Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/247

Rh in safety, until the day when, conscious of its power, it would give battle to the alien spirit and liberate itself from the yoke. None the less it is true that about the middle of the eighteenth century Italian opera was supreme in Germany, and the leaders of German music, those who were afterwards to be its foremost liberators, were all without exception profoundly Italianised. And magnificent as was the development of German music in Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and their successors, it is permissible to believe that this was not the normal development of German music as it would have been had the latter, in taking shape, relied only upon its own resources, drawing only upon its own capital.

From the overwhelming triumph of the Italian opera over the Germany of the eighteenth century there has remained, through the centuries, the indelible mark of Italian feeling and the Italian style, which is perceptible even in the most thoroughly German masters of our own period. It would not be difficult to prove that Wagner's work is full of Italianisms; that the melodious and expressive language of Richard Strauss is, to a great extent, fundamentally Italian. A victory such as that of the Italy of the eighteenth century over Germany leaves its indelible traces upon the history of the people that has suffered it.