Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/13



centuries ago the Germans were already filling Naples, Rome and Venice with their princes, their merchants, their pilgrims, their artists and their tourists. But Italy was not then passive, as she afterwards became. She exported fourfold what was imported across her frontiers; and she did not fail to repay to Germany the visits which she received. She profited by the exhaustion caused by the Thirty Years' War to flood Bavaria, Hesse, Saxony, Thuringia and Austria with her works of art and her artists. Music, above all, and the theatre were left to her. Cavalli, Bernabei, Steffani and Torri reigned in Munich; Bontempi and Pallavicino in Dresden; Cesti, Draghi, Ziani, Bononcini, Caldara and G. Porta in Vienna; Vivaldi was Kappelmeister in Hesse-Darmstadt and Torelli in Brandenburg-Anspach. Multitudes of libretto-writers and scene-painters, of sopranos, contraltos and castrati, of violinists and harpsichord players, of players on the lute, the flute, the guitar and instruments of every kind, followed these leaders. Their great engine of war was the Opera, the supreme creation of the Renaissance in its decline; and their centre of propaganda was 1em