A musical tour through the land of the past/Chapter VII - II

by Romain Rolland

 

II.

Germany

Despite a century and a half of great musicians, Germany, about the year 1750, was far from having won, in the musical judgment of Europe, the position that she holds to-day. It is true that those days were past when a Roman chronicler said of the students of the German College in Rome:

"If by chance these students had to make music in public it is certain that it would be a Teutonic music, fit to excite laughter and to fill the hearers with merriment."^[1]

The time was even past—though not very remote—when Lecerf de la Viéville made careless mention of the Germans "whose reputation in music is not great,"^[2] and the Abbé de Châteauneuf congratulated a German performer on the dulcimer "all the more because he came from a country not likely to produce men of brilliance and talent."^[3]

By 1780 Saxony had produced Händel and Johann Sebastian Bach. She had Gluck and Philipp Emmanuel Bach. Yet she was still enduring the crushing yoke of Italy. Although certain of her musicians, who were becoming conscious of their power, suffered this domination with impatience, they were not as yet sufficiently united to end it. The gifts of fascination possessed by their rivals were too great; the Italian art was too complete, whatever its deficiency of ideas. It showed up in a crude light the awkwardness, the dullness, the faults of taste which are not lacking in the German masters and often repel him who examines the works of artists of the second rank.

The English traveller Burney, who, in his notes on Germany,^[4] finally pays a very great tribute to the greatness of German music, is none the less continually shocked by the clumsiness of musical performances; he gnashes his teeth over the ill-tuned instruments, the inharmonious organs, the shrieking voices.

"One does not find in German street musicians the same delicacy of ear which I have met with in the same class of persons in Italy."^[5]

In the musical schools of Saxony and Austria "the playing of the pupils is generally hard and clumsy."

At Leipzig the singers produce merely a disagreeable noise, a yelping, when the high notes are taken; a sort of stricken shriek, instead of emitting the voice while diminishing or swelling the tone.

In Berlin the instrumental school "makes hardly any use of forte and piano. Each performer simply vies with his neighbour. The chief aim of the Berlin musician is to play louder than he… There is no gradation … no attention to the nature of the tone produced by the instruments, which have only a certain degree of power when producing a musical note, after which there is nothing but a noise."

At Salzburg the very large orchestra of the Prince Archbishop "was remarkable chiefly for its inelegance and its noise." Mozart speaks of it with disgust: "It is one of the great reasons why Salzburg is hateful to me; this Court orchestra is so uncouth, so disorderly and so debauched! An honest man with decent manners cannot live with such people!"^[6]

Even at Mannheim, which had the most perfect orchestra in Germany, the wind instruments—the bassoons and oboes—were not in tune.

As for the organ, it was torture to hear it played in Germany. In Berlin "the organs are big, clumsy, loaded with stops, noisy and out of tune." In Vienna, in the cathedral, "the organs are horribly out of tune." Even in Leipzig, in the holy city of the organ, the city of the great Johann Sebastian Bach, "despite all my investigations," says Burney, "I did not hear anyone play the organ well anywhere."

It would seem that with the exception of a few princely Courts, "where the arts," says Burney, "rendered power less insupportable, and intellectual diversions were perhaps as necessary as those of active life," the love of music was not nearly so ardent or so universal as in Italy.

During the first weeks of his tour Burney was disappointed:

"Travelling along the banks of the Rhine, from Cologne to Coblentz, I was peculiarly surprised to find no trace of that passion for music which the Germans are said to possess, especially on the Rhine.^[7] At Coblentz, for example, although it was Sunday, and the streets were filled with crowds of people, I did not hear a single voice or instrument, as is usual in most Roman Catholic countries."

Hamburg, lately famed for its opera, the first and most celebrated in Germany, has become a musical Bœotia. Philipp Emmanuel Bach feels lost there. When Burney goes to see him, Bach tells him: "You have come here fifty years too late."

And in a jesting tone that conceals a little bitterness and shame, he adds:

"Good-bye to music! The Hamburgers are good people, and I enjoy here a tranquillity and independence that I should not have in a Court. At the age of fifty I abandoned all ambition. 'Let us eat and drink,' I said, for 'to-morrow we shall sleep.' And here I am, reconciled with my position, except when I meet men of taste and intellect who can appreciate a better music than that we produce here; then I blush for myself and for my good friends the Hamburgers.'"

Burney concludes that the Germans must owe their knowledge of music not to nature but to study.^[8]

He will gradually change his opinion, on discovering the hidden wealth, the originality, the powerful vitality of German art. He will come to realise the superiority of German instrumental music. He will even take pleasure in German singing, and will prefer it to any others, Italian excepted. But his first impressions make it clear enough that the choice spirits of the period, the princes and amateurs, favoured the Italians at the expense of their own compatriots, with an exaggeration that even the Italianate Burney recognised.

***

Italian music had several centres in the heart of Germany. These, in the seventeenth century, were Munich, Dresden and Vienna. The greatest Italian masters—Cavalli, Cesti, Draghi, Bontempi, Bernabei, Torn, Pallavicino, Caldara, Porpora, Vivaldi, Torelli, Veracini—had sojourned there and reigned supreme. Dresden above all displayed a dazzling efflorescence of Italianism during the first half of the eighteenth century, in the days when Lotti, Porpora and Hasse, the most Italianate of the Germans, directed the opera.

But in 1760 Dresden was barbarously devastated by Frederick the Great, who applied himself to effacing its splendour for good and all. He methodically destroyed by his artillery, during the siege of the city, all its monuments, churches, palaces, statues and gardens. When Burney passed through it the city was no more than a heap of rubbish. Saxony was ruined, and for a long time to come played no further part in musical history. "The theatre was closed for reasons of economy." The band of instrumentalists, famous all over Europe, was dispersed among foreign cities. "The poverty was general. Those artists who had not been dismissed were rarely paid. The greater part of the nobility and the bourgeoisie was so poor that it could not afford to have its children taught music. … But for a wretched comic opera there was no other spectacle in Dresden save that of poverty."^[9] There was the same devastation at Leipzig.

The citadels of Italianism in the second half of the century were Vienna, Munich and the towns on the banks of the Rhine.

At Bonn, when Burney was making his tour, the band of musicians maintained by the Elector of Cologne was almost wholly composed of Italians, under the direction of the Kapellmeister Lucchesi, a composer well known in Tuscany.

At Coblentz, where Italian operas were often performed, the Kapellmeister was Sales of Brescia.

Darmstadt had formerly been distinguished by the presence of Vivaldi, the Court violinist.

Mannheim and Schwetzingen, the summer residence of the Elector Palatine, had Italian opera-houses. That of Mannheim was able to contain five thousand persons; the staging was sumptuous, and the company more numerous than at the Paris or London opera-houses. Almost all the performers were Italian. Of the two Kapellmeisters one, Toeschi, was Italian, and the other, Christian Cannabich, had been sent to Italy at the Elector's expense to study under Jommelli.

