Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/179

Rh hears, in the public places, a shoemaker, a blacksmith, a cabinet-maker singing an aria in several parts with a correctness and taste which they owe to nature and the habit of listening to harmonists formed by art."

In Florence and Genoa the merchants and artisans combined, on Sundays and fête-days, to form various societies of Laudisti or psalm-singers. They used to walk about the country together, singing music in three parts.

In Venice "if two persons are walking together arm in arm," says Burney, "it seems as though they converse only in song. All the songs there are sung as duets."—"In the Piazza di San Marco" says Grosley "a man from the dregs of the people, a shoemaker, a blacksmith, in the clothes proper to his calling, strikes up an air; other people of his sort, joining him, sing this air in several parts with an accuracy, a precision and a taste which one hardly encounters in the best society of our Northern countries."

From the fifteenth century onwards popular musical performances were given yearly in the Tuscan countryside; and the popular genius of Naples and Calabria expressed itself in songs which were not disdained by the musicians: Piccinni and Paisiello exploited them to their advantage.

But the wonderful thing was the ardent delight which the people displayed in listening to music.

"When the Italians admire a thing" writes Burney, "they seem on the point of dying of a pleasure too great for their senses." At a symphony concert given in the open air, in Rome, in 1758, the Abbé Morellet states that the people "were swooning. One heard groans of: O benedetto, o che gusto, piacer di morir! (O blessed! O what