"Good-bye to music! The Hamburgers are good people, and I enjoy here a tranquillity and independence that I should not have in a Court. At the age of fifty I abandoned all ambition. 'Let us eat and drink,' I said, for 'to-morrow we shall sleep.' And here I am, reconciled with my position, except when I meet men of taste and intellect who can appreciate a better music than that we produce here; then I blush for myself and for my good friends the Hamburgers.'"
Burney concludes that the Germans must owe their knowledge of music not to nature but to study.[1]
He will gradually change his opinion, on discovering the hidden wealth, the originality, the powerful vitality of German art. He will come to realise the superiority of German instrumental music. He will even take pleasure in German singing, and will prefer it to any others, Italian excepted. But his first impressions make it clear enough that the choice spirits of the period, the princes and amateurs, favoured the Italians at the expense of their own compatriots, with an exaggeration that even the Italianate Burney recognised.
***
Italian music had several centres in the heart of Germany. These, in the seventeenth century,
- ↑ Burney, in Dresden. Let us note the vulgarity of the popular spectacles in Germany, and even in Vienna, where Burney records programmes of barbarous amusements like the following: "1. Fight between mastiffs and a wild Hungarian bull, surrounded by fire; that is, having fire fixed under the tail and crackers to the ears and horns. 2. Fight between a wild boar and mastiffs. 3. Fight between a large bear and mastiffs. 4. Fight between a savage wolf and beagles. 5. Fight between a wild Hungarian bull and savage famish-dogs. 6. Fight between a bear and hounds. 7. Fight between a wild boar and mastiffs protected by iron armour. 8. Fight between a tiger and mastiffs. Fight between an infuriated bear, not having eaten for a week, and a young wild bull, which he will eat alive on the spot—or assisted by a wolf."
Two or three thousand persons, among whom were women of quality, used to witness these fights, which were frequently arranged in an amphitheatre in Vienna. Such were the spectacles which delighted the eyes of the audiences of Haydn and Mozart.
