Grand Tour

The guidebook par excellence on any musical journey was The Present State of Music in France and Italy by Charles Burney, who undertook his tour with the aim of writing a general history of music: the work was published in 1771. The English composer began by stating that Florence, if poets (Dante) and historians (Villani) were to believed, was the city with the oldest musical tradition in Europe. His subsequent observations were made from a highly technical point of view, drawing on an expertise in the field that the majority of travelers did not share: whole sequences of musicians, roles, productions and the merits and defects of performances. But if we can pick our way through a host of names and anecdotes (principally connected with Florence and Siena), his book presents a clear picture of a very extensive, lively and varied musical scene. The organ of Florence Cathedral, one of the largest in Italy, was the best tuned of all those he heard. At the church of the Annunziata solemn vespers were sung with instrumental accompaniment and choirs of treble voices. The climax of the religious festivals in the surrounding countryside was an opera (the story of David and Goliath), which was then sung in the form of an oratorio. A festive climate held sway at the theater, especially on the occasion of the latest productions which, if successful, were acclaimed by the audience with sonnets composed in honor of singers and dancers. The musical panorama was cosmopolitan, enlivened by the presence of many foreign artists «The 'Tommasino', as [Linley] is called, and the little Mozart, are talked of all over Italy, as the most promising geniuses of this age!»; The confraternities of Laudists, still active, had been established in Florence for almost 500 years. The city was filled with talented amateurs. The author furnished some more details on Tuscany at the end of his journey, recalling that there were interesting missals in Siena and that music was flourishing again in Pisa.

Twenty years later (1766), Duclos also spoke of music in Pisa, saying that he found performances at the theater very boring but preferred the Italian opera buffa to the French grand opéra. Delpuech de Comeiras said the same in 1804, which comes as no surprise as he copied the passage in question word for word from Duclos (an eloquent example of “affinity” between travel books!). Comic opera was undoubtedly the genre that received the most reviews, and Duclos's opinion (1767) that the music was pleasant but the libretti «wretched» è was one shared by many. In fact Italian theater was musical theater, thanks to an incomparable melodic vein that made it possible to overlook the poor staging or the slipshod texts of the libretti. It was opera and, above all, comic opera. Prose theater was regarded, like grand opera, as a prerogative of the French. It is no accident that Duclos singled out Goldoni as «the first and only author to have begun to imitate French drama in comedy».