Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/197

Rh have done with stricter discipline and more conscientious poets!

In Venice, as we have seen, this passion for the opera was combined with a very ardent love of instrumental music, which at this period did not exist in Naples. This had always been so since the Renaissance; and even at the beginning of the seventeenth century this characteristic distinguished the opera of the Venetian Monteverdi from Neapolitan, Florentine or Roman opera.

In a general fashion, we may say that the North of Italy—Venetia, Lombardy, Piedmont—was in the eighteenth century a paradise of instrumental music.

It was a country of great instrumentalists, and above all of violinists. The art of the violin was peculiarly Italian. Endowed with a natural sense of the harmony of form, lovers of beautiful melodic outline, creators of the dramatic monody, the Italians ought to have excelled in music for the violin. "No one in Europe" says M. Pirro "can write, as they do, with the lucidity and expressiveness which it demands." Corelli and Vivaldi were the models of the German masters. The golden age of Italian violin music was the period 1720–1750, the age of Locatelli, Tartini, Vivaldi and Francesco-Maria Veracini. Great composers and performers, these masters were distinguished by the severity of their taste.

The most famous of these was Tartini of Padua. "Padua," says Burney, "is no less famed for the fact that Tartini lived and died there than for the