For Cesar Franck overcame a false musical culture in the land of his
adoption by showing it, at the moment it was prepared to perceive it,
the face of a true. The French are not an outstandingly musical race.
Music plays a comparatively insignificant role in their civilization.
The mass of the people does not demand it, has never demanded it as
insistently as do Germans and Russians, and as did the mass of Italians
during the Renaissance, the mass of English before the Revolution.
Something of a prejudice against its own musical impulse must exist in
the race. For though France has a very definite musical feeling, a thing
that varies little with the passing centuries and makes for the
surprising similarities between the work of Claude Le Jeune in the
sixteenth century, Rameau in the eighteenth and Debussy in the
twentieth, she has, during her thousand years of culture, and while
producing a flood of illustrious authors, and painters and sculptors,
borne not more than four or five composers of indisputably first rank.
Germany in the course of two centuries produced at least eight or nine;
Russia three within the last fifty years. In France centuries elapse
between the appearance of a Josquin des Pres in the fifteenth century, a
Rameau in the eighteenth, a Debussy in the early twentieth.
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