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CONTENTS 



BACH . 

HANDEL 

GLUCK .... 

HAYDN .... 

MOZART .... 

BEETHOVEN 

SCHUBERT, SCHUMANN, AND FRANZ . 

CHOPIN .... 

WEBER .... 

MENDELSSOHN 

WAGNER 



PAGE 

. 7 
15 

. 58 

74 

. 94 

109 
. 135 

157 
. 176 

189 
. 198 



THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 



BACH. 



THE growth and development of German music 
are eminently noteworthy facts in the history of 
the fine arts. In little more than a century and a 
half it reached its present high and brilliant place, 
its progress being so consecutive and regular that 
the composers who illustrated its well-defined 
epochs might fairly have linked hands in one con- 
nected series. 

To JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH must be accord- 
ed the title of "father of modern music." All 
succeeding composers have bowed with reverence 
before his name, and acknowledged in him the 
creative mind which not only placed music on a 
deep scientific basis, but perfected the form from 
which have been developed the wonderfully rich 
and varied phases of orchestral composition, 



8 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

Handel, who was his contemporary, having been 
born the same year, spoke of him with sincere 
admiration, and called him the giant of music. 
Haydn wrote : " Whoever understands me knows 
that I owe much to Sebastian Bach, that I have 
studied him thoroughly and well, and that I ac- 
knowledge him only as my model." Mozart's 
unceasing research brought to light many of his 
unpublished manuscripts, and helped Germany to 
a full appreciation of this great master. In like 
manner have the other luminaries of music 
placed on record their sense of obligation to one 
whose name is obscure to the general public in 
comparison with many of his brother composers. 

Sebastian Bach was born at Eisenach on the 
21st of March, 1685, the son of one of the court 
musicians. Left in the care of his elder brother, 
who was an organist, his brilliant powers dis- 
played themselves at an early period. He was 
the descendant of a race of musicians, and even 
at that date the wide-spread branches of the fam- 
ily held annual gatherings of a musical character. 
Young Bach mastered for himself, without much 
assistance, a thorough musical education at LUne- 
burg, where he studied in the gymnasium and 
sang in the cathedral choir ; and at the age of 
eighteen we find him court musician at Weimar, 
where a few years later he became organist and 
director of concerts. He had in the mean time 
studied the organ at Ltibeck under the celebrated 



BACH. 9 

Buxtehude, and made himself thoroughly a mas- 
ter of the great Italian composers of sacred mu- 
sic Palestrina, Lotti, Vivaldi, and others. 

At this period N Germany was beginning to ex- 
perience its musical renaissance. The various 
German courts felt that throb of life and enthusi- 
asm which had distinguished the Italian principal- 
ities in the preceding century in the direction of 
painting and sculpture. Every little capital was 
a focus of artistic rays, and there was a general 
spirit of rivalry among the princes, who aspired 
to cultivate the arts of peace as well as those of 
war. Bach lend become known as a gifted musi- 
cian, not only by his wonderful powers as an or- 
ganist, but by two of his earlier masterpieces 
"Gott ist mein Konig" and "Ich hatte viel 
Bektimmerniss." Under the influence of an at- 
mosphere so artistic, Bach's ardor for study in- 
creased with his success, and his rapid advancement, 
in musical power met with warm appreciation. 

While Bach held the position of director of 
the chapel of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Kothen, 
which he assumed about the year 1720, he went 
to Hamburg on a pilgrimage to see old Reinke, 
then nearly a centenarian, whose fame as an or- 
ganist was national, and had long been the object 
of Bach's enthusiasm. The aged man listened 
while his youthful rival improvised on the old 
choral, "Upon the Rivers of Babylon." He shed 
tears of joy while he tenderly embraced Bach, 



10 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

and said : " I did think that this art would die 
with me ; but I see that you will keep it alive." 

Our musician rapidly became known far and 
wide throughout the musical centres of Germany 
as a learned and recondite composer, as a brilliant 
frnproviser, and as an organist beyond rivalry. 
Yet it was in these last two capacities that his 
reputation among his contemporaries was the 
most marked. It was left to a succeeding gen- 
eration to fully enlighten the world in regard to 
his creative powers as a musical thinker. 

ii. 

THOUGH Bach's life was mostly spent at Weimar 
and Leipsic, he was at successive periods chapel- 
master and concert-director at several of the Ger- 
man courts, which aspired to shape public taste in 
matters of musical culture and enthusiasm. But he 
was by nature singularly retiring and unobtrusive, 
and he recoiled from several brilliant offers which 
would have brought him too much in contact with 
the gay world of fashion, apparently dreading 
any diversion from a severe and exclusive art-life; 
for within these limits all his hopes, energies, and 
wishes were focalized. Yet he was not without 
that keen spirit of rivalry, that love of combat, 
which seems to be native to spirits of the more 
robust and energetic type. 

