Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/237

Rh this remark occurs at the end of a sentence in which Burney remarks that the Germans also furiously attacked one another. Every town was divided into jealous factions. "Everyone is jealous of everyone else, and all are jealous of the Italians." This lack of union was to be as disastrous to the Germans in art as in politics; it rendered them all the more incapable of defending themselves against the foreign invasion, inasmuch as their leaders, the Glucks and Mozarts of the profession, seemed to have gone over to the enemy.

But to the popular taste Italianism remained all but unknown. The catalogues of the Frankfurt and Leipzig fairs of the eighteenth century afford us proof of this. In these great European markets, in which music occupied an important place, Italian opera, so to speak, scarcely showed it self, Of German religious music there was abundance: Lutheran canticles, oratorios, Passions, and above all the collections of Lieder and Liedlein, the eternal and inviolable refuge of German thought.

On the other hand, it is a remarkable fact that Italian opera and Italian music were represented in Europe, about the middle of the eighteenth century, not by Italians, but by Germans; by Gluck in Vienna, Johann Christian Bach in London, Graun in Berlin and Hasse in Italy itself. How could it be otherwise than that a new spirit should find its way into this Germanised Italianism? 1em