was a model of good behaviour." "The orchestra," says Burney, "was subjected to the strictest discipline. None of the performers appeared eager to shine; all remained in that sort of subordination which a servant is required to observe in respect of his master." The artists gave evidence of great technical skill; but their taste was always pure and Galuppi's art was to be detected in the least cadences of his pupils. He trained them in all styles of music, sacred or profane; and the concerts which he directed lent themselves to the most varied vocal and instrumental combinations. It was not unusual, in Venice, to employ, in a church, two orchestras, two organs and two choirs, one echoing the other; and Burney heard, in St Mark's, under Galuppi's direction, a mass with six orchestras: two large orchestras in the galleries of the two principal organs, and four lesser orchestras distributed, in twos, between the aisles, each group being supported by two small organs. This was in the Venetian tradition: it dated from the Gabrieli, from the sixteenth century.

Apart from the conservatoires and the churches, numerous concerts or "academies" were held in private houses. In these the nobility took part. Noble ladies performed on the harpsichord, playing concertos. Sometimes festivals were organised in honour of a musician: Burney was present at a "Marcello" concert. These musical "evenings" were often prolonged far into the night. Burney records that four conservatoire concerts and several private "academies" were held on the same evening.

The concerts did no harm to the theatres, which in Venice as in Naples constituted the city's chief title to musical fame. For a long time they were the foremost theatres of Italy.

At the Carnival of 1769, seven opera-houses were open simultaneously; three giving "serious" opera (opera seria) and four comic opera (opera buffa), without speaking of four theatres producing comedy; all were full, night after night.

A last detail gives evidence of the liberality and the truly democratic spirit that inspired these Italian cities. The gondoliers enjoyed free admission to the theatre; and "when a box belonging to a noble family was not occupied the director of the opera allowed the gondoliers to instal themselves therein." Burney sees here, correctly enough, one of the reasons of "the distinguished manner in which the men of the people sing in Venice as compared with men of the same class elsewhere." Nowhere was there better music in Italy; nowhere was it more widely spread among the people.

***

All around these two operatic capitals—Venice with its seven theatres, Naples with its four or five—of which the San Carlo, one of the largest in Europe, had an orchestra of eighty performers^[3]—the opera was flourishing in all the cities of Italy: in Rome, with her famous theatres—the Argentina, the Aliberti, the Capranica; in Milan and Turin, whose opera houses gave daily performances, during the season, save on Fridays, and where stupendous actions were represented, such as battles fought by cavalry;^[4] at Parma, where stood the Farnese theatre, the most luxurious in Italy; at Piacenza, Reggio, Pisa, and Lucca, which, according to Lalande, possessed "the most perfect orchestra;" throughout all Tuscany, and all Venetia, and at Vicenza and Verona, which city, writes Edmund Rolfe, "was mad over opera."^[5] It was the great national passion. The Abbé Coyer, in 1763, was in Naples during a famine; the rage for spectacles was not diminished thereby.

Let us enter one of these opera-houses. The performance begins, as a rule, at eight o'clock, and ends about half-past twelve.^[6] The cost of the places in the parterre is a paule^[7] (sixpence English) unless admission is free, as is often the case in Venice and Naples. The public is noisy and inattentive; it would seem that the peculiar pleasure of the theatre, dramatic emotion, counts for very little. The audience chats at its ease during part of the performance. Visits are paid from box to box. At Milan "each box opens out of a complete apartment, having a room with a fireplace and all possible conveniences, whether for the preparation of refreshments or for a game of cards. On the fourth floor a faro-table is kept open on either side of the building as long as the opera continues."^[8]—"At Bologna the ladies make themselves thoroughly at home; they talk, or rather scream, during the performance, from one box to that facing it, standing up, clapping and shouting Bravo! As for the men, they are more moderate; when an act is finished, and it has pleased them, they content themselves with shouting until it is performed again."^[9] In Milan "it is by no means enough that everybody should enter into conversation, shouting at the top of his voice, or that one should applaud, by yelling, not the singing, but the singers, as soon as they appear and all the time they are singing. …

"Besides this, the gentlemen in the parterre have long sticks, with which they beat the benches as hard as they can, by way of admiration. They have colleagues in the boxes of the fifth tier, who, at this signal, throw down thousands of leaflets containing a sonetto printed in praise of the signora or the virtuoso who has just been singing. All the occupants of the boxes lean half out of them to catch these leaflets; the parterra capers about and the scene closes with a general 'Ah!' as though they were admiring a Midsummer Night bonfire."^[9]