In the days of the old Minnesingers, tourna- 
ments of music shared the public taste with tour- 



BACH. 11 

naments of arms. In Bach's time these public 
competitions were still in vogue. One of these 
was held by Augustus II., Elector of Saxony and 
King of Poland, one of the most munificent art- 
patrons of Europe, but best known to fame from 
his intimate part in the wars of Charles XII. of 
Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia. Here 
Bach's principal rival was a French virtuoso, 
Marchand, who, an exile from Paris, had delighted 
the king by the lightness and brilliancy of his 
execution. They were both to improvise on the 
same theme. Marchand heard Bach's perform- 
ance, and signalized his own inferiority by de- 
clining to play, and secretly leaving the city of 
Dresden. Augustus sent Bach a hundred louis 
d'or, but this splendid douceur never reached him, 
as it was appropriated by one of the court officials. 

In Bach's half -century of a studious musical 
life there is but little of stirring incident to record. 
The significance of his career was interior, not ex- 
terior. Twice married, and the father of twenty 
children, his income was always small even for 
that age. Yet, by frugality, the simple wants of 
himself and his family never overstepped the limit 
of supply ; for he seems to have been happily 
mated with wives who sympathized with his ex- 
clusive devotion to art, and united with this the 
virtues of old-fashioned German thrift. 

Three years before his death, Bach, who had a 
son in the service of the King of Prussia, yielded 



12 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

to the urgent invitation of that monarch to go to 
Berlin. Frederick II., the conqueror of Rossbach, 
and one of the greatest of modern soldiers, was a 
passionate lover of literature and art, and it was 
his pride to collect at his court all the leading 
flights of European culture. He was not only the 
patron of Voltaire, whose connection with the 
Prussian monarch has furnished such rich mate- 
rial to the anecdote-history of literature, but of 
all the distinguished painters, poets, and musi- 
cians, whom he could persuade by his munificent 
offers (but rarely fulfilled) to suffer the burden 
of his eccentricities. Frederick was not content 
with playing the part of patronj but must him- 
self also be poet, philosopher, painter, and com- 
poser. 

On the night of Bach's arrival Frederick was 
taking part in a concert at his palace, and, on 
hearing that the great musician whose name was 
in the mouths of all Germany had come, immedi- 
ately sent for him without allowing him to don a 
court dress, interrupting his concert with the en- 
thusiastic announcement, " Gentlemen, Bach is 
here." The cordial hospitality and admiration of 
Frederick was gratefully acknowledged by Bach, 
who dedicated to him a three-part fugue on a 
theme composed by the king, known under the 
name of "A Musical Offering." But he could 
not be persuaded to remain long from his Leipsic 
home. 



BACH. 13 

Shortly before Bach's death, he was seized 
with blindness, brought on by incessant labor ; 
and his end was supposed to have been hastened 
by the severe inflammation consequent on two 
operations performed by an English oculist. He 
departed this life July 30, 1750, and was buried 
in St. John's churchyard, universally mourned by 
musical Germany, though his real title to excep- 
tional greatness was not to be read until the next 
generation. 

in. 

SEBASTIAN BACH was not only the descendant 
of a widely-known musical family, but was himself 
the direct ancestor of about sixty of the best- 
known organists and church composers of Ger- 
many. As a master of organ-playing, tradition 
tells us that no one has been his equal, with the 
possible exception of Handel. He was also an 
able performer on various stringed instruments, 
and his preference for the clavichord * led him to 
write a method for that instrument, which has 
been the basis of all succeeding methods for the 
piano. Bach's teachings and influence may be 
said to have educated a large number of excellent 
composers and organ and piano players, among 
whom were Emanuel Bach, Cramer, Hummel, and 
Clementi ; and on his school of theory and prac- 
tice the best results in music have been built. 

* An old instrument which may be called the nearest pro- 
totype of the modern square piano. 



14 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

That Bach's glory as a composer should be 
largely posthumous is probably the result of his 
exceeding simplicity and diffidence, for he always 
shrank from popular applause ; therefore we may 
believe his compositions were not placed in the 
proper light during his life. It was through Mo- 
zart, Haydn, and Beethoven, that the musical 
world learned what a master-spirit had wrought 
in the person of John Sebastian Bach. The first 
time Mozart heard one of Bach's hymns, he said, 
" Thank God ! I learn something absolutely new." 

