Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/95

Rh secured from the excesses of artistic individualism by two profound emotions: the consciousness of the social obligations of art and a passionate patriotism.

We know how Germanic sentiment decayed in German music at the close of the seventeenth century. Abroad the most disdainful idea was entertained of it. We may remember that in 1709 Lecerf de la Viéville, speaking of the Germans, remarked that "their reputation in music is not great," and that the Abbé de Chateauneuf admired a German performer all the more because he came from "a country that is not addicted to producing men of fire and genius." The Germans subscribed to this judgment; and while their princes and wealthy burgesses passed their time in travelling through Italy and France and aping the manners of Paris or Venice, Germany was full of French and Italian musicians, who laid down the law, imposed their style, and were "all the rage." I have already given a summary of a novel by J. Kuhnau: The Musical Charlatan, published in 1700, whose comic hero is a German adventurer who passes himself off as an Italian in order to exploit the snobbery of his compatriots. He is the type of those Germans of the period who denied their nationality in order to share in the glory of the foreigners.

In the first twenty years of the Eighteenth century an intellectual change was already making itself felt. The musical generation which surrounded Händel at Hamburg—Keiser, Telemann, Mattheson—did not go to Italy; it prided itself in not doing so and was beginning to realise its own strength. Händel himself at first refused to make the Italian