Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/21

Rh Memoirs, conceptions in which boldness and even largeness of scope are not what are missing, and in which one feels that some internal force is bubbling up, for abstract reasoning would not have sufficed to form them. Under the form of a dream of the future he describes a thousand enrichments that theatre music might receive from the hand of a great symphonist without changing its nature. Someone has remarked, not without justice, that this dream was indeed a prophecy, to be realised in the person of Mozart. But there is my point—I believe that Grétry, if he had gone through a greater and more complete school, would have been a French Mozart, and the true corollary to Rameau.

The young artist’s most ardent desire was to spend some years in Italy. The generosity of his Mæcænas, the canon, and the existence of a Liège college at Rome facilitated the accomplishment of that desire. The college used to give hospitality to eighteen young students and artists, natives of Liège, who had distinguished themselves in the eyes of their fellow-citizens. It was this college that Grétry entered after a journey on foot of which he has left us a pleasant account. His life at Rome, free from pecuniary anxieties and steeped in the torrent of music which flowed unceasingly in the eight theatres and countless churches of the town, must have been very happy. He was a well-conducted lad (as his master of counterpoint testified in the absence of any other recommendation) and moreover a lad of resource. Finding it necessary to do something to replenish his purse, he introduced himself to a nobleman who played the flute and who had made himself notor-