Bach's great compositions include his "Pre- 
ludes andTugues " for the organ, works so diffi- 
cult and elaborate as perhaps to be above the av- 
erage comprehension, but sources of delight and 
instruction to all musicians ; the " Matthaus Pas- 
sion," for two choruses and two orchestras, one 
of the masterpieces in music, which was not pro- 
duced till a century after it was written ; the 
" Oratorio of the Nativity of Jesus Christ ; " and 
a very large number of masses, anthems, cantatas, 
chorals, hymns, etc. These works, from their large- 
ness and dignity of form, as also from their depth 
of musical science, have been to all succeeding com- 
posers an art-armory, whence they have derived 
and furbished their brightest weapons. In the 
study of Bach's works the student finds the deep- 
est and highest reaches in the science of music ; 
for his mind seems to have grasped all its re- 
sources, and to have embodied them with austere 



HANDEL. 15 

purity and precision of form. As Spenser is 
called the poet for poets, and Laplace the mathe- 
matician for mathematicians, so Bach is the musi- 
cian for musicians. While Handel may be con- L 
sidered a purely independent and parallel growth, 
it is not too much to assert that without Sebas- 
tian Bach and his matchless studies for the piano, 
organ, and orchestra, we ' could not have had the 
varied musical development in sonata and sym- 
phony from such masters as Haydn, Mozart, and 
Beethoven. Three of Sebastian Bach's sons be- 
came distinguished musicians, and to Emanuel we 
owe the artistic development of the sonata, which 
in its turn became the foundation of the sym- 
phony. 



HANDEL. 



To the modern Englishman Handel is almost 
a contemporary. Paintings and busts of this 
great minstrel are scattered everywhere through- 
out the land. He lies in Westminster Abbey 
among the great poets, warriors, and statesmen, a 
giant memory in his noble art. A few hours 
after death the sculptor Roubiliac took a cast of 
his face, which he wrought into imperishable mar- 
ble ; " moulded in colossal calm," he towers above 



16 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

his tomb, and accepts the homage of the world 
benignly like a god. Exeter Hall and the Found- 
ling Hospital in London are also adorned with 
marble statues of him. 

There are more than fifty known pictures of 
Handel, some of them by distinguished artists. 
In the best of these pictures Handel is seated 
in the gay costume of the period, with sword, 
shot-silk breeches, and coat embroidered with 
gold. The face is noble in its repose. Benevo- 
lence is seated about the finely-shaped mouth, 
and the face wears the mellow dignity of years, 
without weakness or austerity. There are few 
collectors of prints in England and America who 
have not a woodcut or a lithograph of him. His 
face and his music are alike familiar to the Eng- 
lish-speaking world. 

Handel came to England in the year 1710, at 
the age of twenty-five. Four years before he 
had met, at Naples, Scarlatti, Porpora, and Corelli. 
That year had been the turning-point in his life. 
With one stride he reached the front rank, and 
felt that no musician alive could teach him any- 
thing. 

GEORGE FREDERICK HANDEL (or Handel, as 
the name is written in German) was born at Halle, 
Lower Saxony, in the year 1685. Like German 
literature, German music is a comparatively re- 
cent growth. What little feeling existed for the 
musical , art employed itself in cultivating the 



HANDEL. 17 

alien flowers of Italian song. Even eighty years 
after this Mozart and Haydn were treated like 
lackeys and vagabonds, just as great actors were 
treated in England at the same period. Handel's 
father looked on music as an occupation having 
very little dignity. 

Determined that his young son should become 
a doctor like himself, and leave the divine art to 
Italian fiddlers and French buffoons, he did not 
allow him to go to a public school even, for fear 
he should learn the gamut. But the boy Handel, 
passionately fond of sweet sounds, had, with the 
connivance of his nurse, hidden in the garret a 
poor spinet, and in stolen hours taught himself 
how to play. At last the senior Handel had a 
visit to make to another son in the service of the 
Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels, and the young George 
was taken along to the ducal palace. The boy 
strayed into the chapel, and was irresistibly 
drawn to the organ. His stolen performance was 
made known to his father and the duke, and the 
former was very much enraged at such a direct 
evidence of disobedience. The duke, however, 
being astonished at the performance of the youth- 
ful genius, interceded for him, and recommended 
that his taste should be encouraged and cultivated 
instead of repressed. 

From this time forward fortune showered 
upon him a combination of conditions highly 
favorable to rapid development. Severe train- 
2 



18 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

ing, ardent friendship, the society of the first 
composers, and incessant practice were vouchsafed 
him. As the pupil of the great organist Zachau, 
he studied the whole existing mass of German and 
Italian music, and soon exacted from his master 
the admission that he had nothing more to teach 
him. Thence he went to Berlin to study the 
opera-school, where Ariosti and Bononcini were 
favorite composers. The first was friendly, but 
the latter, who with a first-rate head had a can- 
kered heart, determined to take the conceit out of 
the Saxon boy. He challenged him to play at 
sight an elaborate piece. Handel played it with 
perfect precision, and thenceforward Bononcini, 
though he hated the youth as a rival, treated him 
as an equal. 

On the death of his father Handel secured an 
engagement at the Hamburg opera-house, where 
he soon made his mark by the ability with which, 
on several occasions, he conducted rehearsals. 

At the age of nineteen Handel received the 
offer of the Ltibeck organ, on condition that he 
would marry the daughter of the retiring organist. 
He went down with his friend Mattheson, who it 
seems had been offered the same terms. They 
both returned, however, in single blessedness to 
Hamburg. 