This description, a trifle exaggerated, is none the less not so very unlike certain Italian performances of the present day. A French or German spectator present at such scenes would be inclined to doubt the sincerity of the emotion which the Italian public professes to experience at the opera; he would conclude that the pleasure of going to the theatre was, for these people, simply the pleasure of finding themselves in a crowd.—Nothing of the kind. All this uproar is suddenly hushed at certain passages of the work.—"They listen, they go into ecstasies only when the arietta is sung," says the Abbé Coyer. "I am wrong: they pay attention also to the recitatives obbligati, more moving than the ariette." At these moments, "however slight the nuances, none escapes these Italian ears; they seize them, feel them, savour them with a relish which is as a foretaste of the joys of Paradise."

Let us not suppose that these are "concert pieces," valued solely for their beauty of form. They are, in most cases, expressive and sometimes highly dramatic passages. President de Brosses reproaches the French for judging Italian music before they have heard it in Italy. "One must be perfectly acquainted with the language and able to enter into the meaning of the words. In Paris we hear dainty Italian minuets or great arias loaded with roulades; and we pretend that Italian music, in other respects melodious, is capable of nothing better than playing with syllables, and is lacking in the expression characteristic of the emotion. …" Nothing could be more mistaken; it excels, on the contrary, in the interpretation of emotion, in accordance with the genius of the language; and the passages most relished in Italy are the simplest and most affecting, "the passionate, tender, touching airs, adapted to theatrical expression and calculated to display the capacities of the actor," such as are found in Scarlatti, Vinci, and Pergolesi. These are naturally the very passages which it is most difficult to send abroad, "since the merit of these scraps of tragedy consists in accuracy of expression," which one cannot realise without knowing the language.

Thus we find in the Italian public of the eighteenth century an extreme indifference to dramatic action, to the play; in this superb heedlessness of the subject they will even give the second or third act of the opera before the first when it suits some personage who cannot spend the whole evening in the theatre. Don Leandro de Moratin, the Spanish poet, sees, at the opera, Dido dying on her pyre; then, in the following act, Dido comes to life again and welcomes Æneas. But this same public that is so disdainful of drama becomes furiously enthusiastic over a dramatic passage divorced from the action.

The fact is that it is above all lyrical, but with a lyrical quality that has nothing abstract about it; which is applied to particular passions and cases. The Italian refers everything to himself. It is neither the action nor the characters that interest him. It is the passions; he embraces them all; he experiences them all in his own person. Hence the frenzied exaltation into which the opera throws him at certain moments. In no other country has the love of the opera this passionate quality, because no other nation displays this personal and egoistical character. The Italian does not go to the opera-house to see the heroes of opera, but to see himself, to hear himself, to caress and inflame his passions. All else is indifferent to him.

What intensity must the art possess that is kindled by these burning hearts! But what a danger is here! For everything in art that is not subjected to the imitation or the control of nature, all that depends merely upon inspiration or inward exaltation, all in short that presupposes genius or passion, is essentially unstable, for genius and passion are always exceptional, even in the man of genius, even in the man of passionate feeling. Such a flame is subject to momentary eclipses or to total disappearance; and if, during these phases of spiritual slumber, scrupulous and laborious talent, observation and reason do not take the place of genius the result is absolute nullity. This remark may be only too readily verified among Italians of all ages. Their artists, even their indifferent ones, have often more genius than many famous and generously endowed Northern artists; but this genius is squandered over mere nothings, or drowses, or goes astray; and when it is no longer at home the house is empty. …

The salvation of the Italian music of the eighteenth century should have been found in a style of music which it had just created: the opera buffa, the intermezzo, which, at its point of departure, in Vinci and Pergolesi, is based on the humorous observation of the Italian character. The Italians, who are pre-eminently given to a bantering style of humour, have left veritable masterpieces of this description. President de Brosses was right to speak with enthusiasm of these little comedies. "The less serious the style," he informs us, "the greater the success of Italian music; for it exhales the spirit of gaiety and is in its element." And he writes, just after seeing La Serva Padrona: "It is not true that one can die of laughter; for if it were I should certainly have died of it, despite the grief which I felt to think that my merriment prevented me from hearing as much as I could have wished of the heavenly music of this farce."

