Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/18

6 intelligence. Only a few touches of pedantry, the malady of the period, now and again slightly mar this endearing countenance. There is much to be learned from these many-coloured pictures of seventeenth century life in Saxony. They shed a light on one of the most interesting periods of German history—the rapid convalescence of the country after the Thirty Years' War, and the formation of the great classic century of music.

The hero of the novel is a Suabian adventurer, from the neighbourhood of Ulm, who, profiting by Germany's infatuation for Italy, passed himself off as an Italian in his own country. He had spent scarcely a year in Italy, and had filled a very humble situation there, as copyist or famulus to a few celebrated musicians; but no more than this was needed to persuade him that the genius of his masters had descended upon him. He was very careful, however, to avoid putting the matter to the test in Italy, knowing that he would find it difficult to get his pretensions accepted in Rome or Venice; he crossed the Alps, relying upon the ingenuous simplicity of his compatriots and their servile respect for all that was foreign.

He makes straight for Dresden, the centre of Italianism, the home of the Opera. He begins by travestying his name; from an insulting nickname applied to his father (Theuer Affe—precious monkey) he evolves the name of a respectable Neapolitan family: Caraffa. One of the eccentricities of the age was to give German names a French or Latin disguise. Kuhnau castigates this absurdity with the sturdy commonsense of a Molière. "We may