Burney, "is the post of honour for composers, the Romans being regarded as the severest judges of music in Italy. It is considered that an artist who has had a success in Rome has nothing to fear from the severity of the critics in other cities."
***
The first emotion produced by Neapolitan music on foreign travellers was rather surprise than pleasure. Those who were more sincere, or finer judges, were even disappointed at the outset. They found, as Burney did, that the execution was careless, or the time and the pitch were equally at fault, or the voices were harsh, or there was a natural brutality, something immoderate, "a taste," according to Grosley, "for the capricious and extravagant." The records of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are agreed upon this point. A French traveller, J. J. Bouchard, states, in 1632:
The Neapolitan music is especially striking by reason of its cheerful and fantastic movements. Its style of song, quite different from the Roman, is dazzling and as it were hard; not indeed really too gay, but fantastic and harebrained, pleasing only by its quick, giddy and fantastic movement; it is a mixture of French and Sicilian melody[1]; for the rest, most extravagant in respect of continuity and uniformity, which it does not respect in the least; running, then stopping short, jumping from low to high and high to low, forcing the voice to the utmost, then suddenly restraining it; and it is really by these alternations of high and low, piano and forte, that Neapolitan singing is recognised.
And Burney, in 1770, writes:
- ↑ That is, according to Bouchard, of the galant style and the dramatic style.