But, as always happens, the men of taste, the musicians, entirely failed to rate these works at their true value; they regarded them as unimportant entertainments, and they would have blushed to place them in the same rank as the musical tragedies. Constantly, in history, this unintelligent hierarchy of styles has caused indifferent works in a noble style to be prized more highly than admirable works in a less exalted style. In President de Brosses' day, the précieux et précieuses of Italy affected to despise the opera buffa and laughed at "de Brosses' infatuation for these farces." Consequently these excellent little compositions were soon overlooked; and abuses as great as those to be found in opera made their way into the intermezzi: the same improbability and the same carelessness in respect of the action. Burney is compelled to admit that "if one takes away the music of a French comic opera it remains a pleasant comedy, while without music the Italian comic opera is insupportable." At the close of the century Moratin laments the absurdity of this class of composition. Yet this was the period of Cimarosa, Paisiello, Guglielmi, Andraozzi, Fioraventi and many others. What might not these lesser masters have done with stricter discipline and more conscientious poets!

***

In Venice, as we have seen, this passion for the opera was combined with a very ardent love of instrumental music, which at this period did not exist in Naples. This had always been so since the Renaissance; and even at the beginning of the seventeenth century this characteristic distinguished the opera of the Venetian Monteverdi from Neapolitan, Florentine or Roman opera.

In a general fashion, we may say that the North of Italy—Venetia, Lombardy, Piedmont—was in the eighteenth century a paradise of instrumental music.

It was a country of great instrumentalists, and above all of violinists. The art of the violin was peculiarly Italian. Endowed with a natural sense of the harmony of form, lovers of beautiful melodic outline, creators of the dramatic monody, the Italians ought to have excelled in music for the violin. "No one in Europe" says M. Pirro^[10] "can write, as they do, with the lucidity and expressiveness which it demands." Corelli and Vivaldi were the models of the German masters. The golden age of Italian violin music was the period 1720–1750, the age of Locatelli, Tartini, Vivaldi and Francesco-Maria Veracini. Great composers and performers, these masters were distinguished by the severity of their taste.

The most famous of these was Tartini of Padua. "Padua," says Burney, "is no less famed for the fact that Tartini lived and died there than for the fact that Titus Livius was born there. People visited his house, later his tomb, "with the fervour of pilgrims to Mecca." No less famous as composer and theorist than as performer, and one of the creators of the science of modern harmony, Tartini was one of the musical authorities of his century. No Italian virtuoso regarded himself as consecrated until he had won Tartini's approbation. Of all the musicians of his country he was pre-eminent in matters of taste, and he above all was unprejudiced in respect of the artistic merits of other nations. "He is polite, complaisant, without pride and without eccentricity" says De Brosses; "he argues like an angel, and without partiality, as to the different merits of French and Italian music. I was quite as much pleased by his conversation as by his playing."—"His playing had little that was dazzling about it;" for this virtuoso had a horror of empty virtuosity. When Italian violinists came to him that he might listen to their tricks of style, "he would listen coldly and then say: 'That is brilliant; that is lively; that is very good, but,' he would add, placing his hand over his heart, 'it has nothing to say to me here.'" His style was remarkable for the extreme distinctness with which every note was sounded—"one never lost the least of them"—and for its intense feeling. Until his death Tartini modestly filled a place in the orchestra of the Santo at Padua.

In addition to this great name there are others that have retained a legitimate fame even down to our own days. In Venice there was Vivaldi; he too was known to De Brosses; he promptly became one of the Frenchman's most intimate friends, "in order" says the latter "to sell me his concertos at a very dear rate… He is un vecchio, who composes with the most prodigious fury. I have heard him undertake to compose a concerto with all its parts more rapidly than a copyist could copy it." Already he was no longer greatly esteemed in his own country, "where fashion was everything; where his works had been heard too long, and where the music of the previous year no longer paid." But one compensation was left him; that of being a model for Johann Sebastian Bach.

The other violinists of the same period—Nardini, Tartini's best pupil; Veracini, whose compositions were noted for their profundity, and in whom some have seen a precursor of Beethoven; Nazzari and Pugnani—had the same sober and expressive qualities, avoiding rather than striving for effect. Burney writes of Nardini "that he should please rather than surprise;" and President de Brosses says of Veracini that "his playing was accurate, noble, scholarly and precise, but somewhat lacking in grace."

