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A Musical Tour

"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.[1]

  1. 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,