The 16th century saw, with the classical • For instance. read again the admirable melodies of Venice, an astonishing and complete synthesis.
spirit of the Greeks and Latins, the triumph of simplicity, an admirable order and well estab listed rules; the Revolution, food for heroism in the cult of the great men of Plutarch. To day, the art of the ancient Hellenes shows us the perfect equilibrium; and with the cult of the harmonious lines of the human body, the natural and sincere love of the beautiful; in the same way, as that which concerns music, Gounod seems our precursor. He was also a believer, a mystic, but without the least as ceticism. Yet his art does not express any thing of sensuality. Quite the reverse, it is essentially sentiment and one might make the same remark of those that, after him, were great by the charm of their compositions, Faure and Debussy. Apart from Berlioz and Gounod, French music, until about 1860, had somewhat slumbered. The composers, over whom the influence of Meyerbeer triumphed, often only succeeded in producing superficial operas, full of affectation, the transient reputa tion of which could not mislead. As to the comic opera, although, since Gretry, at times delightful with Boieldieu The Woman in White' and Herold The Clerks' Meadow,' it eventually quite degenerated; the same is to be remarked of Auber, Ad. Adams, V. Masse. It has been brilliantly revived in our day. Moreover this style, qualified as eminently na tional, only represents a very small portion of French music.
The generation immediately following that of Berlioz and Gounod, fostered by vigorous and classical studies, finally comprehended all the beauty of the symphony. Since then, this favorable movement was no longer to be stopped. It will be but right to state here, that the ancient German masters pointed out the way to a more closely serried technic. The example of Beethoven, also that of Mozart were precious, but still more that of J. S. Bach. In art, we have never approved of, nor prac tised, absolute protectionism, esteeming on the contrarythat interchange is beneficial, "pro vided it is not prejudicial to the natural gifts of the race. Now, French music has not been without submitting to several foreign influences, but by a harmonious fusion, they have only helped to maintain its national originality; it is thus, that rich natures borrow of one an other. Our school is no less great nor French,
for having found in J. S. Bach the real tradi tional style of polyphonetics. This style of Bach's directly linked to that of Purcell, Buxtehude, H. Schutz and more anciently, of Gondimel, and the Franco-Flemish masters of the 16th century, Gounod understood how to discover its beauty (as his commentaries on the chants of the grand cantor testify), at about the same time as Lalo, Saint-Saens and Caesar Franck. The latter,* the first with Berlioz, sees far and wide. But the admirable hidden life of Franck is nothing more than an effort toward the best, and this great master medi tated long in silence, seeking his own calling, the right direction of his thoughts; it was only much later he °realized' that he had reached his aim.
Even before 1870 tendencies, at the same time very serious and purely symphonic, were affirmed. Already the first compositions of Saint-Saens (this delightful trio in F dates from 1865) testify to those gifts which were bestowed on him, if one may say, from the cradle: an exceptional surety in writing and scoring, which characterizes the (Deluge) and the (Symphony for the
There is also manifested in it, that which Berlioz calls as lack of inexperience," a word at once para doxical and profound. With Saint-Saens, in deed, the perfect assimilation of the -past pre vails over that of the spirit of independence in respect to tradition (otherwise not at all ig nored), which, on the contrary, influences some of our young masters, and that doubtless ex plains his unrelenting attitude as regards chance discoveries, however beautiful and log ical of our contemporaneous school. Edward Lalo, molded by a thorough knowledge of the classical quartets for stringed instruments, moreover endowed* with a remarkable sense of rhythm and of the picturesque (can that be attributed to his Spanish origin?), was equally one of the best symphonists that saw the debut of this Renaissance. His part was important, none the less in the influence of his orchestra, than in the value of his compositions, such as for instance