Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/23

Rh the share of Pergolesi alone. The public of his time were quite right in calling him the French Pergolesi. It may be mentioned that he had not waited for his visit to Rome before discovering Pergolesi—he knew of him through the Italian company at Liège—moreover the representation of the Serva padrona at Paris in 1752 had been a revelation to the French. But it was at Rome that Grétry steeped himself in the lessons to be learnt from him.

Admirable lessons certainly. Yet does it not seem extraordinary that these lessons, apart from those of nature, were the only ones that Grétry had ever received? As source and foundation of a musical culture the Serva padrona is a little inadequate. Why did not Grétry go back to the great Italian school that immediately preceded Pergolesi—to the great Scarlatti, the incomparable Stradella—the scope of whose genius is sufficiently attested by the fact that he not only invented the “bouffon” style which Pergolesi has employed divinely in the Serva padrona, but also exercised a real domination over Handel’s mind? But we must think of our artist as an impatient young man, eager to “arrive” and to make the most of the extraordinary facility of dramatic musical expression which he feels fermenting within him. Now for learning dramatic expression, as far as neatness and restraint are concerned, there is nothing better than Pergolesi. We shall find that Grétry loses no time in producing wonderful fruit from the seed thus sown.

The sense which attaches in French (and English) to the words buffoon, buffoonery, might cause a misconception as to the nature of Italian Opéra-bouffe. We have to deal with no extravagant art-form, but