Why be astonished at it?  Let us face the matter plainly.  In music we have not, so to speak, any masters of French style.  All our greatest composers are foreigners.  The founder of the first school of French opera, Lulli, was Florentine; the founder of the second school, Gluck, was German; the two founders of the third school were Rossini, an Italian, and Meyerbeer, a German; the creators of opera-comique were Duni, an Italian, and Gretry, a Belgian; Franck, who revolutionised our modern school of opera, was also Belgian.  These men brought with them a style peculiar to their race; or else they tried to found, as Gluck did, an “international” style,[77] by which they effaced the more individual characteristics of the French spirit.  The most French of all these styles is the opera-comique, the work of two foreigners, but owing much more to the opera-bouffe than is generally admitted, and, in any case, representing France very insufficiently.

[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.[79]

[Footnote 78:  I am not speaking of the Franco-Flemish masters at the end of the sixteenth century:  of Jannequin, Costeley, Claude le Jeune, or Mauduit, recently discovered by M. Henry Expert, who are possessed of so original a flavour, and have yet remained almost entirely unknown from their own time to ours.  Religious wars bruised France’s musical traditions and denied some of the grandeur of her art.]

[Footnote 79:  It is amusing to find Wagner comparing Berlioz with Auber, as the type of a true French musician—­Auber and his mixed Italian and German opera.  That shows how Wagner, like most Germans, was incapable of grasping the real originality of French music, and how he saw only its externals.  The best way to find out the musical characteristics of a nation is to study its folk-songs.  If only someone would devote himself to the study of French folk-song (and there is no lack of material), people would realise perhaps how much it differs from German folk-song, and how the temperament of the French race shows itself there as being sweeter and freer, more vigorous and more expressive.]