The art of the harpsichord had already had its masters, such as Domenico Zipoli, a contemporary and rival of Händel, and Domenico Scarlatti, a precursor of genius, who opened up new paths on which Philipp Emmanuel Bach was to follow him. A master who won even greater fame for the art was Galuppi. But even in Burney's time its decadence was perceptible. "To tell the truth," he says, "I have not met with a great harpsichord-player, nor with an original composer for this instrument, in all Italy. The reason of this is that here the instrument is used only to accompany the voice; and at present it is so greatly neglected, as much by the composers as by the players, that it is difficult to say which are worse, the instruments or those who play on them."—The art of the organist had been better preserved since old Frescobaldi's day. But in spite of way in which Burney and Grosley have praised the Italian organists, we may accept as correct the verdict of Rust, who says that "the Italians seemed to think it impossible to give real pleasure by playing on instruments actuated by a keyboard." Here we recognise their expressive genius, which found its favourite instruments in the voice and the violin.^[11]

But what was of more importance than the great virtuosi, so numerous in Northern Italy, was the general taste for symphonic music. The Lombard and Piedmontese orchestras were famous. The most celebrated was that of Turin, which included Pugnani, Veracini, Sernis and the Besozzi. There was "symphonic music" in the Chapel Royal every morning, from eleven o'clock to noon; the king's orchestra was divided into three groups which were distributed in these galleries at some distance one from another. The understanding between them was so excellent that they had no need of anyone to beat time. This custom, which was general in Italy, naturally struck foreign travellers. "The composer" says Grosley "applies himself merely to encouraging the players by voice or gesture, as the commander of an army encourages troops about to charge. All this music, despite the variety and complication of its parts, is executed without any beating of time." And this proves, no doubt, that the variety and complication of this music were not as yet very great, or it could not have been accorded such liberty; but it is also a proof of the experience and the musical spirit of the Italian orchestras.^[12] It is enough to consider the French orchestras of those days, which did not play more difficult music, but which none the less had to be conducted by great sweeps of the bâton—and stamping of the feet.—"These people" writes De Brosses "greatly excel us in accuracy. Their orchestras have a great feeling for gradations of tone and chiaroscuro. A hundred string and wind instruments will accompany voices without smothering them."^[13]

In Milan above all symphonic music was greatly esteemed. We might almost say that it originated in Milan, for there dwelt one of the two or three men who may lay claim to the glory of having created the symphony, in the modern sense of the word—and he was, I believe, that one of the three whose titles to this fame were most considerable.^[14] He was G. B. Sammartini, Haydn's precursor and model. He was chapel-master to almost half the churches in Milan and for them he composed innumerable symphonic pieces. Burney, who knew him and heard several concerts given under his direction, says that "his symphonies were full of a spirit and a fire which were peculiar to him. The instrumental parts were well written; he did not leave a single instrument idle long; and the violins above all were given no time to rest." Burney complained of him—and the same complaint was afterwards made of Mozart—that his music had "too many notes and too many allegro passages. He seemed positively to gallop. The impetuosity of his genius impelled him forward in a series of rapid movements which, in the long run, fatigued both the orchestra and the audience." Burney nevertheless admires "the truly divine beauty" of some of his adagios.

The Milanese gave evidence of a very decided taste for this symphonic music. There were many concerts in Milan, not only public, but private, at which small orchestras of amateurs performed; at these concerts they played the symphonies of Sammartini and Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach. It often happened even that a performance of opera was replaced by a concert. And even in opera the result of this preference for instrumental music was—to the scandal of the elderly admirers of Italian singing—that the orchestra was too numerous, too powerful, and the complicated accompaniments tended to conceal the melody and stifle the voices.

***

Thus the principal centres of instrumental music were Turin and Milan; for vocal music, Venice and Naples.