Though the Ltibeck maiden had stirred no bad 
blood between them, musical rivalry did. A dis- 
pute in the theatre resulted in a duel. The only 



HANDEL. 19 

thing that saved Handel's life was a great brass 
button that shivered his antagonist's point, when 
they were parted to become firm friends again. 

While at Hamburg Handel's first two operas 
were composed, " Almira " and " Nero." Both of 
these were founded on dark tales of crime and 
sorrow, and, in spite of some beautiful airs and 
clever instrumentation, were musical failures, as 
might be expected. 

Handel had had enough of manufacturing 
operas in Germany, and so in July, 1706, he went 
to Florence. Here he was cordially received ; 
for Florence was second to no city in Italy in 
its passion for encouraging the arts. Its noble 
specimens of art creations in architecture, paint- 
ing, and sculpture, produced a powerful impres- 
sion upon the young musician. In little more 
than a week's time he composed an opera, " Rodri- 
go," for which he obtained one hundred sequins. 
His next visit was, to Venice, where he arrived at 
the height of the carnival. Whatever effect Ven- 
ice, with its weird and mysterious beauty, with its 
marble palaces, fayades, pillars, and domes, its 
magnificent shrines and frescoes, produced on 
Handel, he took Venice by storm. Handel's power 
as an organist and a harpsichord player was only 
second to his strength as a composer, even when, 
in the full zenith of his maturity, he composed the 
" Messiah " and " Judas Maccabseus." 

"II caro Sassone," the dear Saxon, found a 



20 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

formidable opponent as well as dear friend in the 
person of Scarlatti. One night at a masked ball, 
given by a nobleman, Handel was present in dis- 
guise. He sat at the harpsichord, and astonished 
the company with his playing ; but no one could 
tell who it was that ravished the ears of the as- 
sembly. Presently another masquerader came 
into the room, walked up to the instrument, and 
called out : " It is either the devil or the Saxon ! " 
This was <Scarlatti, who afterward had with Han- 
del, in Florence and Rome, friendly contests of 
skill, in which it seemed difficult to decide which 
was victor. To satisfy the Venetian public, Han- 
del composed the opera " Agrippina," which made 
a furore among all the connoisseurs of the city. 

So, having seen the summer in Florence and the 
carnival in Venice, he must hurry on to be in time 
for the great Easter celebrations in Rome. Here 
he lived under the patronage of Cardinal Otto- 
boni, one of the wealthiest and most liberal of the 
Sacred College. The cardinal was a modern rep- 
resentative of the ancient patrician. Living him- 
self in princely luxury, he endowed hospitals and 
surgeries for the public. He distributed alms, 
patronized men of science and art, and entertained 
the public with comedies, operas, oratorios, pup- 
pet-shows, and academic disputes. Under the au- 
spices of this patron, Handel composed three op- 
eras and two oratorios. Even at this early period 
the young composer was parting company with 



HANDEL. 21 

the strict old musical traditions, and his works 
showed an extraordinary variety and strength of 
treatment. 

From Rome he went to Naples, where he spent 
his second Italian summer, and composed the ori- 
ginal Italian " Aci e Galatea," which in its Eng- 
lish version, afterward written for the Duke of 
Chandos, has continued a marked favorite with 
the musical world. Thence, after a lingering 
return through the sunny land where he had 
been so warmly welcomed, and which had taught 
him most effectually, in convincing him that 
his musical life had nothing in common with 
the traditions of Italian musical art, he returned 
to Germany, settling at the court of George of 
Brunswick, Elector of Hanover, and afterward 
King of England. He received commission in 
the course of a few months from the elector to 
visit England, having been warmly invited thither 
by some English noblemen. On his return to Han- 
over, at the end of six months, he found the dull 
and pompous little court unspeakably tiresome 
after the bustle of London. So it is not to be 
. marveled at that he took the earliest opportunity 
of returning to the land which he afterward adopt- 
ed. At this period he was not yet twenty-five 
years old, but already famous as a performer on 
the organ and harpsichord, and as a composer of 
Italian operas. 

When Queen Anne died and Handel's old pa- 



22 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

tron became King of England, Handel was forbid- 
den to appear before him, as he had not forgotten 
the musician's escapade ; but his peace was at last 
made by a little ruse. Handel had a friend at 
court, Baron Kilmansegge, from whom he learned 
that the king was, on a certain day, going to take 
an excursion on the Thames. So he set to work to 
compose music for the occasion, which he arranged 
to have performed on a boat which followed the 
king's barge. As the king floated down the river he 
heard the new and delightful " Water-Music." He 
knew that only one man could have composed such 
music ; so he sent for Handel, and sealed his par- 
don with a pension of two hundred pounds a year. 

IT. 

