Anton Raphael Mengs returned from Spain in 1768, and was soon lord of the studios in Rome. Hardly anyone questioned his supremacy among contemporary artists. Crowned heads angled for his brush, sometimes in vain. Winckelmann called him the Raphael of his age, praised his deadly Parnassus as a masterpiece before which “even Raphael would have bowed his head,”77 and injected into the History of Ancient Art a superlative estimate of his friend.78
The best of Mengs’s paintings in this period is his self-portrait (1773?).79 It shows him still vigorous, handsome, black-haired, proud at forty-five. After a second stay in Spain Mengs returned (1777) to spend his declining years in Italy. He continued to prosper, but the death of his wife (1778) broke his once buoyant spirit. A variety of ailments weakened him, and his resort to quack doctors and miraculous cures completed his physical ruin. He died in 1779 at the age of fifty-one. His disciples raised to his memory a cenotaph in the Pantheon, beside the monument to Raphael. Today there is no critic so poor to do him reverence.
VII. I MUSICI
Church music had declined with the growing secularization of life, and had suffered infection from operatic forms. Instrumental music was prospering, partly through the improvement of the pianoforte, but still more with the increasing popularity of the violin. Virtuosi like Pugnani, Viotti, and Nardini conquered Europe with a bow. Muzio Clementi, who went from Italy to live for twenty years in England, toured the Continent as organist and pianist, competed with Mozart in Vienna, and may have profited from Mozart’s comment that his playing was too mechanical. He was the most successful piano teacher of the eighteenth century, and he established the nineteenth-century style of piano technique with his famous series of exercises and studies, Gradus ad Parnassum—steps to the home of the Muses from whom music took its name. Gaetano Pugnani inherited his master Tartini’s violin artistry, and passed it on to his pupil Giovanni Battista Viotti, who traversed Europe triumphantly. Viotti’s Violin Concerto in A Minor can still be enjoyed by our old-fashioned ears.
Like so many Italians, Luigi Boccherini left a land crowded with musicians to seek an audience abroad. From 1768 till his death in 1805 he charmed Spain with his cello as Farinelli had charmed it with his voice and Scarlatti with his harpsichord. For a generation his instrumental compositions rivaled those of Mozart in international acclaim; Frederick William II of Prussia, himself a cellist, preferred Boccherini’s quartets to Mozart’s.80 In his sixty-two years he composed ninety-five string quartets, fifty-four trios, twelve piano quintets, twenty symphonies, five concertos for the cello, two oratorios, and some religious music. Half the world knows his “Minuet”—a movement from one of his quintets; but all the world should know his Concerto in B Flat for violoncello and orchestra.
Europe surrendered without a struggle (again excepting Paris) to the bel canto of Italy. From a dozen cities of the Magic Boot prima donnas like Cate-rina Gabrielli and castran like Gasparo Pacchierotti poured across the Alps to Vienna, Munich, Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Hamburg, Brussels, London, Paris, and Madrid. Pacchierotti was among the last of the famous emasculates; for a generation he rivaled Farinelli’s career. He held London captive for four years; his acclaim there still echoes in Fanny Burney’s Diary,81 and in her father’s General History of Music82
Italian composers and conductors followed the singers. Pietro Guglielmi wrote two hundred operas, and moved from Naples to Dresden to Brunswick to London to conduct them. Another Neapolitan, Niccolò Piccini, has come down to us disfigured by his unwilling contest with Gluck in Paris; but Galiani described him as un très honnête homme —a thoroughly hoaorable man.83 His opere buffe were for a decade the rage of Naples and Rome; even the Serva padrona of Pergolesi won no such popularity as Piccini’s La cecchina (1760). Jommelli, Pergolesi, Leo, and Galuppi had set to music Metastasio’s Olimpiade; Piccini did likewise, and, by common consent, excelled them all. In 1776 he accepted a call to Paris; the wild war that ensued there must wait its geographical turn; through it all Piccini carried himself with complete courtesy, remaining friends with his rivals Gluck and Sacchini even though their partisans threatened his life.84 When the Revolution drowned out this opera buff a Piccini returned to Naples. There he was placed under house arrest for four years because of sympathy with France; his operas were hooted from the stage, and he lived in a poverty disgraceful to his country. After Napoleon’s conquest of Italy he was again invited to Paris (1798); the First Consul gave him a modest sinecure, but a paralytic stroke broke him down in body and spirit, and he died in Paris in 1800.