Bologna stood at the head of Italian music: the brain that reasoned and controlled, the city of theorists and academicians. There dwelt the principal musical authority of eighteenth-century Italy, the authority recognised at once by the Italians and by the masters of all Europe; by Gluck, Johann Christian Bach and Mozart—Father Martini. This Franciscan monk, choirmaster of the church of his order in Bologna, was a pleasant and scholarly composer, whose work exhibited a certain rococo grace; a learned historian, a master of counterpoint and an impassioned collector, who gathered about him, in his library of seventeen thousand volumes, the musical knowledge of the period. This he generously shared with all those who applied to him, for he was full of kindliness; his was one of those pure and serene souls which are to be found among the old Italian artists. He was greatly beloved, and musicians were constantly appealing to his wisdom, whether in writing or by visiting him in Bologna. Burney speaks of him with affection:

"He is advanced in age and in bad health. He has a distressing cough; his legs are swollen and his whole appearance is that of a sick man. One cannot, by reading his books, form an idea of the character of this good and worthy man. His character is such that it inspires not only respect, but affection. With the purity of his life and the simplicity of his manners he combines gaiety, kindness and philanthropy. I have never liked anyone so well after so slight an acquaintance. I was no more reserved with him at the end of a few hours than I should have been with an old friend or a beloved brother."

Bologna boasted also of the principal musical academy in Italy; the Philharmonic Society, founded in 1666, into which Italian and foreign masters held it an honour to be received. The little Mozart was admitted to it after a competition, in which, so the legend records, he was secretly assisted by the worthy Father Martini. It was the same with Grétry, who does not conceal the fact in his memoirs. The Philharmonic Society discussed questions of theory and musical science; and it gave a yearly festival at which the new works of Bolognese composers were performed. This festival, which was a solemn affair, was held in the church of San Giovanni in Monte, where the Santa Cecilia of Raphael was at that time exhibited. The orchestra and the choirs included a hundred musicians; each composer conducted his own works. All the musical critics of Italy were present at these performances of church and instrumental music, by which reputations were made. Burney, at one of these festivals, met Leopold Mozart "and his son, the little German whose precocious and almost supernatural talents," he tells us, "astonished us in London some years ago when he was little more than a baby. … This young man," he adds farther on, "who has surprised Europe by his execution and his precocious knowledge, is also a very able master of his instrument."^[15]

Lastly, Rome exercised a dictatorship over the whole of Italian music.

Rome boasted a speciality in the religious music of the Sistine Chapel, which was then, however, in a state of decline, owing to the competition of the theatres, which by their large salaries attracted the best artists.^[16] Rome had her great collections of ancient music. She had her seven or eight famous theatres, among others the Argentina and the Aliberti for opera seria and the Capranica for opera buffa.

Above all, Rome, thanks to the attraction which her fame, her traditions and her eternal charm have always possessed for cultivated minds, had a public of rare musical competence, a truly sovereign public, which was aware of its own value, perhaps too much so, and pronounced its judgments without appeal,

"There are in Rome," writes Grétry, "a number of amateurs, of old abbés, who, by their wise criticism, restrain the young composer who allows himself to be carried away beyond the boundaries of his art. So when a composer has succeeded in Naples, Venice or even Bologna, they say to themselves: 'We must see him in Rome.'."

The performances of new operas in Rome were terrible ordeals for the composers; verdicts were promulgated which claimed to be final, and the judges brought to these verdicts the passion of the Italian temperament. The fight was on from the very beginning of the evening. If the music was condemned the hearers were capable of distinguishing between the composer and the singers; they hissed the maestro and applauded the artists. Or it was the singer who was hissed, while the composer was carried in triumph on to the stage.

"The Romans," says Grétry, "have a habit of shouting, in the theatre, during a composition in which the orchestra predominates: Brava la viola, brava il fagotto, brava l'oboe! (Bravo violin, bravo bassoon, bravo oboe!). If it is a melodious and poetical song that pleases them they address themselves to the author, or they sigh and weep; but they also have a terrible mania for shouting, one after another: Bravo Sacchini, bravo Cimarosa, bravo Paisiello! at the performance of operas by other composers; a punishment well calculated to suppress the crime of plagiarism."

With what brutality this popular justice was sometimes executed we learn from the story of poor Pergolesi, who, says tradition, at the first per- formance of his Olimpiade, received, amidst a storm of hooting, an orange, full in his face. And this fact is a sufficient proof that the Roman public was not infallible. But it laid claim to infallibility. Faithful to its traditions, it arrogated to itself an empire over music:

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento. …

No one found anything surprising in this: the privilege of the Roman public was admitted. "Rome, capital of the world," wrote "Amadeo Mozart" in one of his letters, in 1770.

