Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/104

92 of French and Italian art; but in him the basis had remained echt deutsche—genuinely German.—It was otherwise with the new musicians. The musical revolution which was fully accomplished from about 1750 onwards, and which ended in the supremacy of German music, was—however strange it seems—the product of foreign movements. The more perspicacious historians of music, such as Hugo Riemann, have clearly perceived this but have not dwelt upon it. Yet it should be emphasised. It is no insignificant fact that the leaders of the new instrumental music of Germany, the first symphonists of Mannheim, Johann Stamitz, Filtz and Zarth, should be natives of Bohemia, as were the reformer of German opera, Gluck, and the creator of the melodrama and the tragic German Singspiel, George Benda. The impetuosity, the spontaneous impulse and the naturalness of the new symphony were a contribution of the Czechs and Italians to German music. Nor was it a matter of indifference that this new music should have found its focus and its centre in Paris, where the first editions of the Mannheim symphonies appeared; whither J. Stamitz went to conduct his works and found in Gossec an immediate disciple: in France, where other of the Mannheim masters had established themselves, Richter at Strasbourg, and Bech at Bordeaux. The critics of northern Germany who were hostile to the movement were completely conscious of the importance of these facts. They qualified these symphonies as "symphonies in the recent outlandish manner" and their authors as "musicians in the Parisian fashion."