Antonio Sacchini was born to a fisherman at Pozzuoli, and was being trained to succeed his father when Francesco Durante heard him sing, and carried him off to Naples as pupil and protégé. His Semiramide was so well received at the Teatro Argentino in Rome that he remained with that theater for seven years as its composer of operas. After a stay in Venice he set off to conquer Munich, Stuttgart, … and London (1772). His operas were applauded there, but hostile cabals damaged his popularity, and his dissolute habits ruined his health. Moving to Paris, he produced his masterpiece, Oedipe a Colone (1786), which held the boards of the Opéra through 583 representations in the next fifty-seven years; we can still hear it, now and then, on the air. He adopted several of Gluck’s reforms; he abandoned the Italian style of making an opera a patchwork of arias; in Oedipe the story controls the arias, and the choruses, inspired by Handel’s oratorios, lend grandeur to both the music and the theme.
The melodious conquest went on with Antonio Salieri, foe of Mozart and friend of the young Beethoven. Born near Verona, he was sent at the age of sixteen to Vienna (1766); eight years later Joseph II appointed him composer to the court, and in 1788 Kapellmeister. In this post he preferred other composers to Mozart, but the story that this opposition caused Mozart’s collapse is a myth.85 After Mozart’s death Salieri befriended the son and promoted his musical development. Beethoven submitted several compositions to Salieri, and accepted his suggestions with unwonted humility.
“The most radiant star in the Italian operatic firmament during the second half of the eighteenth century”86 was Giovanni Paisiello. Son of a veterinary surgeon at Taranto, his voice so impressed his Jesuit teachers there that they persuaded his father to send him to Durante’s conservatory in Naples (1754). When he took to composing operas he found the Neapolitan audiences so enamored of Piccini that he accepted an invitation from Catherine the Great. In St. Petersburg he wrote (1782) Il barbiere di Siviglia; it had so lasting a success throughout Europe that when Rossini offered in Rome (February 5, 1816) an opera on the same subject it was damned by the public as an ungentlemanly intrusion upon territory sacred to Paisiello, who was still alive. On his way back from Russia in 1784, Paisiello stopped long enough in Vienna to write twelve “symphonies” for Joseph II, and to produce an opera, Il re Teodoro, which soon won Europe-wide acceptance. Then he returned to Naples as maestro di cappella to Ferdinand IV. Napoleon persuaded Ferdinand to “lend” him Paisiello; when the composer arrived in Paris (1802) he was received with a magnificence that made him many enemies. In 1804 he returned to Naples under the patronage of Joseph Bonaparte and Murat.
We should note, in passing, how patiently these Italians prepared their careers. Paisiello studied for nine years at Durante’s Conservatorio di San Onofrio; Cimarosa studied for eleven years in the Conservatorio di Santa Maria di Loreto, and later at Naples. After long tutelage under Sacchini, Piccini, and others, Domenico Cimarosa produced his first opera, Le strava-ganze del conte. Soon his operas were heard in Vienna, Dresden, Paris, and London. In 1787 he took his turn at St. Petersburg, where he delighted the polyandrous Empress with Cleopatra. Invited by Leopold II to succeed Salieri as Kapellmeister at Vienna, he produced there his most celebrated opera, Il matrimonio segreto (1792). It so pleased the Emperor that at its close he ordered supper to be served to all those present, and then commanded a repetition of the whole.87 In 1793 he was called back to Naples as maestro di cappella for Ferdinand IV. When
the King was deposed by a French Revolutionary army (1799) Cimarosa hailed the event with enthusiasm; when Ferdinand was restored Cimarosa was condemned to death. The sentence was commuted to exile. The composer set out for St. Petersburg, but died on the way at Venice (1801). He left, in addition to many cantatas, Masses, and oratorios, some sixty-six operas, which were far more applauded than Mozart’s, and which even now must be reckoned second only to Mozart’s in the opere buffe of the eighteenth century.