***

Such, in its broad outlines, was the fabric of Italian music in the eighteenth century. We perceive what abundance, what vitality it displayed. Its greatest danger—that to which it succumbed—was its very exuberance. It had no time to recollect itself, to meditate upon its past. It was eaten up by its mania for novelty.^[17]

"You mention Carissimi," wrote De Brosses. "For God's sake be careful not to speak of him here, under penalty of being regarded as a dunce; those who succeeded him have long been regarded as out of fashion!"

The same writer, ravished by hearing a famous singer in Naples—il Senesino—"perceived with astonishment that the people of the country were by no means satisfied. They complained that he sang in a stile antico. You must understand that the taste in music changes here at least every ten years."

Burney is still more positive:

" In Italy they treat an opera already heard like a last year's almanack. … There is a rage for novelty; it has sometimes been the cause of the revolutions which one observes in Italian music; it often gives rise to strange concetti. It leads composers to seek novelty at any cost. The simplicity of the old masters does not please the public. It does not sufficiently tickle the pampered taste of these spoilt children, who can no longer take pleasure save in astonishment."^[18]

This inconstancy of taste, this perpetual restlessness, was the reason why no music worthy of mention was being printed in Italy.

"Musical compositions last such a short time, and the vogue of novelties is so great, that the few copies which might be required are not worth the expense of engraving or printing… The art of engraving music, moreover, appears to be entirely lost. One finds nothing in all Italy resembling a music publisher's."^[19]

Burney is even beginning to foresee, in the midst of the artistic splendour which he loves, the complete and by no means distant disappearance of Italian music. He believes, in truth, that the stupendous energy expended upon it will be transformed, that it will create other arts:

"The language and genius of the Italians are so rich and so fertile that when they are weary of music—which will without a doubt happen very soon, from very excess of enjoyment—this same mania for novelty, which has made them pass so quickly from one style of composition to another, and which often makes them change from a better style to a worse, will force them to seek amusement in a theatre without music!"^[20]

Burney's prediction was only partly realised. Italy has since then attempted, not without success, to establish "a theatre without music." She has, above all, spent the best of her energies, apart from the theatre and music, in her political conflicts, in the wonderful epopée of her Risorgimento, in which all that was great and generous in the nation was expended and often sacrificed in a spirit of exaltation. But Burney has plainly perceived the secret of this Italian music, the principle of its life, its greatness and its death; the Italy of the eighteenth century is all for the present moment; for her there is no longer past or future. She reserves nothing; she is burning herself up.

What a difference between this thriftless Italy and the wise economy of France and Germany at the same period!—Germany slowly and silently amassing her stores of science, of poetry, of artistic genius; France patiently, slowly, parsimoniously setting aside her musical possessions, as the French peasant hoards his cash in the famous woollen stocking!—And so they will find themselves young, vigorous and, as it were, renewed when Italy will be exhausted by her extravagant expenditure of energy.

Blame her who will! Even though the virtues of domestic economy are worthy of all esteem, all my sympathies are for the art that gives itself without counting the cost. It is the charm of this Italian music of the eighteenth century that it spends itself with both hands without recking of the future. No matter if beauty be not lasting: what does matter is that it shall have been as beautiful as possible. Of the fugitive radiance of the beautiful dead centuries a joy and a light remain for ever in the heart.

 

1. Montesquieu travelled in Italy in 1728–29 (Voyages, Bordeaux, 1894); the President de Brosses in 1739–40 (Lettres familières écrites d'Italie); Grosley, in 1758 (Observations sur Italie); Lalande in 1765–66 (Voyages en Italie, VIII. Vol.: in i2-mo, Venice, 1769); Goethe, in 1786–87 (Italianische Reise); Moratin, in 1793–96 (Obras postumas, Madrid, 1867).

   Burney's famous Tour dated from 1770–72, and has been described by him in his two works: The present state of Music in France and Italy (1771) and The present state of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces (1773), almost immediately translated into French.

   The reader may also consult the letters of Mozart, who made three journeys through Italy (1769–71, 1771, 1772–73), The Mémoires of Grétry, who spent eight years in Rome, from 1759–1767, the Autobiography of Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, who accompanied Gluck into Italy—to say nothing of the numerous studies of those German musicians who travelled in Italy, such as Ruet, Johann Christian Bach, etc.

   I obtained much valuable information from an interesting work by Signer Giuseppe Roberti: La Musica in Italia nel secolo XVIII. secondo le impressioni di viaggiatori stranieri (Rivista musicale Italiana, 1901).

