Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/186

174 M. Gilbert whom Lalande met with, who was working for the benefit of France.

They recruited composers also. The two most famous Neapolitan composers of the middle of the eighteenth century—Jommelli and Piccinni—were recruited, the one, Jommelli, for Germany, where he remained for fifteen years at Stuttgart; the other, Piccinni, for Paris, where he was set up in opposition to Gluck. He died there after having been professor at the Royal School of Singing and Declamation, and Inspector of the Paris Conservatoire. These two men formed a perfect contrast. Piccinni, small, thin, pale, with a tired face, extremely polished, gentle and vehement at the same time, rather serious as to the outer man, with an affectionate heart, impressionable to excess, was above all inimitable in musical comedy, and it was a misfortune for him that his little comic operas in the Neapolitan dialect could not be transplanted beyond the limits of his native country, where they were all the rage; but, as the Abbé Galiani said, "it was really impossible that this style of music should find its way into France since it did not even reach Rome. One had to be a Neapolitan to appreciate the masterly state of perfection to which Piccinni had brought comic opera in Naples."—Jommelli, on the contrary, was appreciated abroad better than in Naples. The Neapolitans resented the fact that he had become unduly Germanised at Stuttgart. Physically he was like a German musician. "He was an extremely corpulent man," says Burney; "his face reminded me of Händel's. But he is much more polished and pleasant in his manners." A true artist, exalted and emotional, but a trifle heavy, he brought back from Germany a love of harmony and compact