If melody is the heart of music, Italian music is supreme. The Germans had preferred polyphonic harmony to a simple melodic line; in this sense Italy won another victory over Germany when the German Mozart subordinated polyphony to melody. But the Italians gave melody so dominant a place that their operas tended to be a succession of tuneful arias rather than musical dramas such as the first Italian opera composers (c. 1600) had had in mind in their attempt to rival the dramatic art of the Greeks. In Italian opera the significance of the action, and often of the words, was lost in the glory of the song; this was beautiful, but if, as we used to think, art is the replacement of chaos with order to reveal significance, opera, in Italian hands, had fallen short of its highest possibilities. Some Italians, like Jommelli and Traëtta, acknowledged this, and strove to mold the music and the play into a united whole; but that achievement had to await, for its clearest form, the operas of Gluck. So, in the pendulum of life, the Italian conquest of Europe with melody ended when, in 1774, Gluck produced at Paris an Iphigénie en Aulide which subordinated the music to the play. But the conflict between melody and drama went on; Wagner won a battle for drama, Verdi captured new trophies for melody. May neither side win.
VIII. ALFIERI
There were no Dantes in this age, but there was Parini in verse, Filangieri in prose, and Alfieri in drama, prose, and poetry.
Giuseppe Parini struggled up from penury, lived by copying manuscripts, and entered print (1752) with a small volume of ver si sciolti— blank verse. He took holy orders as a means of eating, and even then had to earn his bread by tutoring; there was a plethora of priests in Italy. His poverty sharpened his pen to satire. Contemplating the idleness and pomp of many Italian nobles, he conceived the idea of describing a typical day in such a blueblood’s life. In 1763 he issued the first part as Il mattino (Morning); two years later he added Il mezzogiorno (Noon); he completed, but never lived to publish, Il vespro (Evening) and La notte (Night) ; together they formed a substantial satire, which he called Il giorno (The Day). Count von Firmian showed real nobility by appointing the poet-priest editor of the Milan Gazzetta, and professor of belles-lettres in the Scuola Palatina. Parini welcomed the French Revolution, and was rewarded by Napoleon with a place on the municipal council of Milan. The odes that he composed between 1757 and 1795 are among the minor classics of Italian literature. We get a faint echo of him in translation, as in this sonnet, written as a lover rather than a priest:
Benignant Sleep, that, on soft pinion sped,
Dost wing through darkling night thy noiseless way,
And fleeting multitudes of dreams display
To weariness reposed on quiet bed:
Go where my Phillis doth her gentle head
And blooming cheek on peaceful pillow lay;
And, while the body sleeps, her soul affray
With dismal shape from thy enchantment bred;
So like unto mine own that form be made—
Pallor so dim disfiguring its face—
That she may waken by compassion swayed.
If this thou wilt accomplish of thy grace,
A double wreath of poppies I will braid,
And silently upon thine altar place.88
To this posy let us add, as a flower from the Italian Enlightenment, a passage from Gaetano Filangieri’s La scienza della legislazione (1780-85), inspired by Beccaria and Voltaire:
The philosopher should not be the inventor of systems but the apostle of truth.... So long as the evils that affect humanity are still uncured; so long as error and prejudice are allowed to perpetuate them; so long as the truth is limited to the few and the privileged, and concealed from the greater part of the human species and from the kings; so long will it remain the duty of the philosopher to preach the truth, to sustain it, to promote it, and to illuminate it. Even if the lights he scatters are not useful in his own century and people, they will surely be useful in another country and century. Citizen of every place and every age, the philosopher has the world for his country, the earth for his school, and posterity will be his disciples.89
The age was summed up in Alfieri: the revolt against superstition, the exaltation of pagan heroes, the denunciation of tyranny, the acclaim of the French Revolution, the revulsion from its excesses, and the cry for Italian freedom—all added to a romance of illicit love and noble fidelity. He recorded this passionate career in Vita di Vittorio Alfieri … scritta da esso —his life “written by himself,” and continued to within five months of his death. It is one of the great autobiographies, as revealing as Rousseau’s Confessions. It begins disarmingly: “Speaking—and, still more, writing—of oneself is beyond all doubt the offspring of the great love one has for oneself.” Thereafter there is no mask of modesty, and no sign of dishonesty.