At Stuttgart and at Ludwigsburg, where the Duke of Würtemberg was in conflict with his subjects, on account of his extravagant passion for music,^[10] Jommelli was fifteen years Kapellmeister and director of the Italian opera.^[11] The theatre was enormous; it could be opened at the back, thus forming, when required, an open-air amphitheatre, "which was sometimes filled by the populace, expressly for the purpose of obtaining effects of perspective." All the opera buffa singers were Italian. The orchestra included numerous Italians, and in particular some famous violinists: Nardini, Baglioni, Lolli and Ferrari. "Jommelli," writes Leopold Mozart, "is taking all imaginable pains to close the Court to Germans. … In addition to his salary of four thousand florins, the upkeep of four horses, lighting, and fuel, he has a house in Stuttgart and another at Ludwigsburg. … Add to this that he has unlimited power over his musicians. … Would you like a proof of the degree of his partiality for people of his own nation? Just think of it—he and his compatriots, of whom his house is always full, have gone to the length of declaring, in respect of our Wolfgang,^[12] that it was an incredible thing that a child of German birth could possess such passion and animation."^[13]

Augsburg, which had never ceased to be in touch with Venice and Upper Italy; Augsburg, where Italian influence had permeated architecture and the arts of design in the time of the Rennaissance—Augsburg, which was the native city of Hans Burgkmair and the Holbeins, was also the cradle of the Mozarts. Leopold Mozart had, it is true, settled at Salzburg, but in 1763 he made a journey to Augsburg, with his little boy, aged seven; and Teodor de Wyzewa has shown that it was there, in all probability, that Mozart "began to initiate himself into the free and majestic beauty of Italy."^[14]

Munich was almost an Italian city. It had Italian comic-opera houses and Italian concerts and the most famous Italian singers and performers. The sister of the Elector of Bavaria, the Dowager Electress of Saxony, was a pupil of Porpora and had composed Italian operas, words and music. The Elector was himself an excellent virtuoso and a fairly good composer.

Scarcely had he entered Austria but Burney noted "the corrupt, factitious, Italianised melody which one hears in the towns of this vast empire."

Salzburg, whose musical life is described by Teodor de Wyzewa in some charming pages devoted to La Jeunesse de Mozart, was half Italian in music, as in architecture. About 1700 a writer of bad opere buffe, Lischietti, of Naples, was Kapellmeister there.

But the German metropolis of Italianism was Vienna. There reigned the monarch of the opera, the opera made man: Metastasio. Father of an innumerable progeny of operatic poems, each of which was set to music, not once, but twice, thrice, ten times, and by all the famous composers of the century, Metastasio was regarded by all the artists of Europe as a unique genius. "He has," says Burney, "all the feeling, all the soul and completeness of Racine with more originality." He was the first authority in the world on theatrical music. "This great poet," says Burney again, "whose writings perhaps contributed more to the perfection of vocal melody, and consequently of music in general, than the united efforts of all the composers of Europe," let it be understood that he sometimes gave the musicians the motive or subject of their airs; and he arrogated to himself a protective supremacy over them. Nothing better shows the Italianisation of Germany better than this fact; the most famous representative of Italian opera chose as his residence not Rome or Venice but Vienna, where he held his court. Poet Laureate to the Emperor, he disdained to learn the language of the country in which he lived; he knew only three or four words of it; just what he needed, as he said, 'to save his life'; that is, to make himself understood by his servants. Worshipped by Germany, he did not conceal his disdain of her.

His right hand in Vienna, his principal interpreter in music, was the composer Hasse, the most Italianate of German musicians.^[15] Adopted by Italy, baptised by her il Sassone (the Saxon), the pupil of Scarlatti and Porpora, Hasse had acquired a sort of Italian chauvinism that surpassed that of the Italians themselves. He would not hear of any other music; and he was ready to fall upon President de Brosses when the latter, while in Rome, attempted to uphold the superiority of François Lalande in the matter of church music.

"I saw," says De Brosses, "my man ready to suffocate for anger against Lalande and his supporters. He was already exhibiting a display of chromatics, and if Faustina, his wife,^[16] had not thrust herself between us he would in a moment have seized me with a semi-quaver and crushed me with a diesig."

We may say that the German Hasse was, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the favourite Italian composer of opera seria in Germany, England, and Italy even. He had set to music all Metastasio's operatic libretti, with a single exception—some of them three or four times, and all at least twice; and although one could not possibly say that Metastasio worked slowly,^[17] Hasse did not find that he wrote quickly enough; and to pass the time he composed the music for various operas by Apostolo Zeno. The number of his works was so great that he confessed that "he might very well fail to recognise them if they were shown to him;" he derived more pleasure, he said, in creating than in preserving what he had written; and he compared himself with "those fertile animals whose offspring are destroyed in the act of birth or left to the mercy of chance. "^[18]

This illustrious representative of Italian opera in German was, it is true, beginning to be discussed. About 1760 another party, and a very zealous one, was formed in Vienna in opposition to Metastasio and Hasse. But who were its leaders? Raniero da Calsabigi of Leghorn—yet another Italian!—the librettist of Orfeo and Alceste; and Gluck—no less Italianate than Hasse, a pupil of Sammartini's in Milan, the author of two score dramatic works in the Italian style, who professed all his life, to write Italian operas.^[19]—Such were the opposing camps; and between them there was no question of the superiority of Italian opera: that was contested by neither; the only point at issue was whether certain reforms should or should not be introduced into opera. "The school of Hasse and Metastasio," says Burney, "regarded all innovation as charlatanry and remained attached to the old form of musical drama, in which the poet and the musician demanded equal attention on the part of the spectators—the poet in the recitative and narrative and the composer in the airs, duets and choruses.—The school of Gluck and Calsabigi devoted themselves rather to scenic effects, to the propriety of the characters, to simplicity of diction and musical execution, rather than to what they called flowery descriptions, superfluous comparisons, a cold and sententious morality, with tedious symphonies and long musical developments."—Here we have the whole difference; at bottom it is a question of age, not of race or style. Hasse and Metastasio were old; they complained that there had been no good music written since the days of their youth. But neither Gluck nor Calsabigi had any more idea than the older men of dethroning Italian music and replacing it by another style. In his preface to Paride ed Elena, written in 1770, after Alceste, Gluck speaks only of "destroying the abuses which have found their way into Italian opera and are degrading it."

Viennese society was divided between these two Italianate coteries, which exhibited only the merest shade of difference. The whole Imperial family was musical. The four Archduchesses played and sang in Metastasio's operas, set to music alternately by Hasse and by Gluck. The Empress sang and had even acted formerly on the boards of the Court theatre. Salieri had just been appointed composer to the Chamber and director of the Italian theatre; and he remained conductor of the Court orchestra until 1824, an obstacle in the way of German composers, and of Mozart in particular.

Vienna, then, even into the nineteenth century, remained a centre of Italian art in Germany. In the days of Beethoven and Weber, Rossini's Tancred was enough to ruin the painfully erected fabric of German music; and we know with what unjust violence Wagner spoke of this city—unfaithful, in his opinion, to the Germanic spirit: "Vienna—does not that say everything? Every trace of German Protestantism effaced; even the national accent lost, Italianised!"^[20]

***

In opposition to the Germany of the South and the ancient capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the new capital of the future German Empire, Berlin, was already growing in importance.

"The music of this country" writes Burney in Berlin, "is more truly German than that of any other part of the Empire." Frederick the Great had set his heart upon Germanising it; he would allow no operas to be performed in his States other than those of his favourite Graun and the Saxon Agricola and a few—only a few—of Hasse's. But observe how difficult it was for German taste to liberate itself! These operas were Italian operas, and the king could not even imagine that there could be any object in singing in any other language than Italian.

