(243) The same influence which had been won by Italian operatic music in Germany penetrated to the churches of Catholic Germany, and attained to complete sovereignty. But there was a difference, important, though not at the time generally or consciously felt. The conception and mode of expression of Italian church music was, although secularised, yet in its essence national, and in its appeals to religious emotion it might count upon universal comprehension and sympathy. But transplanted to Germany both the ideas and their mode of execution were strange, and could only be adopted after a preliminary artistic training; what in Italy had grown up in the course of national development was transmitted to Germany as mere form. The delicate sense of beauty and of grace, the excitable, passionate nature of the Italians, could not be transplanted, and the external adjuncts were even more superficially treated than on the soil from which they sprang. Contrapuntal work, especially the fugue, was haunted by the school traditions of church usages, which conduced to a spiritless formalism of routine. Thus, carelessness and pedantry, superficiality and dulness were combined, and church music declined more rapidly and visibly than the opera. The difference between the true essence and its extinct form is the more apparent and significant the deeper it lies; and to this must be added the fact that the continuous demand for church music' gave rise to the production of a mass of inferior work, from which the opera was preserved in deference to the taste of the public. Under these circumstances it was impossible even for a surpassing genius to do more than distinguish himself in some particulars; the efforts of an individual after thorough-going reform could only be successful supported by the spirit of the age and of the nation.[9] This general position held by church music was modified in different regions by local peculiarities of the liturgy, by the tastes of church authorities, and by the differences in the {CHURCH MUSIC.} (244) musical forces at command. The peculiar circumstances under which Mozart wrote in Salzburg are described by himself in a letter to Padre Martini (September 4, 1776):[10]--