were Munich, Dresden and Vienna. The greatest Italian masters—Cavalli, Cesti, Draghi, Bontempi, Bernabei, Torn, Pallavicino, Caldara, Porpora, Vivaldi, Torelli, Veracini—had sojourned there and reigned supreme. Dresden above all displayed a dazzling efflorescence of Italianism during the first half of the eighteenth century, in the days when Lotti, Porpora and Hasse, the most Italianate of the Germans, directed the opera.
But in 1760 Dresden was barbarously devastated by Frederick the Great, who applied himself to effacing its splendour for good and all. He methodically destroyed by his artillery, during the siege of the city, all its monuments, churches, palaces, statues and gardens. When Burney passed through it the city was no more than a heap of rubbish. Saxony was ruined, and for a long time to come played no further part in musical history. "The theatre was closed for reasons of economy." The band of instrumentalists, famous all over Europe, was dispersed among foreign cities. "The poverty was general. Those artists who had not been dismissed were rarely paid. The greater part of the nobility and the bourgeoisie was so poor that it could not afford to have its children taught music. … But for a wretched comic opera there was no other spectacle in Dresden save that of poverty."[1] There was the same devastation at Leipzig.
The citadels of Italianism in the second half of the century were Vienna, Munich and the towns on the banks of the Rhine.
At Bonn, when Burney was making his tour, the band of musicians maintained by the Elector
- ↑ Burney adds that not a boat was to be seen on the Elbe, and that for three years no oats had been given to the horses, nor hair-powder to the soldiers.