"A German singer!" he used to say. "I would as soon hear my horse neigh!"^[21]

And who were these German composers, whose exclusive and intolerant protector he had appointed himself? so that Burney was justified in saying: "The names of Graun and Quantz are sacred in Berlin, and more respected than those of Luther and Calvin. There are many schisms; but the heretics are forced to keep silent. For in this land of universal tolerance in matters of religion, whosoever should dare to profess other musical dogmas than those of Graun and Quantz might count quite certainly on being persecuted …"

J. J. Quantz, who was composer and musician in ordinary to the Royal chamber, and also taught the King to play the flute, "had the taste which people had forty years ago"—that is, the Italian taste. He had travelled extensively in Italy. He was of the school of Vivaldi, Gasparini, Alessandro Scarlatti and Lotti, and for him the golden age of music was the age of these musical forbears. As Burney says, "he had been liberal and advanced … some twenty years previously."

It was much the same with Graun, and Karl Heinrich Graun was, with Hasse, the most famous name in German music in the days of Bach and Händel.^[22] Marpurg calls him "the greatest ornament of the German muse, the master of pleasing melody … tender, sweet, sympathetic, exalted, stately and terrible by turns. All the strokes of his pen were equally perfect. His genius was inexhaustible. Never has any man been more generally regretted by a whole nation, from the king to the least of his subjects."

"Graun"—says Burney more soberly—"was, thirty years ago, a composer of graceful simplicity, having been the first among the Germans to renounce the fugue and all such laboured inventions!"

A poor compliment to us, who have since then returned with such singular affection to "all such laboured inventions!" But for an Italianate musician this was the best of compliments. Graun, indeed, had applied himself to acclimatising, in Berlin, the Italian operatic style, and in particular the style of Leonardo Vinci, that composer of genius who bears a doubly famous name. This is tantamount to saying that his tastes were those of the generation of Italians who lived between the times of Alessandro Scarlatti and Pergolesi. He too, like Quantz, dated back to 1720.

In patronizing Graun and Quantz, Frederick was therefore merely an Italianate conservative, who sought to defend, against the fashion of the day, "the productions of an age which was regarded as the Augustan age of music; the age of Scarlatti, Vinci, Leo and Porpora, as well as that of the greatest singers, since when, he considered, music had degenerated." In the face of a denationalised Vienna it was not worth while to pose as the representative of German art. Frederick would not have been far from agreement, in fundamentals, with the most Italianate coterie of Vienna: that of Hasse and Metastasio.^[23] There was one only difference between his taste and that of the Viennese coterie: namely, his favourites were not the equals of Hasse and Metastasio. "Admitting," says Burney, "that the period of art which the king prefers is the best, he has not chosen its best representatives."

I am wrong: there was one other difference. In Vienna, whatever the exigencies of the musical fashion, music had always been free; the authorities, anything but liberal in other matters, allowed the musicians and lovers of music liberty of taste. In Berlin they had to obey; no taste other than the king's was permitted.

The extent to which the meddling tyranny of Frederick the Great interfered with music is unimaginable. It was the same despotic spirit that prevailed throughout the whole organisation of Prussia.^[24] An inquisitional and menacing supervision weighed upon music—for the king was a musician: a flautist, a virtuoso, a composer, as all had reason to know. Every afternoon, at Sans-Souci, from five to six o'clock, he gave a concert consisting of performances on the flute. The Court was invited by command, and listened piously to the three or four "long and difficult" concertos which it pleased the king to inflict upon them. There was no danger of his running short of these: Quantz had composed three hundred, expressly for these concerts; he was forbidden to publish any of them, and no one else might play them. Burney amiably observes that "these concertos had no doubt been composed in an age when people held their breath better; for in some of the difficult passages, as in the organ-points, his Majesty was obliged, against the rules, to take breath in order to finish the passage."^[25] The Court listened in resignation, and it was forbidden to betray the least sign of approbation. The contrary eventuality had not been foreseen. Only the gigantic Quantz, worthy, in respect of stature, to figure in one of the King of Prussia's regiments,^[26] "had the privilege of shouting bravo to his royal pupil, after each solo, or when the concert was finished."

But without lingering over these well-known facts let us see how the royal flautist endeavoured to rule, by blows of his stick, the whole musical world of Berlin, and especially the opera.

Certainly he had done good. From the death of Frederick I. (1713) to 1742, Berlin had had no opera,^[27] Immediately upon his accession Frederick II. built one of the greatest opera houses in existence, with the inscription: Fredericus Rex Apollini et Musis. He got together an orchestra of fifty performers, engaged Italian singers and French dancers, and prided himself upon having a company which in Berlin was said to be the best in Europe. The king bore all the expenses of the opera, and admission was gratuitous to all who were decently clothed; which made it possible, after all, to exclude the popular element, even from the parterre.^[28]

But although the artists were royally paid I fancy they earned their salaries. Their situation was by no means restful.

"The king" says Burney, "stood always behind the Kapellmeister, with his eyes on the score, which he followed, so that one might truthfully say that he played the part of director-general. … In the opera-house, as in the camp, he was a strict observer of discipline. Attentively observing the orchestra and the stage, he noted the least sign of negligence in the music or the movements of the performers and reprimanded the culprit. And if any member of the Italian company dared to infringe this discipline, by adding to or subtracting from his part, or by altering the least passage, he was subsequently ordered by the king to apply himself strictly to the execution of the notes written by the composer, under penalty of corporal punishment."

This detail gives us the measure of the musical freedom enjoyed in Berlin. An Italian pseudo-classicism reigned in a tyrannical fashion permitting neither change nor progress. Burney is scandalised by this tyranny.

"Thus," he says, "music is stationary in this country, and will be so long as his Majesty allows the artists no more liberty in this art than he grants in matters of civil government, striving to be at the same time the sovereign of the lives, fortunes and interests of his subjects, and the supervisor of the least of their pleasures."

We may add that Berlin was above all a city of musical professors and theorists, who assuredly did not permit themselves to discuss the king's taste, for they were all more or less officials, like the chiefest among them, Marpurg, who was director of the royal lottery and councillor to the Ministry of War. They avenged themselves upon this constraint by bitter disputes, and their squabbles did nothing to add to the liberty or the amenity of musical life in Berlin.

"Musical disputes," says Burney, "are accompanied in Berlin with more heat and animosity than anywhere else. Indeed, as there are more theorists than performers in this city, there are also more critics, which is not calculated to purify the taste nor to feed the imagination of the artists."

Those whose tempers required freedom could not endure Berlin. If Philipp Emmanuel Bach remained in the city from 1740 to 1767 it was much against his will. The poor fellow could not leave Berlin—he was not allowed to do so; and he suffered in his taste and his self-respect. His position and his salary were both unsatisfactory; he was obliged, day after day, to accompany the royal flautist on the harpsichord; and both Graun and Quantz, "whose style was absolutely opposed to that which he was striving to establish," were preferred to him. This explains why he was, later on, so delighted to find himself in the good town of Hamburg, which was devoid of interest in music and of taste, but was hospitable, good-natured and free. To an artist, anything—even ignorance—is better than despotism in matters of taste.

***

Such, then, at first sight, was the musical culture of the great German cities. Italian opera was supreme, and Burney closed his observations of Germany with these words:

"To sum up: the points of comparison between the melodic style of the Germans and that of the Italians are as numerous as the analogies of taste offered by the majority of the composers and artists of these two countries. The reason for this resides in the relations obtaining between the Empire and its extensive possessions beyond the Alps, and also in the Italian opera-houses which have almost always existed in Vienna, Munich, Dresden, Berlin, Mannheim, Brunswick, Stuttgart, Cassel, etc."