I was born in the city of Asti in Piedmont January 17, 1749, of noble, opulent, and respectable parents. I notice these circumstances as fortunate ones for the following reasons. Noble birth was of great service to me, … for it enabled me, without incurring the imputation of base or invidious motives, to disparage nobility for its own sake, to unveil its follies, its abuses, and its crimes. … Opulence made me incorruptible, and free to serve only the truth.90
His father died when Vittorio was an infant; his mother married again. The boy retired into himself, brooded, meditated suicide at the age of eight, but could not hit upon any comfortable way. An uncle took charge of him, and sent him, aged nine, to be educated at the Academy of Turin. There he was served and bullied by a valet. His teachers tried to break his will as the first stage in making a man of him, but their tyranny inflamed his pride and his longing for liberty. “The class in philosophy … was something to send one to sleep standing upright.”91 The death of his uncle left him, aged fourteen, master of a large fortune.
Having secured the consent of the King of Sardinia as a prerequisite to foreign travel, he set out in 1766 on a three-year tour of Europe. He fell in love with sundry women, French literature, and the English constitution. The reading of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau destroyed his inherited theology, and began his hatred of the Roman Church—though he had only recently kissed the foot of Clement XIII, “a fine old man of venerable majesty.”92 In The Hague he became desperately enamored of a married woman; she smiled and went away; again he contemplated suicide; this was the age of Werther, and suicide was in the air. Again finding the idea more attractive in prospect than in execution, he returned to Piedmont, but was so unhappy in an atmosphere of political and religious conformity that he resumed his travels (1769).
Now he went through Germany, Denmark, and Sweden—where, he tells us, he liked the scenery, the people, and even the winter. Then to Russia, which he despised, seeing in Catherine the Great only a crowned criminal; he refused to be presented to her. He enjoyed Frederick’s Prussia no better; he hurried on to bravely republican Holland, and to an England that was trying to teach George III to keep out of the government. He cuckolded an Englishman, fought a duel, was wounded. He caught syphilis in Spain,93 and returned to Turin (1772) to be cured.
In 1774 he was sufficiently recovered to undertake his second great romance, with a woman nine years his senior. They quarreled and parted, and he cleansed her from his dreams by writing a play, Cleopatra; what could be more dramatic than two triumvirs, a queen, a battle, and an asp? The piece was produced at Turin June 16, 1775, “amid applause, for two successive nights”; then he withdrew it for alterations. He itched now “with a very noble and elevated passion for fame.” He reread Plutarch and
the Italian classics, and studied Latin again to delve into Seneca’s tragedies; in these readings he found themes and form for his dramas. He would restore ancient heroes and virtues as Winckelmann had restored ancient art.
Meanwhile (1777) he was writing his treatise Delia tirannide, but it contained such hot indictments of state and Church that he could not think of publishing it; it came to print only in 1787. An almost religious fervor animated it:
Not pressing poverty, … not the slavish idleness in which Italy lies prostrate, no, these were not the reasons which directed my mind to the true lofty honor of assailing false empires with my pen. A fierce god, a god unknown, has ever been at my back scourging me on since my earliest years. … My free spirit can never find peace or truce unless I pen harsh pages for the destruction of tyrants.94