Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/22

8 ious among the musicians of Rome as being hard to satisfy. This music-lover was in the habit of ordering a flute concerto from every artist who visited him: he was never satisfied with it and always sent the music back to the composer with a few pounds. Our cunning Walloon expressed a desire to hear a prelude played on the instrument by one who was such a master of it. And having fixed in his memory all the flautist’s favourite passages and runs, he put them in the concerto. The nobleman declared his production admirable and took him into his pay, promising him a small annual salary on condition of receiving a flute concerto in every town where he stopped—for he was a great traveller.

The Memoirs of Grétry give us an amusing picture of musical life in Rome at this period, and of the passion of the public for the theatre and for church concerts. What one must not expect to find in the Memoirs is an account of the state of musical art, or a judicial mention of the artists who adorned it in its various branches at that time. Grétry is not writing a chapter of the history of music: he is merely telling us about the works and the masters that have specially attracted him by their affinity with his own personality, and by the direct help and stimulus that he felt he could draw from them for the development of his own nature. Of all the different kinds of music it was theatre music that captivated him at Rome: and in theatre-music it was opéra-bouffe, and among the masters of opéra-bouffe, Pergolesi. Pergolesi was the preponderating influence with Grétry. A study such as this, aiming at the accuracy, but not at the detail, of truth, can afford to neglect the share of the Galuppis, Vincis, Terradellas, in the formation of his art, and the rousing of his genius, and to confine itself to