But had not Germany lately produced the eminently German genius, the vast and profound achievements of Johann Sebastian Bach? How is it that his name finds so little space in Burney's notes and in his picture of Germany?

We have here a fine example of the diversity of the judgments pronounced upon a genius by his contemporaries and by posterity! At a distance of two centuries it seems to us impossible that he should not have held a predominant position in the musical world of his period. We may at a pinch admit that a great man may remain absolutely unknown if the circumstances of his life are such that he is isolated and can neither publish his works nor force the public to give him a hearing. But we find it difficult to believe that he could be known and not recognised; that people should have had an indifferent and merely benevolent opinion of him; that they should have been unable to distinguish between him and the artists of the second rank by whom he was surrounded. Yet such things are constantly happening.

Shakespeare was never completely ignored or unrecognised. M. Jusserand has shown that Louis XIV. had his plays in his library and that they were read in France in the seventeenth century. The public of his own time appreciated him, but not more than it appreciated many other dramatists and less than it appreciated some. Addison, who was acquainted with his works, forgot, in 1694, to mention him in his Account of the Best English Poets.

It was almost the same with Johann Sebastian Bach. He had a respectable reputation among the musicians of his time, but this celebrity never extended beyond a restricted circle. His life in Leipzig was difficult, straitened, almost poverty-stricken, and he was a victim of the persecutions of the Thomasschule, whose council did not regret his death, and, like the Leipzig newspapers, did not even mention it in its annual opening address. It refused the small customary pension to his widow, who died in 1760 in a condition of indigence. Fortunately Bach had trained a number of scholarly pupils, to say nothing of his sons, who cherished a pious recollection of his teaching. But how was he known twenty years after his death? As a great organist and a masterly teacher. Burney remembers him when he passes through Leipzig, but only to cite the opinion of Quantz, who said of Bach "that this able artist had brought the art of playing the organ to the highest degree of perfection." He adds:

"In addition to the excellent and very numerous compositions which he wrote for the church, this author has published a book of preludes and fugues for the organ, on two, three or four different motives, in modo recto et contrario, and in each of the twenty-four modes. All the organists existing to-day in Germany were trained in his school, just as most of the harpsichord -players and pianists have been trained in that of his son, the admirable Karl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, who has long been so well-known."

Observe the position of the epithet "admirable." In 1770 the "admirable Bach" is Philipp Emmanuel Bach. He is the great man of the family. And Burney goes into raptures over the fashion in which "this sublime musician" had contrived to train himself.^[29]

"How did he form his style? It is difficult to say. He had neither inherited it nor acquired it from his father, who was his sole master; for that worthy musician, whom no one has equalled in knowledge and invention, thought it necessary to concentrate in his own two hands all the harmony of which he could avail himself; and undoubtedly in his system he sacrificed melody and expression."

Nothing could be more characteristic than the promptitude with which the sons of Johann Sebastian—who, for that matter, venerated him—denied his taste and his principles. Philipp Emmanuel speaks with irony of musical science, especially of canons, "which are always dry and pretentious." He regards it "as a defect of genius to abandon oneself to these dreary and insignificant studies."^[30] He asks Burney whether the latter has met with any great contrapuntist in Italy. Burney replies in the negative. "Faith," says Philipp Emmanuel, "if you did find one it wouldn't be a very valuable discovery, for when one knows counterpoint there are other things too that are necessary to make a good composer."

Burney is wedded to his own opinion, and both agree that "music must not be a large gathering where everybody speaks at once, so that there is no longer any conversation, nothing but wrangling and ill-breeding and noise. A sensible man should wait for the moment in conversation when he can put in his word with effect."—It was the school of pure melody, in the Italian style, that condemned the old German polyphony. Italianism had permeated even the Bach family.

Johann Sebastian himself was possibly not indifferent to the charm of Italian opera. According to his historian, Forkel, he relished the work of Caldara, Hasse and Graun. He was a friend of Hasse's and La Faustina's; and in Leipzig or Dresden he often went, with his elder son, to hear the Italian opera. He used laughingly to apologise for the pleasure which he took in these little escapades. "Friedmann," he would say, "shall we go and hear those pretty little Dresden songs again?" Is it so difficult to recognise in certain passages of his compositions reminiscences of these "little songs?" And who knows whether, in other circumstances, had he had a theatre at his disposal, he would not have gone with the tide, as the others did?

His sons offered no resistance to the movement. Italianism conquered them so thoroughly that one of them became—for a time—completely the Italian, under the name of Giovanni Bacchi. I am referring to Johann Christian Bach, the youngest of the family. He was fifteen years old at the time of his father's death, and had received at his hands a thorough musical training; he displayed a preference for the organ and the clavier. After his father's death he went to his brother Philipp Emmanuel in Berlin. There he found the Italianised opera of Graun and Hasse. The impression which it made upon him was so profound that he set out for Italy. He went to Bologna, and there this son of Johann Sebastian Bach placed himself under the discipline of Father Martini.^[31] For eight years, with Martini's assistance, he worked incessantly at the task of acquiring an Italian training and an Italian soul. At intervals he went to Naples, and there became a champion of the Neapolitan school of opera; and he produced a series of Italian operas based on poems by Metastasio, including Catone in Utica (1761) and Alessandro nelle Indie (1762), which enjoyed a great success. Burney said that "his airs were in the best Neapolitan taste."—But this is not all; having abjured his father's musical taste he likewise abjured his faith; the son of the great Bach became a Catholic. He was appointed organist in the Duomo of Milan, under an Italian name.^[32] It would be difficult to mention a more categorical example of the conquest of the Germanic spirit by Italy.

And we are not speaking of second-rate men, having no other claim to our attention than the fact that they were the sons of a great man. Johann Sebastian's sons were themselves great artists, whom history has not placed in their proper rank. Like the majority of the musicians of this transition period, they have been unduly sacrificed to those who preceded them and those who followed them. Philipp Emmanuel, far in advance of his time and very imperfectly understood, excepting by a few, has rightly been described by M. Vincent d'Indy as one of the first direct forerunners of Beethoven. Johann Christian is hardly less important; from him derives not Beethoven, but Mozart.^[33]

Another remarkable musician, who, even more than Philipp Emmanuel, was the precursor—one might almost say the model—of Beethoven, in his great sonatas and variations: Frederick Wilhelm Rust, a friend of Gœthe's, musical director to Prince Leopold III. of Anhalt, at Dessau, was seduced like the rest by the Italian charm.^[34] He journeyed to Italy and remained there for two years, assiduously visiting the opera-houses and making the acquaintance of the principal teachers—Martini, Nardini, Pugnani, Farinelli, and, above all, Tartini, from whom he learned a great deal; and this sojourn in Italy had a decisive effect upon his artistic education. Thirty years later, in 1792, he once more related his reminiscences of travel in one of his sonatas, the Sonata italiano.

If the leaders of German music—such as the Bachs, Rust, Gluck, Graun and Hasse—were affected to such an extent by the influence of Italian art,^[35] how should German music hold out against the foreign spirit? Where was its genius to find salvation?

