Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/96

84 pilgrimage; at the period when he was writing his Almira at Hamburg he affected a great contempt for Italian music. The failure of the Hamburg opera compelled him, however, to make the classic journey; and once he was in Italy he surrendered to the charm of the Latin Circe, like all those who have once known her. Still, he took from her the best part of her genius without impairing his own; and his victory in Italy, the triumph of his Agrippina at Venice, in 1708, was of considerable effect in restoring Germany's pride; for the echo of this success was immediately heard in his own country. These remarks apply even more forcibly to the success of his Rinaldo in London, in 1711. Think of it: here was a North German who, as all Europe agreed, had beaten the Italians on their own ground! The Italians themselves admitted it. The Italian scores which he wrote in London were at once performed in Italy. The poet, Barthold Feind, in 1715, told his compatriots at Hamburg that the Italians called Händel "l'Orfeo del nostro secolo"—"the Orpheus of our age." "A rare honour," he adds, "for no German is spoken of thus by an Italian or a Frenchman, these gentry being accustomed to scoffing at us."

With what rapidity and vehemence did the national sentiment revive in German music during the following years! In 1728 Mattheson's Musikalische Patriot exclaimed: "Fuori Barbari!" "Out, barbarians!"

"Let the calling be forbidden to the aliens who encompass us from east to west, and let them be sent back across their savage Alps to purify themselves in the furnace of Etna!"

In 1729 Martin Heinrich Fuhrmann published