Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/181

Rh conversation—everything there expresses and exhales music. Naples is the principal source of music."

Burney reacts against this opinion, which in his day was no longer quite accurate, and must always have been a little exaggerated. "More confidence is reposed in the art of the Neapolitans than they deserve to-day," he says, "notwithstanding the right they may have had to this celebrity in times past." And he claims the first place for Venice. Without going into the question of the pre-eminence of either city, we may say that Venice and Naples were, in the eighteenth century, the great seminaries of vocal music, not only for Italy but for Europe. Each was the seat of a famous school of opera; that of Venice, the earliest in point of date, which had sprung from Monteverdi, counted such names as Cavalli and Segrenzi in the seventeenth century, Marcello and Galuppi in the eighteenth; while that of Naples, which had come into being a little later (at the end of the seventeenth century) with Francesco Provenzale, had, by the eighteenth century, what with the school of Alessandro Scarlatti and its innumerable adherents, and that of Pergolesi, established its incontestable superiority in respect of dramatic music. Venice and Naples also contained the most clebratedcelebrated [sic] conservatoires in Italy.

In addition to these two metropolitan centres of opera, Lombardy was a centre of instrumental music; Bologna was famous for its theorists; and Rome, in the complex of this artistic organisation, played her part of capital, less by reason of the superiority of individual production than by the sovereign judgment which Rome arrogated to herself in respect of works of art. "Rome" says