***

To begin with, it was inevitable that the mass of lesser musicians, the musical plebs of Germany, those who had not the means to go to Italy and Italianise themselves, suffered from their humiliating situation and the preference given to the Italians. Burney, compelled to admit that the Italians in Germany were often much better paid than German artists who were superior to them, adds that for this reason "one must not blame the Germans unduly for endeavouring to disparage the merit of the great Italian masters, and to treat them with a severity and a disdain which are due merely to gross ignorance and stupidity."—"All are jealous of the Italians," he says elsewhere. It is true that this remark occurs at the end of a sentence in which Burney remarks that the Germans also furiously attacked one another. Every town was divided into jealous factions. "Everyone is jealous of everyone else, and all are jealous of the Italians." This lack of union was to be as disastrous to the Germans in art as in politics; it rendered them all the more incapable of defending themselves against the foreign invasion, inasmuch as their leaders, the Glucks and Mozarts of the profession, seemed to have gone over to the enemy.

But to the popular taste Italianism remained all but unknown. The catalogues of the Frankfurt and Leipzig fairs of the eighteenth century afford us proof of this.^[36] In these great European markets, in which music occupied an important place, Italian opera, so to speak, scarcely showed it self,^[37] Of German religious music there was abundance: Lutheran canticles, oratorios, Passions, and above all the collections of Lieder and Liedlein, the eternal and inviolable refuge of German thought.

On the other hand, it is a remarkable fact that Italian opera and Italian music were represented in Europe, about the middle of the eighteenth century, not by Italians, but by Germans; by Gluck in Vienna, Johann Christian Bach in London, Graun in Berlin and Hasse in Italy itself. How could it be otherwise than that a new spirit should find its way into this Germanised Italianism? In these German masters, conscious of their superiority, there gradually developed a desire, avowed or unconfessed, to conquer Italy with her own weapons. We are struck by the Germanic pride which we perceive increasing in Gluck and Mozart. And these brilliant Italianisers are the first to try their powers in the German Lied.^[38]

Even in the theatre we see the German language reconquering its place.^[39] Burney, who, after calling attention to the musical qualities of the language, was at first astonished that more use was not made of it in the theatre, very soon realised that musical compositions in the German language were beginning to spread through Saxony and in the north of the Empire. Since the middle of the century the poet Christian Felix Weisse and the musicians Standfuss and Johann Adam Hiller were composing, at Leipzig, in imitation of the English operetta and the comic operas of Favart, German operettas (Singspiele), the first example of which (1752) (Der Teufel ist los, oder die verwandelten Weiber). "The Devil is loose, or the Gossips Transformed,"^[40] was soon followed by a quality of similar works. "The music," says Burney, "was so natural and so agreeable that the favourite airs, like those of Dr. Arne, in England, were sung by all classes of the people, and some of them in the streets." Hiller gave the plebeian characters in his operas simple Lieder to sing, and these Lieder became as popular in Germany as the vaudeville in France. "To-day," says Burney, "the taste for burlette (farces) is so general and so pronounced that there is some reason to fear, as sober individuals do, that it may destroy the taste for good music, and above all for music of a more exalted style." But far from destroying it, these popular Lieder were one of the sources of the new German opera.

***

But the capital fact which was to be the salvation of German music was the sudden development of instrumental music at this juncture. At the moment when Germany seemed to be abjuring, with vocal polyphony and the infinite resources of the contrapuntal style, the old German manner, her very personality—at the moment when she seemed to be abandoning the effort to express her complex and logical soul, to adopt the Latin style of sentiment, she had the good fortune to find, in the sudden outgrowth of instrumental music, the equivalent, and more, of what she had lost.

It may seem strange to speak of good fortune in respect of an event in which intelligence and determination evidently played a great part. However, we must allow here, as always in history, for chance, for the co-operation of circumstances, which now favour, now oppose the evolution of a people. It is true that the more vigorous peoples always end by constraining chance and forcing it to take their side. But we cannot deny that there is such a thing as chance,

And in this instance it is plainly visible.

The Germans were not alone in developing the resources of instrumentation. The same tendencies were manifest in France and Italy. The conservatoires of Venice were devoting themselves to instrumental music, with successful results; the Italian virtuosi were everywhere famous, and the symphony had its birth in Milan. But symphonic music harmonised but ill with the Italian genius, which was essentially methodical, lucid and definite, a thing of clear outlines. At all events, to transform this genius and adapt it to the novel conditions would have necessitated an effort of which Italian music, overworked, exhausted and indolent, was no longer capable. In Italy the change would have meant a revolution. In Germany it meant evolution. Consequently the development of the orchestra assured Germany of victory, while it contributed to the decadence of Italian music. Burney complains that the Italian operatic orchestras had become too numerous and that their noise forced the singers to bawl. "All the chiaroscuro of music is lost; the half-tints and the background disappear; one hears only the noisy parts, which were intended to provide a foil for the rest." Consequently the Italian voices are being spoiled, and Italy is losing her prerogative of il bel canto, of which she was justly so proud. A useless sacrifice; for while renouncing her own inimitable qualities she cannot acquire qualities and a style which are alien to her.^[41]

The Germans, on the other hand, are quite at home in the nascent symphony. Their natural taste for instrumental music, the necessity in which numbers of the little German Courts found themselves of confining themselves to such music, as the result of a strict application of the principles of the Reformed Church, which forbade them to maintain an opera-house, the gregarious instinct which impelled the German musicians to unite in small societies, in small "colleges," in order to play together, instead of practising the individualism of the Italian virtuosi—all these things—everything, in short—even to the comparative inferiority of German singing, was bound to contribute to the universal development of instrumental music in Germany. Nowhere in Europe were there more schools in which it was taught, or more good orchestras.

One of the most curious musical institutions in Germany was that of the "Poor Scholars," which corresponded (save that they were on a less generous scale) with the conservatoires for poor children in Naples. These Scholars, troops of whom Burney met in the streets of Frankfort, Munich, Dresden and Berlin, had in each city of the Empire "a school confided to the Jesuits, where they were taught to play instruments and to sing." The Munich school contained eighty children from eleven to twelve years of age. Before being admitted they had already to be able to play an instrument or to give signs of a marked vocation for music. They were kept at school until their twentieth year. They were boarded, fed, and taught, but not clothed. They had partly to earn their living by singing or playing in the streets. This was an absolute obligation upon them, "so that they should make their progress known to the public that maintained them."—In Dresden the city was divided into wards or quarters, and the Poor Scholars, divided into bands of sixteen, seventeen or eighteen, had to sing, in turns, before the doors of the houses of each quarter. They made up little choirs and orchestras—violins, 'cellos, oboes, horns and bassoons. Wealthy families subscribed to the schools in order that the Poor Scholars should play before their houses once or twice a week. They were even engaged for private entertainments, or for funerals. Lastly, they had to take part in the religious ceremonies of Sunday. It was a hard profession, and an irksome obligation to sing in the streets in winter, however inclement the weather. These Poor Scholars were afterwards appointed as schoolmasters in the parish schools, on condition that they knew enough of Greek and Latin and the organ. The most distinguished were sent to certain of the Universities, such as Leipzig and Wittenburg, where more than three hundred poor students were maintained. They were allowed to devote themselves to music or to the sciences.

Some of the princely Courts had musical foundations for poor children. The Duke of Würtemberg had installed at Ludwigsburg and "Solitude," in one of his summer palaces, two conservatoires, for the education of two hundred boys and a hundred girls of the poorer classes. "One of his favourite amusements was to be present at their lessons."