LET us take a glance at the society in which 
the composer moved in the heyday of his youth. 
His greatness was to be perfected in after-years 
by bitter rivalries, persecution, alternate oscilla- 
tions of poverty and affluence, and a multitude of 
bitter experiences. But at this time Handel's life 
was a serene and delightful one. Rival factions 
had not been organized to crush him. Lord Bur- 
lington lived much at his mansion, which was then 
out of town, although the house is now in the 
heart of Piccadilly. The intimate friendship of 
this nobleman helped to bring the young musician 
into contact with many distinguished people. 

It is odd to think of the people Handel met 



HANDEL. 23 

daily without knowing that their names and his 
would be in a century famous. The following 
picture sketches Handel and his friends in a 
sprightly fashion : 

" Yonder heavy, ragged-looking youth stand- 
ing at the corner of Regent Street, with a slight 
and rather more refined- looking companion, is the 
obscure Samuel Johnson, quite unknown to fame. 
He is walking with Richard Savage. As Signer 
Handel, ( the composer of Italian music,' passes by, 
Savage becomes excited, and nudges his friend, 
who takes only a languid interest in the foreigner. 
Johnson did not care for music ; of many noises 
he considered it the least disagreeable. 

" Toward Charing Cross comes, in shovel-hat 
and cassock, the renowned ecclesiastic Dean 
Swift. He has just nodded patronizingly to Bo- 
noncini in the Strand, and suddenly meets Han- 
del, who cuts him dead. Nothing disconcerted, 
the dean moves on, muttering his famous epi- 
gram : 

' Some say that Signer Bononcinl, 
Compared to Handel, is a ninny ; 
While others vow that to him Handel 
Is hardly fit to hold a candle. 
Strange that such difference should be 
'Twixt tweedledum and tweedledee.' 

"As Handel enters the * Turk's Head' at the 
corner of Regent Street, a noble coach and four 
drives up. It is the Duke of Chandos, who is 



24 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

inquiring for Mr. Pope. Presently a deformed 
little man, in an iron-gray suit, and with a face 
as keen as a razor, hobbles out, makes a low bow 
to the burly Handel, who, helping him into the 
chariot, gets in after him, and they drive off to- 
gether to Cannons, the duke's mansion at Edge- 
ware. There they meet Mr. Addison, the poet 
Gay, and the witty Arbuthnot, who have been 
asked to luncheon. The last number of the Spec- 
tator is on the table, and a brisk discussion soon 
arises between Pope and Addison concerning the 
merits of the Italian opera, in which Pope would 
have the better if he only knew a little more 
about music, and could keep his temper. Ar- 
buthnot sides with Pope in favor of Mr. Handel's 
operas ; the duke endeavors to keep the peace. 
Handel probably uses his favorite exclamation, 
' Vat te tevil I care ! ' and consumes the recherchb 
wines and rare viands with undiminished gusto. 

" The Magnificent, or the Grand Duke, as he 
was called, had built himself a palace for 230,- 
000. He had a private chapel, and appointed 
Handel organist in the room of the celebrated 
Dr. Pepusch, who retired with excellent grace be- 
fore one manifestly his superior. On week-days 
the duke and duchess entertained all the wits arid 
grandees in town, and on Sundays the Edgeware 
Road was thronged with the gay equipages of 
those who went to worship at the ducal chapel 
and hear Mr. Handel play on the organ. 



HANDEL. 25 

" The Edgeware Road was a pleasant country 
drive, but parts of it were so solitary that high- 
waymen were much to be feared. The duke was 
himself attacked on one occasion ; and those who 
could afford it never traveled so far out of town 
without armed retainers. Cannons was the pride 
of the neighborhood, and the duke of whom 
Pope wrote, 

4 Thus gracious Chandos is beloved at sight ' 

was as popular as he was wealthy. But his name 
is made still more illustrious by the Chandos an- 
thems. They were all written at Cannons be- 
tween 1718 and 1720, and number in all eleven 
overtures, thirty-two solos, six duets, a trio, quar- 
tet, and forty-seven choruses. Some of the above 
are real masterpieces ; but, with the exception of 
* The waves of the sea rage horribly,' and * Who 
is God but the Lord ? ' few of them are ever heard 
now. And yet these anthems were most signifi- 
cant in the variety of the choruses and in the 
range of the accompaniments ; and it was then, 
no doubt, that Handel was feeling his way toward 
the great and immortal sphere of his oratorio 
music. Indeed, his first oratorio, 'Esther,' was 
composed at Cannons, as also the English version 
of * Acis and Galatea.'" 

But Handel had other associates, and we 
must now visit Thomas Britton, the musical coal- 
heaver. /' There goes the famous small-coal man, 



26 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

a lover of learning, a musician, and a companion 
of gentlemen." So the folks used to say as 
Thomas Britton, the coal-heaver of Clerkenwell 
Green, paced up and down the neighboring streets 
with his sack of small coal on his back, destined 
for one of his customers. Britton was great 
among the great. He was courted by the most 
fashionable folk of his day. He was a cultivated 
coal-heaver, who, besides his musical taste and 
ability, possessed an extensive knowledge of 
chemistry and the occult sciences. 