2. That is, according to Bouchard, of the galant style and the dramatic style.
3. Marquis d'Orbessan, Voyage d'Italie, 1749–50 (Mélanges historiques et critiques, Toulouse, 1768.)
4. Edmund Rolfe, in 1761: Continental Diary, published by E. Neville Rolfe (Naples, 1897).
5. To say nothing of the lesser cities, where one always found good orchestras and good companies.
6. Lalande (1765, at Parma).
7. Burney.—The Italian opera-houses were generally leased to an association of noblemen, each of whom subscribed for one box, and sub-let the rest by the year, reserving the parterra and the upper gallery only (at Milan and Turin, for example).
8. Burney.
9. Letters of President de Brosses (1739).
10. Pirro, L'Orgue de Bach (Paris, Fischbacher, 1895).
11. Wind instruments were to some extent neglected. Alessandro Scarlatti, who was with difficulty persuaded by Hasse to grant an interview to the famous flautist Quantz, in 1725, said to him: "My son, you are aware of my antipathy for wind instruments; they are never in tune." (Quantz himself repeats this remark to Burney).—In 1771 Mozart discovered that for the great festival of San Petronio at Bologna it was necessary to send to Lucca for the trumpets, and that they were detestable.—Good wind-instruments were hardly to be found save in Venice and the north of Italy. Turin boasted of the two brothers Besozzi, one of whom played the oboe and the other the bassoon; they were known all over Europe.
12. It seems that this custom had become obsolete by the end of the century. Goethe complains, at Vicenza (1786) "of the accursed beating by the maestro, which I had thought peculiar to France."
13. This was no longer so in Burney's time, when the orchestra was tending to dominate the voices.
14. The two others are Gossec (France) and Stamitz (Germany).
15. Burney is among the most disdainful critics of Mozart's sister Marianne. "The young person seems to have attained her highest development, which is nothing very wonderful; and if I may judge by the orchestral music of her composition that I have heard, it is prematurely ripened fruit which is extraordinary rather than excellent."
16. "As persons of distinguished merit attached to the Sistine Chapel find little encouragement there, the music is beginning to be less excellent; there is a perceptible falling off… The result is bound to be the gradual decline of this noble establishment, the home of ancient music, as well as the graceful simplicity that made the reputation of this chapel." (Burney).—A friend of Burney's, who had spent twenty years in Rome, had warned him that the Papal choir no longer enjoyed its erstwhile superiority. Formerly the musicians attached to the Pope's service were the best paid. But "their salary has remained the same. Meanwhile, living has become dearer. The result is that the musicians are obliged, in order to live, to add another profession to that of singing, which loses thereby, while the musical execution in the theatres improves daily."
17. I am speaking of the public taste. The cult of the past was cherished by a small élite. And apart from Father Martini and his library of seventeen thousand volumes, Italy had no lack of collectors, such as Professor Campioni, of Florence, who collected the madrigals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the singer, Mazzanti, of Rome, who made a collection of everything relating to Palestrina; the Abbé Orsini and the Chevalier Santarelli, of Rome, who collected all documents relating to bygone opera and oratorio. (Burney). The old style was also in some degree preserved in the church music. Burney often notes, in Milan, Brescia, Vicenza, Florence, etc., that the church music was "in the old style, full of fugues."
    It is true that a great deal of profane music was executed in the churches, such as that described by the Chevalier Goudar in an amusing narrative (L'Espion Chinois, 1765): "I went recently, in Bologna, to what they call here a grand musical mass. On entering the church I thought at first that I must be at the opera. Introductions, symphonies, minuets, rigadoons, airs for the solo voice, duets, choruses, accompanied by drums, trumpets, kettledrums, hunting horns, oboes, violins, fifes, flageolets: in a word, all that goes to make the music of a play was employed in this music. It was a masterpiece of impiety. If the composer had wished to write a mass for the goddess of pleasure he could not have employed more moving sounds nor more lascivious modulations."
    But Burney assures us that "it was only on feast-days that one could hear this style of modern music in the churches. On ordinary days, in the cathedral churches, the music was of the old style, and solemn; and in the parish churches it was simply plain-song, sometimes with the organ but more often without."
    Nevertheless, in a century and a country as irreligious as Italy was in the 18th century, church music could not be a sufficient counterweight to profane music, which was led away by the thirst for novelty.
18. Here Burney is referring more especially to the Neapolitans.
19. Burney: in Venice.
20. Burney: in Bologna.