Under these circumstances Italy enjoyed undisputed and unlimited sovereignty in all matters relating to music. Spain and England acknowledged it almost without reserve; in France, where the impulse proceeding originally from Italy, had been modified by national characteristics, the influence of Italy was now beginning to reassert itself. In Germany alone, the works of great masters (we need only remind our readers of the Bach family as representatives of German church music; of Keiser, the creator of German opera in Hamburg) bore witness to an independent development of music. Even here it was not as "German as the German oaks," and bore many traces of Italian or French influences; but the comprehension and cultivation of form, the substance and spirit of the music, are purely German. This German music, however, was principally confined to Protestant North Germany; it was nourished by no favour from the great, and the colder artistic mind of North Germany hindered it from attaining the popularity which was enjoyed by music in Italy. At all the German courts, Protestant as well as Catholic, the opera was Italian; the Catholic church music was under the exclusive sway of Italian composers; all singers, male and female, were either born or educated in Italy, and so, for the most part, were the instrumentalists, although it was in instrumental music that Germany first challenged the supremacy of Italy. The curious attraction of Germans to Italy, which has existed in all ages under different manifestations, must have worked with peculiar power on musicians.[6] The German {LEOPOLD' MOZART'S HOPES.} (105) composers of the last century (with the exception of the North German Protestant church composers) all studied and laid the foundation of their fame in Italy, even those who, like Handel and Gluck, possessed original power enough to enable them later to strike out a path for themselves.[7] It may be said that, in this sense, Mozart's pilgrimage to Rome was the last of its kind; to him it was accorded, not, only to attain to the highest aim of Italian opera but to break the bonds of nationality, by lending depth and substance to the Italian perfection of form, while, with the wealth of knowledge acquired in Italy, he furnished artistic form and expression to the national opera of Germany.