In addition to these schools for poor children the communal schools gave a considerable amount of attention to music, especially to instrumental music. Such was the rule in Austria, Saxony, Moravia, and above all in Bohemia. Burney records that every village in Bohemia had a public school where the children were taught music just as they were taught to read and write. He inspected some of them. At Czaslau, near Collin, he found "a class of young children of both sexes occupied in reading, writing, and playing the violin, the oboe, the bassoon and other instruments. The organist of the church, who improvised magnificently on a sorry little organ, had, in a small room, four harpsichords, on which his small pupils practised." At Budin, near Lobeschutz, more than a hundred children of both sexes were taught music, singing and playing in the Church.

Unhappily the skill thus acquired was stifled by poverty. "The majority of these children were destined for inferior situations of a menial or domestic nature, and music remained for them simply a private recreation; which is perhaps, after all," says Burney philosophically "the best and most honourable use to which music could be applied." The rest entered the service of wealthy landowners, who with these servants made up orchestras and gave concerts. The nobility of Bohemia made the mistake of detaching themselves unduly from its interesting peasantry, living for the greater part of the year in Vienna, "If the Bohemians," says Burney, "had the advantages enjoyed by the Italians they would surpass them. They are perhaps the most musical race in all Europe." They excelled above all in the playing of wind-instruments: wood-wind toward the Saxon frontier and brass in the direction of Moravia.—It was one of these Bohemian schools that trained the reformer of instrumental music, the creator of the symphony, Stamitz, born at Teuchenbrod, the son of the Kantor of the church there. It was in these schools that Gluck received his earliest musical training. It was at Lukavec, near Pilsen, that Haydn, director of music in the private chapel of Count Morzin, wrote his first symphony in 1759. Lastly, the greatest German violinist, Franz Benda, who was, with Philipp Emmanuel Bach, the only musician in Berlin who dared to possess a style of his own, independently of Graun and the Italianisers, was also a Bohemian.

Thanks to these schools and these natural faculties, instrumental music was cultivated throughout Germany, even in Vienna and Munich, preeminently the centres of Italian opera. We say nothing of princely virtuosi: of the flute-playing king in Berlin; of the 'cellist who was Emperor of Austria; of the princely violinists, the Elector of Bavaria and the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg; of the royal pianists, the Duke of Würtemburg and the Elector of Saxony, the latter of whom, by the way, was "so timid in society," says Burney, "that the Electress, his wife, herself had scarcely ever heard him! …" Nor do we insist upon the alarming consumption of concertos on the part of the German dilettanti; an average of three or four concertos to the concert in Berlin, while in Dresden five or six were given in a single evening! … But the nascent symphony was putting forth its shoots on every side. Vienna had a veritable efflorescence of symphonists; among whom the naturalistic Hoffmann^[42] and the imaginative Vasshall, with Ditters, Huber, Gusman and the youthful Haydn, who had just made his first appearance, were singled out for praise. This music found an enthusiastic public in Vienna. Teodor von Wyzewa has described the Court music and "table music " of the Archbishop of Salzburg; three concert-masters were responsible in turn for preparing the programmes of these orchestras and for conducting the performances. The work of Leopold Mozart shows what a quantity of instrumental music was demanded by the every-day life of these little German Courts.—To this we may add the private concerts and the serenades sung or played in the streets to the order of wealthy burghers.

The centre of instrumental music in Germany was in those days Mannheim—or, during the summer months, Schwetzingen, at a distance of some seven or eight miles from Mannheim. Schwetzingen, which was only a village, was apparently inhabited, says Burney, solely by a colony of musicians. "Here it was a violinist who was practising; in the next house a flautist; there an oboe, a bassoon, a clarionette, a 'cello, or a concert of several instruments combined. Music seemed the principal object in life." The Mannheim orchestra "contained, by itself, perhaps more distinguished virtuosi and composers than any other in Europe; it was an army of generals."

This company of the elect, which also earned the admiration of Leopold Mozart and his son, used to give celebrated concerts. It was at these concerts that Stamitz, since 1745 first concert-master and musical director of the Prince's chamber music, made the first experiments in the German symphony.

"It was here," says Burney, "that Stamitz, for the first time, ventured to cross the boundaries of the ordinary operatic overtures, which until then had merely served to challenge attention and impose silence. … This brilliant and ingenious musician created the modern symphonic style by the addition of the majestic effects of light and shade which he used to enrich it. First all the various effects were tested which could be produced by the combination of notes and tones; then a practical understanding of the crescendo and diminuendo was acquired in the orchestra; and the piano, which until then had been employed only as synonymous with echo, became, with the forte, an abundant source of colours which have their gamut of shades in music just as red and blue have in painting."

This is not the place to insist on this fact; it is enough to note in passing the originality and the fertile audacity of the experiments made by the fascinating Stamitz, who to-day is so little and so imperfectly known, although, as Burney tells us, he was regarded in his day "as another Shakespeare, who overcame all difficulties and carried the art of music farther than any had ever done before his time; a genius all invention, all fire, all contrast in the lively movements, with a tender, gracious and seductive melody, simple and rich accompaniments, and everywhere the sublime effects produced by enthusiasm, but in a style not always sufficiently polished."^[43]

***

We see that in spite of Italianism the German genius had contrived to reserve to itself certain independent provinces in which it was able to grow in safety, until the day when, conscious of its power, it would give battle to the alien spirit and liberate itself from the yoke. None the less it is true that about the middle of the eighteenth century Italian opera was supreme in Germany, and the leaders of German music, those who were afterwards to be its foremost liberators, were all without exception profoundly Italianised. And magnificent as was the development of German music in Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and their successors, it is permissible to believe that this was not the normal development of German music as it would have been had the latter, in taking shape, relied only upon its own resources, drawing only upon its own capital.

From the overwhelming triumph of the Italian opera over the Germany of the eighteenth century there has remained, through the centuries, the indelible mark of Italian feeling and the Italian style, which is perceptible even in the most thoroughly German masters of our own period. It would not be difficult to prove that Wagner's work is full of Italianisms; that the melodious and expressive language of Richard Strauss is, to a great extent, fundamentally Italian. A victory such as that of the Italy of the eighteenth century over Germany leaves its indelible traces upon the history of the people that has suffered it.

 

1. Chronicle of Father Castorio (1630) cited Henri Quittard in his preface to the Sacred Histories of Carissimi, published by the Schola Cantorum.
2. Comparison de la musique française et de la musique italienne (1705).
3. Abbé de Châteauneuf, Dialogue sur la musique des anciens (1705).
4. Charles Burney: The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces (1773):—French translation of the same period.
5. Burney in Vienna.
6. Letter from Mozart to his father (9th July, 1778). The best musician at Salzburg, almost a genius, Michael Haydn, had just been playing the organ while abominably drunk.
7. Burney passed through Bonn some time after Beethoven's death.
8. Burney, in Dresden. Let us note the vulgarity of the popular spectacles in Germany, and even in Vienna, where Burney records programmes of barbarous amusements like the following: "1. Fight between mastiffs and a wild Hungarian bull, surrounded by fire; that is, having fire fixed under the tail and crackers to the ears and horns. 2. Fight between a wild boar and mastiffs. 3. Fight between a large bear and mastiffs. 4. Fight between a savage wolf and beagles. 5. Fight between a wild Hungarian bull and savage famish-dogs. 6. Fight between a bear and hounds. 7. Fight between a wild boar and mastiffs protected by iron armour. 8. Fight between a tiger and mastiffs. Fight between an infuriated bear, not having eaten for a week, and a young wild bull, which he will eat alive on the spot—or assisted by a wolf."

