"You mention Carissimi," wrote De Brosses. "For God's sake be careful not to speak of him here, under penalty of being regarded as a dunce; those who succeeded him have long been regarded as out of fashion!"
The same writer, ravished by hearing a famous singer in Naples—il Senesino—"perceived with astonishment that the people of the country were by no means satisfied. They complained that he sang in a stile antico. You must understand that the taste in music changes here at least every ten years."
Burney is still more positive:
" In Italy they treat an opera already heard like a last year's almanack. … There is a rage for novelty; it has sometimes been the cause of the revolutions which one observes in Italian music; it often gives rise to strange concetti. It leads composers to seek novelty at any cost. The simplicity of the
of Rome, who made a collection of everything relating to Palestrina; the Abbé Orsini and the Chevalier Santarelli, of Rome, who collected all documents relating to bygone opera and oratorio. (Burney). The old style was also in some degree preserved in the church music. Burney often notes, in Milan, Brescia, Vicenza, Florence, etc., that the church music was "in the old style, full of fugues."
It is true that a great deal of profane music was executed in the churches, such as that described by the Chevalier Goudar in an amusing narrative (L'Espion Chinois, 1765): "I went recently, in Bologna, to what they call here a grand musical mass. On entering the church I thought at first that I must be at the opera. Introductions, symphonies, minuets, rigadoons, airs for the solo voice, duets, choruses, accompanied by drums, trumpets, kettledrums, hunting horns, oboes, violins, fifes, flageolets: in a word, all that goes to make the music of a play was employed in this music. It was a masterpiece of impiety. If the composer had wished to write a mass for the goddess of pleasure he could not have employed more moving sounds nor more lascivious modulations." But Burney assures us that "it was only on feast-days that one could hear this style of modern music in the churches. On ordinary days, in the cathedral churches, the music was of the old style, and solemn; and in the parish churches it was simply plain-song, sometimes with the organ but more often without." Nevertheless, in a century and a country as irreligious as Italy was in the 18th century, church music could not be a sufficient counterweight to profane music, which was led away by the thirst for novelty.