"The music," says Burney, "was so natural and so agreeable that the favourite airs, like those of Dr. Arne, in England, were sung by all classes of the people, and some of them in the streets." Hiller gave the plebeian characters in his operas simple Lieder to sing, and these Lieder became as popular in Germany as the vaudeville in France. "To-day," says Burney, "the taste for burlette (farces) is so general and so pronounced that there is some reason to fear, as sober individuals do, that it may destroy the taste for good music, and above all for music of a more exalted style." But far from destroying it, these popular Lieder were one of the sources of the new German opera.
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But the capital fact which was to be the salvation of German music was the sudden development of instrumental music at this juncture. At the moment when Germany seemed to be abjuring, with vocal polyphony and the infinite resources of the contrapuntal style, the old German manner, her very personality—at the moment when she seemed to be abandoning the effort to express her complex and logical soul, to adopt the Latin style of sentiment, she had the good fortune to find, in the sudden outgrowth of instrumental music, the equivalent, and more, of what she had lost.
It may seem strange to speak of good fortune in respect of an event in which intelligence and determination evidently played a great part. However, we must allow here, as always in history, for chance, for the co-operation of circumstances, which now favour, now oppose the evolution of a people. It is true that the more vigorous peoples always end by constraining chance and forcing it
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