   Two or three thousand persons, among whom were women of quality, used to witness these fights, which were frequently arranged in an amphitheatre in Vienna. Such were the spectacles which delighted the eyes of the audiences of Haydn and Mozart.

9. Burney adds that not a boat was to be seen on the Elbe, and that for three years no oats had been given to the horses, nor hair-powder to the soldiers.
10. The Würtembergers had protested in the Diet of the Empire against their sovereign's prodigality; they accused him of ruining the country by his music. His melomania was compared with Nero's; in his craze for things Italian the Duke had boys castrated at Stuttgart by two surgeons from Bologna. Burney speaks with contemptuous pity of this prince, "half of whose subjects are theatrical musicians, violinists and soldiers, and the other half beggars and outcasts."
11. Another Italian, Boroni, succeeded him.
12. The little Mozart.
13. 11th July, 1763. Letter from Leopold Mozart to Haguenauer of Salzburg, published by Nissen, reproduced by Teodor de Wyzewa.
14. A publisher of music, J. J. Lotti, was at that time publishing a great deal of Italian music at Augsburg; and Wyzewa remarks that one of his publications, the Thirty arias for organ and harpsichord, by Guiseppi Antonio Paganelli, of Padua (1756) had a very great resemblance to the first sonata which the little Mozart wrote in Brussels, on the 14th October, 1763, a few weeks after passing through Augsbourg. (T. de Wyzewa, Les premiers voyages de Mozart, Revue des Deux-Mondes, 1st November, 1904.)
15. Johann Adolph Hasse, born at Bergedorf, near Hamburg, in 1699; died in Venice, 1782. He was the greatest master of the opera at Dresden, re-organising and directing it from 1731 to 1763. He wrote more than a hundred operas.
16. Hasse married the most famous Italian songstress of his time, La Faustina (Bordoni).
17. Metastasio used to boast of having written his best drama, Hypermnestre, in nine days. Achilles in Scyros was written, set to music, staged and performed within eighteen days.
18. Burney gives us an excellent portrait of this great composer, whose fame, in the eighteenth century, was far greater than that of Bach. He was everywhere regarded as the composer who, "in respect of vocal music, was closest to nature, most graceful and most judicious, and also as the most fertile of living authors." "He was tall and strongly built. His face must have been handsome and finely chiselled. He seemed older than Faustina, who was small, dark, witty and animated, although he was ten years the younger. He was very quiet and kindly in manner. He was talkative and full of commonsense; equally devoid of pride and prejudice; he spoke ill of no one; on the contrary, he did justice to the talents of several of his rivals. He had an infinite respect for Phillip Emmanuel Bach, and spoke of Händel only with reverence, but he declared that he had been unduly ambitious to parade his talents, to work out his parts and subjects, and that he was over-fond of noise. Faustina added that his voice parts were often uncouth. Above all he admired the old Keiser, "one of the greatest musicians the world has ever possessed," and Alessandro Scarlatti, "the greatest harmonist of Italy, that is, of the whole world." On the other hand, he found Durante "harsh and grotesque, coarse and barbarous." When Burney saw Hasse all his books, manuscripts and personal belongings had been burned in 1760, during the bombardment of Dresden by the King of Prussia, at the moment when the composer was about to have the complete edition of his works engraved at the cost of the King of Poland. But this disaster had not affected his serenity. "He is so pleasant, so easy in his welcome, that I felt as much at my ease with him, after a quarter of an hour, as though I had known him a score of years." Burney, who "owed to his works a great part of the pleasure which music had afforded him since his childhood" compares him with Raphael, and likens his rival Gluck to Michel Angelo. And in truth there is hardly a more beautiful melodic pattern than Hasse's; only Mozart is perhaps his equal in this respect. The oblivion into which this admirable artist has fallen is one of the worst examples of historical injustice, and we shall endeavour some day to repair it.
19. Burney's portrait of Gluck is one of the best that we have of this great man.

    Burney was introduced to him by the British Ambassador Extraordinary, Lord Stormont,—and the introduction was not superfluous, for "Gluck was of as fierce a temper as Händel, of whom we know that everyone was afraid. … He was living with his wife and a young niece, a remarkable musician. He was comfortably lodged in well-furnished rooms. … He was horribly scarred by small-pox. His face was ugly and he had an ugly scowl." But Burney had the good fortune to find him in "an unusually good temper. … Gluck sang. Although he had little voice he produced a great effect. With a wealth of accompaniment he combined energy, an impetuous fashion of dealing with the allegro passages, and a judicious expressiveness in the slow movements; in short, he so cleverly concealed what was defective in his voice that one forgot that he had none. He sang nearly all Alceste, several passages from Paris and Helen and a few airs from Racine's Iphigenia, which he had just finished writing. … He did all this from memory, without a single written note, with prodigious facility. He rose very late. It was his custom to write all night and rest in the morning."

    Burney met him again at a dinner-party given by Lord Stormont. Gluck was his neighbour at table. Rendered expansive by the bumpers he had drained, Gluck confided to Burney that he had just received from the Elector Palatine a tun of excellent wine, in token of gratitude for one of his comic operas; the prince had been delighted to learn that the music was that "of an honest German who loved a good old wine." He boasted freely of his fashion of leading an orchestra, "in which he was as formidable as Händel. He said that he had never known any to rebel, although he forced the musicians to give up all other occupations for the opera, and often made them rehearse parts of his operas twenty or thirty times." He spoke to Burney of his stay in England, "to which he attributed entirely the study which he had made of nature for his dramatic compositions." He was there at the time of Händel's glory; there had been no room for him, and the people were greatly incensed against foreigners. It was only with difficulty that Gluck's Caduta de' Giganti had been performed; and it had been a failure. Gluck had been struck by the fact "that naturalness and simplicity acted most strongly upon the spectators, and since then he had endeavoured never to depart from them. It may be remarked"—says Burney—"that the majority of the airs in Orfeo are as simple and natural as English ballads."

20. Richard Wagner, Beethoven, 1870.
21. Frederick the Great had, moreover, a violent antipathy for sacred music. "It was enough," Agricola told Burney, "that a composer should have written an anthem or an oratorio, for the king to regard his taste as debased and out of fashion."
22. Karl Heinrich Graun was born in 1701 at Wahrenbrück, in Saxony, and died in 1759. He entered the service of Frederick the Great in 1735. He organised the opera in Berlin, and wrote for it twenty-seven works. Frederick the Great was on several occasions his collaborator; he furnished him with the libretti of Fratelli Nemici, after Racine (1750), Merope, after Voltaire (1756), Coriolano (1749), Silla (1753) and Montezuma (1755). This last work—an anti-clerical opera—in which Frederick wished to show, as he wrote to Algarotti, "that even the opera may serve to reform morals and destroy superstitions," has been republished by Herr Albrecht Mayer-Reinach, in the collection of Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst (Leipzig, Breitkopf, 1904).
23. He allowed operas by Hasse to be performed in Berlin, but was a declared enemy of Gluck; he treated Alceste to the harshest criticism, as did Agricola, Kirnberger, Forkel, and all his regiment of theorists, who fell into step behind him.
24. It should be noted how a stranger, even one with the highest recommendations, was received in the Prussian capital. Burney tells us of his arrival in Berlin. Despite his passport and a previous inspection by the customs officials on the Prussian frontier, he was led like a prisoner to the Berlin custom-house, and left shivering there for two hours in the rainy courtyard while the least of his effects were being examined. Very different was the Austrian custom-house, where young Mozart, at the age of seven, disarmed the officials by playing them a minuet on his little violin. But the most incredible part of Burney's narrative is the account of his visit to Potsdam. At the principal entrance and then at each door in the palace he was subjected to an interrogatory which was, he says, quite the most curious thing that had happened to him during his travels. "It could not have been more rigorous at the postern gate of a besieged city."
25. Burney admits elsewhere that he played with "great precision, a clean and uniform attack, brilliant fingering, a pure and simple taste, a great neatness of execution, and equal perfection in all his pieces. His shakes are good, but too long and too studied."
26. The appearance of this old musician was of unusual majesty:

    "The son of Hercules he justly seems
    By his broad shoulders and gigantic limbs."