Britton did more than this. He gave concerts 
in Aylesbury Street, Clerkenwell, where this singu- 
lar man had formed a dwelling-house, with a con- 
cert-room and a coal-store, out of what was origi- 
nally a stable. On the ground-floor was the small- 
coal repository, and over that the concert-room 
very long and narrow, badly lighted, and with a 
ceiling so low that a tall man could scarcely stand 
upright in it. The stairs to this room were far 
from pleasant to ascend, and the following face- 
tious lines by Ward, the author of the " London 
Spy," confirm this : 

" Upon Thursdays repair 
To my palace, and there 
Hobble up stair by stair 
But I pray ye take care 
That you break not your shins by a stumble ; 

" And without e'er a souse 
Paid to me or my spouse, 



HANDEL. 27 

Sit as still as a mouse 

At the top of the house, 

And there you shall hear how we fumble." 

Nevertheless beautiful duchesses and the best 
society in town flocked to Britton's on Thursdays 
not to order coals, but to sit out his concerts. 

Let us follow the short, stout little man on a 
concert-day. The customers are all served, or as 
many as can be. The coal-shed is made tidy and 
swept up, and the coal-heaver awaits his company. 
There he stands at the door of his stable, dressed 
in his blue blouse, dustman's hat, and maroon 
kerchief tightly fastened round his neck. The 
concert-room is almost full, and, pipe in hand, 
Britton awaits a new visitor the beautiful 

Duchess of B . She is somewhat late (the 

coachman, possibly, is not quite at home in the 
neighborhood). 

Here comes a carriage, which stops at the 
coal-shop ; and, laying down his pipe, the coal- 
heaver assists her grace to alight, and in the gen- 
teelest manner escorts her to the narrow staircase 
leading to the music-room. Forgetting Ward's 
advice, she trips laughingly and carelessly up the 
stairs to the room, from which proceed faint 
sounds of music, increasing to quite an olla podri- 
da of sound as the apartment is reached for the 
musicians are tuning up. The beautiful duchess 
is soon recognized, and as soon in deep gossip with 
her friends. But who is that gentlemanly man 



28 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

leaning over the chamber-organ? That is Sir 
Roger L'Estrange, an admirable performer on the 
violoncello, and a great lover of music. He is 
watching the subtile fingering of Mr. Handel, as 
his dimpled hands drift leisurely and niarvelously 
over the keys of the instrument. 

There, too, is Mr. Bannister with his fiddle 
the first Englishman, by-the-by, who distinguished 
himself upon the violin ; there is Mr. Woolaston, 
the painter, relating to Dr. Pepusch of how he 
had that morning thrown up his window upon 
hearing Britton crying " Small coal ! " near his 
house in Warwick Lane, and, having beckoned 
him in, had made a sketch for a painting of him ; 
there, too, is Mr. John Hughes, author of the 
"Siege of Damascus." In the background also 
are Mr. Philip Hart, Mr. Henry Symonds, Mr. 
Obadiah Shuttleworth, Mr. Abiell Whichello ; 
while in the extreme corner of the room is Robe, 
a justice of the peace, letting out to Henry Need- 
ier of the Excise Office the last bit of scandal that 
has come into his court. And now, just as the 
concert has commenced, in creeps "Soliman the 
Magnificent," also known as Mr. Charles Jennens, 
of Great Ormond Street, who wrote many of 
Handel's librettos, and arranged the words for 
the "Messiah." 

" Soliman the Magnificent " is evidently re- 
solved to do justice to his title on this occasion 
with his carefully-powdered wig, frills, maroon- 



HANDEL. 29 

colored coat, and buckled shoes ; and as he makes 
his progress up the room, the company draw aside 
for him to reach his favorite seat near Handel. 
A trio of Corelli's is gone through ; then Madame 
Cuzzoni sings Handel's last new air ; Dr. Pepusch 
takes his turn at the harpsichord ; another trio of 
Hasse, or a solo on the violin by Bannister ; a 
selection on the organ from Mr. Handel's new 
oratorio ; and then the day's programme is over. 
Dukes, duchesses, wits and philosophers, poets 
and musicians, make their way down the satirized 
stairs to go, some in carriages, some in chairs, 
some on foot, to their own palaces, houses, or 
lodgings. 

in. 

WE do not now think of Handel in connection 
with the opera. To the modern mind he is so 
linked to the oratorio, of which he was the father 
and the consummate master, that his operas are 
curiosities but little known except to musical anti- 
quaries. Yet some of the airs from the Handel 
operas are still cherished by singers as among the 
most beautiful songs known to the concert-stage. 

