e _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.]

He was fitted in every way for the part, even b