To the reader of history perhaps the most significant outward sign of the impending change is the shifting of musical supremacy away from Italy, which had held unbroken sway since the days of Palestrina. We have seen in the last chapter how with Gluck the operatic centre of gravity was transferred from Naples to Paris. We shall now witness a similar change in the realm of ‘absolute’ music--this time in favor of Germany. The underlying causes of this change are fundamentally the same as those which directed the course of literature and general culture--namely the social and political upheaval that followed the Reformation and ushered in a century of struggle and strife, that kindled the Phœnix of a united and liberated nation, the Germany of to-day. A glance at the political history of the preceding era will help our comprehension of the period with which we have to deal. The peace of Westphalia (1648) had left the German Empire a dismembered, powerless mass. No less than three hundred ‘independent’ states, ruled over by petty tyrants--princes, dukes, margraves, bishops--each of whom had the right to coin money, raise armies and contract alliances, made up a nation defenseless against foes, weakened by internal and military oppression, steeped in abject misery and moral depravity. For over a hundred years it remained an ‘abortion,’ an ‘irregular body like unto a monster,’ as Puffendorf characterized it. Despite its pretensions it was, as Voltaire said, ‘neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.’ Flood after flood of pillaging soldiery had passed across its fertile acres, spreading ruin and dejection; the ravages of Louis XIV, the invasion of Kara Mustapha, the Spanish, the Swedish, the Polish wars, left the people victims of the selfish ambitions of brutish monarchs, men whose example set a premium upon crime. These noble robbers had made of the map of Europe a crazy-quilt, the only sizable patches of which represented France, Austria, and Russia. Italy, like Germany, was divided, but with this difference--its several portions were actually ruled by the ‘powers’--Austria had Tuscany and Milan, Spain ruled Naples and Sicily, while France owned Sardinia and Savoy. Its superior culture, having thus the benefit of a benevolent paternalism, penetrated to the very hearts of the conquerors, to Vienna, Madrid, and Paris, and spread a thin but glittering coat all over Europe. Germany, on the other hand, was, under the sham of independence, so constantly threatened with annihilation, so impoverished through strife, that the very idea of culture suggested a foreign thing, an exotic within the reach only of the mighty. Friedrich von Logau in the early seventeenth century bewailed the influx of foreign fashions into Germany, while Moscherosch denounced the despisers and traitors of his fatherland; and Lessing, over a century later, was still attacking the predominance of French taste in literature. We must not wonder at this almost total eclipse of