In 1720 Handel was engaged by a party of 
noblemen, headed by his Grace of Chandos, to 
compose operas for the Royal Academy of Music 
at the Haymarket. An attempt had been made 
to put this institution on a firm foundation by a 
subscription of 50,000, and it was opened on 



30 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

May 2d with a full company of singers engaged 
by Handel. In the course of eight years twelve 
operas were produced in rapid succession : " Flori- 
dante," December 9, 1721; "Ottone," January 
12, 1723; "Flavio" and "Giulio Cesare," 1723; 
" Tamerlano," 1724 ; " Rodelinda," 1725 ; " Scipi- 
one,"1726; "Alessandro," 1726; " Admeto," 1727; 
"Siroe," 1728; and "Tolommeo," 1728. They 
made as great a furore among the musical public of 
that day as would an opera from Gounod or Verdi 
in the present. The principal airs were sung 
throughout the land, and published as harpsi- 
chord pieces ; for in these halcyon days of our 
composers the whole atmosphere of the land was 
full of the flavor and color of Handel. Many of 
the melodies in these now forgotten operas have 
been worked up by modern composers, and so 
have passed into modern music unrecognized. It 
is a notorious" fact that the celebrated song, 
" Where the Bee sucks," by Dr. Arne, is taken 
from a movement in " Rinaldo. " Thus the new life 
of music is ever growing rich with the dead leaves 
of the past. The most celebrated of these operas 
was entitled " Otto." It was a work composed 
of one long string of exquisite gems, like Mozart's 
"Don Giovanni" and Gounod's "Faust." Dr. 
Pepusch, who had never quite forgiven Handel 
for superseding him as the best organist in Eng- 
land, remarked of one of the airs, "That great 
bear must have been inspired when he wrote that 



HANDEL. 31 

air." The celebrated Madame Cuzzoni made her 
debut in it. On the second night the tickets rose 
to four guineas each, and Cuzzoni received two 
thousand pounds for the season. 

The composer had already begun to be known 
for his irascible temper. It is refreshing to learn 
that operatic singers of the day, however whim- 
sical and self-willed, were obliged to bend to the 
imperious genius of this man. In a spirit of ill- 
timed revolt Cuzzoni declined to sing an air. 
She had already given him trouble by her inso- 
lence and freaks, which at times were unbearable. 
Handel at last exploded. He flew at the wretched 
woman and shook her like a rat. " Ah ! I always 
knew you were a fery tevil," he cried, "and I 
shall now let you know that I am Beelzebub, the 
prince of de tevils ! " and, dragging her to the 
open window, was just on the point of pitching 
her into the street when, in every sense of the 
word, she recanted. So, when Carestini, the cele- 
brated tenor, sent back an air, Handel was fu 
ous. Rushing into the trembling Italian's house, 
he said, in his four- or five-language style : " You 
tog ! don't I know better as yourself vaat it pest 
for you to sing ? If you vill not sing all de song 
vaat I give you, I vill not pay you ein stiver." 
Among the anecdotes told of Handel's passion is 
one growing out of the composer's peculiar sen- 
sitiveness to discords. The dissonance of the 
tuning-up period of an orchestra is disagreeable 



32 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

to the most patient. Handel, being peculiarly 
sensitive to this unfortunate necessity, always 
arranged that it should take place before the audi- 
ence assembled, so as to prevent any sound of 
scraping or blowing. Unfortunately, on one occa- 
sion, some wag got access to the orchestra where 
the ready-tuned instruments were lying, and with 
diabolical dexterity put every string and crook 
out of tune. Handel enters. All the bows are 
raised together, and at the given beat all start off 
con spirito. The effect was startling in the ex- 
treme. The unhappy maestro rushes madly from 
his place, kicks to pieces the first double-bass he 
sees, and, seizing a kettle-drum, throws it violently 
at the leader of the band. The effort sends his 
wig flying, and, rushing bareheaded to the foot- 
lights, he stands a few moments amid the roars of 
the house, snorting with rage and choking with 
passion. Like Burleigh's nod, Handel's wig 
seemed to have been a sure guide to his temper. 
When things went well, it had a certain compla- 
cent vibration ; but when he was out of humor, 
the wig indicated the fact in a very positive way. 
The Princess of Wales was wont to blame her 
ladies for talking instead of listening. "Hush, 
hush ! " she would say. " Don't you see Handel's 
wig?" 

For several years after the subscription of the 
nobility had been exhausted, our composer, hav- 
ing invested 10,000 of his own in the Haymar- 



HANDEL. 33 

ket, produced operas with remarkable affluence, 
some of them pasticcio works, composed of all 
sorts of airs, in which the singers could give their 
bravura songs. These were "Lotario," 1729; 
"Partenope," 1730; "Poro," 1731; "Ezio," 
1732 ; " Sosarme," 1732 ; " Orlando," 1733 ; "Ari- 
adne," 1734 ; and also'several minor works. Han- 
del's operatic career was not so much the out- 
come of his choice as dictated to him by the 
necessity of time and circumstance. As time 
vent on, his operas lost public interest. The au- 
diences dwindled, and the overflowing houses of 
his earlier experience were replaced by empty 
benches. This, however, made little difference 
with Handel's royal patrons. The king and the 
Prince of Wales, with their respective households, 
made it an express point to show their deep inter- 
est in Handel's success. In illustration of this, 
an amusing anecdote is told of the Earl of Ches- 
terfield. During the performance of " Rinaldo " 
this nobleman, then an equerry of the king, was 
met quietly retiring from the theatre in the mid- 
dle of the first act. Surprise being expressed by 
a gentleman who met the earl, the latter said : 
" I don't wish to disturb his Majesty's privacy." 

