10. NON-GERMAN MUSIC OF THE 19TH CENTURY While these great issues were being debated in Germany, the music of other countries was awakening from long sleep or out growing infancy and provinciality. France had, since Rameau, been remarkably content to have its music dominated by for eigners. Before Rameau, French opera was established by the Italian Lully. After Rameau it was reformed by the Austrian Gluck. Early 19th century French classicism was dominated by the Italian Cherubini. Another Italian, Rossini, was in the prime of his life absorbed by Paris; and the result was Guillaume Tell, with its rich orchestration and grandiose forms. But the crown of French opera was imposed on it by the German Jew Meyerbeer. The pretensions of the native French composers were more mod est, except for the volcanic eruptions of that typical Gascon Berlioz. The popularity of Gounod (1818-1893) rested on the same misunderstanding of the meaning of art as the vogue of Dore in the capacity of an illustrator of the Bible. Faust was a success. Another development, more improvisatorial, uncertain of its style, but fundamentally sincere, was initiated by the Belgian, Cesar Franck (1822-1892) (q.v.). From him, and not from the more prolific and facile Saint-Saens, originates the main stream of modern French music. His style has too much affinity with Liszt to please the musicians who continue to regard Liszt as the author of all modern musical evil; but he achieved mastery in a wide range of forms all his own and he never wrote for effect.
In Italy music since Rossini was long contented to imitate the things in which Rossini was imitable. These were the mechanical cultivation of bel canto and the use of a full orchestra to support the voice in a thick unison of the melodic instruments, with a brassy dance-rhythm in the rest, and the big drum and cymbals to mark the rhythm. The genuine melodic inventiveness of Bellini and Donizetti did little to improve the other categories of the art ; but in Verdi (1813-1901) a new genius was arising together with the Risorgimento. In Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata Verdi's dramatic sincerity triumphs over the defects of a musical texture which still clings to traditional squalor, though strokes of genius occur unpredictably in the orchestration of many pas sages. In Aida the style silences all cavil; and in Otello (written
at the age of 74) and Falstaff (written at the age of 8o) Verdi creates a new kind of opera, Wagnerian in its perfect continuity and dramatic movement, but utterly independent of Wagner's style and method.
Bold prophets in Beethoven's time had been heard to say that a great musical future was in store for Russia. The fulfilment of this prophecy was long delayed, for when Rubinstein averred that Michael Glinka (1803-1857) was the equal or the superior of Haydn and Mozart he expressed an opinion which could have occurred only to a Russian, and then only as a patriotic paradox. Rubinstein himself achieved only a weak cosmopolitanism in his voluminous compositions, though his pianoforte playing remained, for all its waywardness, till near the end of the century, as the most monumental power of interpretation on that instrument since Liszt. The first composer to make a genuinely Russian music recognized over the whole civilized world was Tchaikovsky (184o 1893) whose symphonies were held by some critics to have eclipsed those of Brahms. This was the eclipse of drama by melodrama. The true merits of Tchaikovsky are now eclipsed by the rising reputation of his less immediately successful con temporaries. Moussorgsky (1835-1881) had the posthumous fortune to have his two great operas Boris Godunov and Khovantschina revised by Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) the most brilliant contemporary master of pure orchestral colour and texture. This was unquestionably good fortune in so far as it speeded these unconventional works on their way into the wide world; but something like indignation has accompanied the more recent study of Moussorgsky's original scores, with the discovery that besides altering clumsinesses Rimsky-Korsakov constantly meddled with features in his friend's style that were far beyond his comprehension.