‘Un pays où tous sont musiciens’, ‘la race, qu'on dit la plus musicienne du monde’; ‘A land where everyone is a musician’, ‘the race said to be the most musical in the world’. The words are French, the nation is Germany, and the voice is Romain Rolland, very early in his immense novel Jean-Christophe, setting the scene for an exhaustive fictional exploration of what was for him the most burning problem of the time. Rolland's wide cultural interests encountered the problem of national identity at many levels—political, ethnic, social and artistic—but nowhere did it engage his personal attention so pressingly as in music, the art he loved and studied more than any other. His problem was a simple one, and yet he seems to have been alone in seeking its very roots. Were the Germans, or were they not, more musical than the French? What was it that made German music German and French music French? The calmness of Rolland's attempt to disentangle truth from prejudice was the more remarkable for coming at a time when nonsense and bigotry were delivered in absurd abundance on both sides of the Rhine, and when the military arms race had a less publicised parallel in music criticism.