Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/183

Rh singular kind of music, as barbarous in its modulations, and as different from that of all the rest of Europe, as Scottish music. … The artistic singing has an energy, a fire, which one does not perhaps meet with in any other part of the world, and which compensates for the lack of taste and delicacy. This manner of execution is so passionate that it is almost frenzied. It is owing to this impetuosity of temper that it is an ordinary thing to see a Neapolitan composer, starting with a gentle and sober movement, set the orchestra on fire before he has finished. … The Neapolitans, like thoroughbred horses, are impatient of the bit. In their conservatoires they find it difficult to obtain pathetic and graceful effects; and in general the composers of the Neapolitan school endeavour less than those of other parts of Italy to obtain the delicate and studied graces."

But if the characteristics of Neapolitan singing had remained almost the same from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, its value had altered greatly. In Bouchard's day Neapolitan music was behind that of the rest of Italy. In Burney's time the Neapolitan composers were renowned not only for their natural genius, but for their science. And here we see what artistic institutions may do, not indeed to transform a race, but to make it produce what it has in reserve, and what, but for them, would probably never have sprung from the soil.

These institutions, in the case of Naples, were its famous conservatoires for the musical training of poor children. An admirable idea, which our modern democracies have neither conceived nor revived.

Of these conservatoires, or Collegii di musica, there were four of the highest standing:

1. The Collegia de' poveri di Gesu Cristo (college of the poor of Jesus Christ), founded in 1589, by a Calabrian of the third order of St. Francis, Marcello Fossataro di Nicotera, who gave harbour to poor