[Footnote 77: Gluck himself said this in a letter to the _Mercure de
France_, February, 1773.]
Some more rational minds have tried to rid themselves of this Italian
and German influence, but have mostly arrived at creating an
intermediate Germano-Italian style, of which the operas of Auber and
Ambroise Thomas are a type.
Before Berlioz's time there was really only one master of the first rank
who made a great effort to liberate French music: it was Rameau; and,
despite his genius, he was conquered by Italian art.[78]
By force of circumstance, therefore, French music found itself moulded
in foreign musical forms. And in the same way that Germany in the
eighteenth century tried to imitate French architecture and literature,
so France in the nineteenth century acquired the habit of speaking
German in music. As most men speak more than they think, even thought
itself became Germanised; and it was difficult then to discover, through
this traditional insincerity, the true and spontaneous form of French
musical thought.
But Berlioz's genius found it by instinct. From the first he strove to
free French music from the oppression of the foreign tradition that was
suffocating it.
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