were past when a Roman chronicler said of the students of the German College in Rome:
"If by chance these students had to make music in public it is certain that it would be a Teutonic music, fit to excite laughter and to fill the hearers with merriment."[1]
The time was even past—though not very remote—when Lecerf de la Viéville made careless mention of the Germans "whose reputation in music is not great,"[2] and the Abbé de Châteauneuf congratulated a German performer on the dulcimer "all the more because he came from a country not likely to produce men of brilliance and talent."[3]
By 1780 Saxony had produced Händel and Johann Sebastian Bach. She had Gluck and Philipp Emmanuel Bach. Yet she was still enduring the crushing yoke of Italy. Although certain of her musicians, who were becoming conscious of their power, suffered this domination with impatience, they were not as yet sufficiently united to end it. The gifts of fascination possessed by their rivals were too great; the Italian art was too complete, whatever its deficiency of ideas. It showed up in a crude light the awkwardness, the dullness, the faults of taste which are not lacking in the German masters and often repel him who examines the works of artists of the second rank.
The English traveller Burney, who, in his notes on Germany,[4] finally pays a very great tribute to
- ↑ Chronicle of Father Castorio (1630) cited Henri Quittard in his preface to the Sacred Histories of Carissimi, published by the Schola Cantorum.
- ↑ Comparison de la musique française et de la musique italienne (1705).
- ↑ Abbé de Châteauneuf, Dialogue sur la musique des anciens (1705).
- ↑ Charles Burney: The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces (1773):—French translation of the same period.
