Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/196

184 speak with enthusiasm of these little comedies. "The less serious the style," he informs us, "the greater the success of Italian music; for it exhales the spirit of gaiety and is in its element." And he writes, just after seeing La Serva Padrona: "It is not true that one can die of laughter; for if it were I should certainly have died of it, despite the grief which I felt to think that my merriment prevented me from hearing as much as I could have wished of the heavenly music of this farce."

But, as always happens, the men of taste, the musicians, entirely failed to rate these works at their true value; they regarded them as unimportant entertainments, and they would have blushed to place them in the same rank as the musical tragedies. Constantly, in history, this unintelligent hierarchy of styles has caused indifferent works in a noble style to be prized more highly than admirable works in a less exalted style. In President de Brosses' day, the précieux et précieuses of Italy affected to despise the opera buffa and laughed at "de Brosses' infatuation for these farces." Consequently these excellent little compositions were soon overlooked; and abuses as great as those to be found in opera made their way into the intermezzi: the same improbability and the same carelessness in respect of the action. Burney is compelled to admit that "if one takes away the music of a French comic opera it remains a pleasant comedy, while without music the Italian comic opera is insupportable." At the close of the century Moratin laments the absurdity of this class of composition. Yet this was the period of Cimarosa, Paisiello, Guglielmi, Andraozzi, Fioraventi and many others. What might not these lesser masters