27. Frederick-William I. had suppressed plays and orchestra by this simple note: "Devil take them!"
28. At Mannheim and Schwetzingen all the subjects of the Elector Palatine were admitted to the opera, and went to the Elector's concerts; which fact, according to Burney, did no little "to form the judgment and establish the decided taste for music which one finds throughout the Electorate."
29. Despite the absurdity of comparing him with, and preferring him to his father, Philipp Emmanuel Bach was none the less a musician of genius, who lacked only a character, or at all events a will, equal to the height of musical inspiration. But a sort of discouragement and lethargy paralysed his admirable powers, and it is a melancholy sight to see in him, at certain moments, as it were the soul of a Beethoven, struggling in the bonds of a straitened life, giving off flashes of genius and then relapsing into apathy. Burney's portrait of him is the best ever drawn. I cannot resist the temptation of quoting some part of it.

    Philipp Emmanuel Bach had invited Burney to dine with him. Burney was shown up "into a music-room, large and elegantly adorned with pictures, drawings and engraved portraits of more than a hundred and fifty famous musicians, of whom several were English, and some portraits in oil of his father and grandfather. Philipp Emmanuel sat down to his Silbermann harpsichord. He played three or four very difficult pieces with all the delicacy, accuracy and passion for which he was so justly distinguished among his compatriots. In the pathetic and tender movements he seemed to draw from his instrument cries of grief and lamentation, such as he alone could produce. The dinner was good, elegant and cheerful. There were present three or four friends, well-bred people, and his family; Frau Bach, his elder son, a student (a law-student—the younger was a painter) and his daughter. After dinner Philipp Emmanuel played again, almost uninterruptedly, until eleven o'clock at night. He became animated to the point of appearing to be inspired. His eyes were fixed, the lower lip drooping, and his whole body was soaked in perspiration. He said that if he often had occasion to force himself to work thus he would grow young again. He is fifty-nine years of age. He is rather short of stature; his hair and eyes are black and his complexion brown; he is full of fire and is of a very gay and vivacious temper."

    Burney was convinced that Philipp Emmanuel was not only one of the greatest composers for the harpsichord, but "the best and most skilful artist in the matter of expression. … He could play in every style, but he confined himself more especially to the emotional style. He was a learned writer, even more so than his father when he chose to be so, especially in the variety of his modulations." Burney compared him with Domenico Scarlatti: "Both, being sons of celebrated composers, dared to attempt new paths. It is only now that the ear is becoming accustomed to Domenico Scarlatti. Philipp Emmanuel Bach seemed likewise to have outstripped his period. … His style is so out of the common that one has to be in some degree accustomed to it in order to appreciate it." And Burney, justly enough, recognised, in his inspired passages, "the effusions of a cultivated genius."

30. This opinion acquires a particular meaning when we read, a little farther on, that "Johann Sebastian Bach had pitilessly forced him to spend the first few years of his life" in such studies.
31. We learn of this training from thirty-one letters written by Johann Christian to Father Martini.
32. See Max Schwartz, Johann Christian Bach, 1901.
33. Max Schwartz points out the direct influence of Johann Christian Bach upon clavier music and opera, and above all upon the first of Mozart's symphonies. Mozart often speaks of Johann Christian in his letters. He declares that he "loves him with all his heart"; that he has "a profound esteem for him." Certain airs of Johann Christian's used to haunt him. He applied himself to rivalling him, to writing fresh melodies to the same words.
34. See Wilhelm Hosäus: Frederick Wilhelm Rust (1882). Rust had been a pupil of Johann Sebastian's eldest son—Wilhelm Friedmann—who had best reserved his father's traditions. He also took lessons from Philipp Emmanuel. It is only of late that his artistic importance has been revealed, thanks to the publications of some of his compositions by one of his descendants.
35. I do not speak of the young musicians of the following period—of Haydn, a pupil of Porpora's and a brilliant imitator ot Sammartini—of Mozart, who during the first part of his life was a pure Italian and whose first operas were performed and acclaimed in Italy. Hasse, on the other hand, who was inimical to Gluck because he did not consider him sufficiently faithful to the true Italian tradition, loved and admired Mozart, in whom he saw his more fortunate or greater successor.
36. The catalogues of the Frankfurt and Leipzig fairs, from 1564 to 1759, were published by Dr. Albert Göhler: Verzeichniss der in den Frankfurter und Leipziger Messkatalogen der Jahre 1564 bis 1759, angezeigten Musikalien, angefertigt und mit Vorschlagen zur Förderung der musikalischen Bücherbeschreibung begleitet, von Dr. Albert Göhler (Leipzig, Kahnt, 1902, in 8vo.) See also an interesting article by Michel Breuet in the Tribune de Saint-Gervais (May–June, 1904).
37. Nor did French music, nor the work of the great Bach.
38. Gluck, as early as 1770, set the odes of Klopstock to music.
39. At the Hamburg opera-house operas had been performed in the German tongue at the end of the seventeenth century. But from the opening years of the eighteenth century Keiser and Händel had set the example of mixing Italian words with German in the same opera; and shortly afterwards Italian had invaded everything.
40. Music by Standfuss and Hiller. The same piece had been produced, unsuccessfully, in Berlin, in 1743, as adapted from an English operetta by Coffey, with the original English melodies.—Der Teufel ist los had a second part, which, played in 1759, under the title of Der lustige Schuster (The Merry Cobbler) was very popular. These Singspiele were the rage in Germany for twenty years; one might say that they were the opera of the lower middle classes of Germany. It is worth noting that Hiller's chief pupil was Christian Gottlob Neefe, Beethoven's master.
41. Hasse and Metastasio, the last representatives of the pure Italian tradition, had foreseen this danger. Metastasio, in his conversations with Burney, complained forcibly of the progress of instrumental music in opera.
42. "As much art as you like," Hoffmann used to tell his compatriots, "provided it is always combined with nature; and even in the marriage of art and nature the lady must always wear the breeches." (Burney.)
43. Lastly we may mention a form of instrumental music in which the Germans were past masters, a form which they imposed upon the rest of Europe: military music. In France, according to Burney, in the second half of the century, "the scores of the marches and even the musicians in many of the garrisons were German." One of the best military bands was that of Darmstadt; Burney tells us that it consisted of four oboes, four clarionettes, six trumpets, four bassoons, four horns and six bugles.