Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/175



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the whole of the eighteenth century as during the seventeenth, Italy was the land of music. Her musicians enjoyed, throughout Europe, a superiority comparable to that of the French writers and "philosophers." Italy was the great market for singers, instrumentalists, virtuosi, composers and operas. She exported them by the hundred to England, Germany and Spain. She herself con- sumed prodigious quantities of them, for her appetite for music was insatiable, and she was always asking for more. The most famous masters of Germany—Händel, Hasse, Gluck, Mozart—came to put themselves to school with her; and some of them left the country more uncompromisingly Italian than the Italians. The English melomaniacs invaded Italy; one saw them travelling from city to city, following the singers and operatic companies, passing the Carnival in Naples, Holy Week in Rome, the Ascension in Venice, the summer months in Padua and Vicenza, the autumn in Milan and the winter in Florence; for years on end they made the same tour, without ever tiring of it. Yet