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,[1] how should German music hold out against the foreign spirit? Where was its genius to find salvation?
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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
- ↑ 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.
