Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/222

210 neither Gluck nor Calsabigi had any more idea than the older men of dethroning Italian music and replacing it by another style. In his preface to Paride ed Elena, written in 1770, after Alceste, Gluck speaks only of "destroying the abuses which have found their way into Italian opera and are degrading it."

Viennese society was divided between these two Italianate coteries, which exhibited only the merest shade of difference. The whole Imperial family was musical. The four Archduchesses played and sang in Metastasio's operas, set to music alternately by Hasse and by Gluck. The Empress sang and had even acted formerly on the boards of the Court theatre. Salieri had just been appointed composer to the Chamber and director of the Italian theatre; and he remained conductor of the Court orchestra until 1824, an obstacle in the way of German composers, and of Mozart in particular.

Vienna, then, even into the nineteenth century, remained a centre of Italian art in Germany. In the days of Beethoven and Weber, Rossini's Tancred was enough to ruin the painfully erected fabric of German music; and we know with what unjust violence Wagner spoke of this city—unfaithful, in his opinion, to the Germanic spirit: "Vienna—does not that say everything? Every trace of German Protestantism effaced; even the national accent lost, Italianised!"

In opposition to the Germany of the South and the ancient capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the new capital of the future German Empire, Berlin, was already growing in importance.