Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/217

Rh Munich was almost an Italian city. It had Italian comic-opera houses and Italian concerts and the most famous Italian singers and performers. The sister of the Elector of Bavaria, the Dowager Electress of Saxony, was a pupil of Porpora and had composed Italian operas, words and music. The Elector was himself an excellent virtuoso and a fairly good composer.

Scarcely had he entered Austria but Burney noted "the corrupt, factitious, Italianised melody which one hears in the towns of this vast empire."

Salzburg, whose musical life is described by Teodor de Wyzewa in some charming pages devoted to La Jeunesse de Mozart, was half Italian in music, as in architecture. About 1700 a writer of bad opere buffe, Lischietti, of Naples, was Kapellmeister there.

But the German metropolis of Italianism was Vienna. There reigned the monarch of the opera, the opera made man: Metastasio. Father of an innumerable progeny of operatic poems, each of which was set to music, not once, but twice, thrice, ten times, and by all the famous composers of the century, Metastasio was regarded by all the artists of Europe as a unique genius. "He has," says Burney, "all the feeling, all the soul and completeness of Racine with more originality." He was the first authority in the world on theatrical music. "This great poet," says Burney again, "whose writings perhaps contributed more to the perfection of vocal melody, and consequently of music in general, than the united efforts of all the composers of Europe," let it be understood that he sometimes gave the musicians the motive or subject of their airs; and he arrogated to himself a protective