Handel paid his singers in those days what 
were regarded as enormous prices. Senisino and 
Carestini had each twelve hundred pounds, and 
Cuzzoni two thousand, for the season. Toward 
the end of what may be called the Handel season 



34 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

nearly all the singers and nobles forsook him, and 
supported Farinelli, the greatest singer living, at 
the rival house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. 

IV. 

FROM the year 1729 the career of Handel was 
to be a protracted battle, in which he was some- 
times victorious, sometimes defeated, but always 
undaunted and animated with a lofty sense of his 
own superior power. Let us take a view of some 
of the rival musicians with whom he came in con- 
tact. Of all these Bononcini was the most formi- 
dable. He came to England in 1720 with Ariosti, 
also a meritorious composer. Factions soon began 
to form themselves around Handel and Bononcini, 
and a bitter struggle ensued between these old 
foes. The same drama repeated itself, with new 
actors, about thirty years afterward, in Paris. 
Gluck was then the German hero, supported by 
Marie Antoinette, and Piccini fought for the Ital- 
ian opera under the colors of the king's mistress 
Du Barry, while all the litterateurs and nobles 
ranged themselves on either side in bitter contest. 
The battle between Handel and Bononcini, as the 
exponents of German and Italian music, was also 
repeated in after-years between Mozart and Salieri, 
Weber and Rossini, and to-day is seen in the acri- 
monious disputes going on between Wagner and 
the Italian school. Bononcini's career in England 
came to an end very suddenly. It was discovered 



HANDEL. 35 

that a madrigal brought out by him was pirated 
from another Italian composer ; whereupon Bonon- 
cini left England, humiliated to the dust, and 
finally died obscure and alone, the victim of a 
charlatan alchemist, who succeeded in obtaining 
all his savings. 

Another powerful rival of Handel was Porpora,, 
or, as Handel used to call him, "old Borbora." 
Without Bononcini's fire or Handel's daring orig- 
inality, he represented the dry contrapuntal school 
of Italian music. He was also a great singing- 
master, famous throughout JCurope, and upon this 
his reputation had hitherto prificip'allyxested. He 
came to London in 1733, under the patrtmage of 
the Italian faction, especially to serve as a thorn 
in the side of Handel. His first opera, " Ariadne," 
was a great success ; but when he had the audac- 
ity to challenge the great German in the field of 
oratorio, his defeat was so overwhelming that he 
candidly admitted his rival's superiority. But he 
believed that no operas in the world were equal 
to his own, and he composed fifty of them during 
his life, extending to the days of Haydn, whom 
he had the honor of teaching, while the father of 
the symphony, on the other hand, cleaned Por- 
pora's boots and powdered his wig for him. 

Another Italian opponent was Hasse, a man of 
true genius, who in his old age instructed some 
of the most splendid singers in the history of the 
lyric stage. He also married one of the most gift- 



36 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

ed and most beautiful divas of Europe, Faustina 
Bordoni. The following anecdote does equal 
credit to Hasse's heart and penetration : In after- 
years, when he had left England, he was again 
sent for to take Handel's place as conductor of 
opera and oratorio. Hasse inquired, " What ! is 
Handel dead ? " On being told no, he^dignant- 
ly refused, saying he was not worthy to tie Han- 
del's shoe-latchets/ 

Inhere are also Dr. Pepusch, the Anglicized 
Prussian, and Dr. Greene^ both names well known 
in English music. Pepusch had had the leading 
place, before Handel's arrival, as organist and 
conductor, and made a distinct place for himself 
even after the sun of Handel had obscured all 
of his contemporaries. He wrote the music of 
the " Beggar's Opera," which was the great sen- 
sation of the times, and which still keeps pos- 
session of the stage. Pepusch was chiefly nota- 
ble for his skill in arranging the popular songs of 
the day, and probably did more than any other 
composer to give the English ballad its artistic 
form. 

The name of Dr. Greene is best known in con- 
nection with choral compositions. His relations 
with Handel and Bononcini are hardly creditable 
to him. He seems to have flattered each in turn. 
He upheld Bononcini in the great madrigal con- 
troversy, and appears to have wearied Handel by 
his repeated visits. The great Saxon easily saw 



HANDEL. 37 

through the flatteries of a man who was in reality 
an ambitious rival, and joked about him, not al- 
ways in the best taste. When he was told that 
Greene was giving concerts at the " Devil Tavern," 
near Temple Bar, " Ah ! " he exclaimed, " rnein 
poor friend Toctor Greene so he is gone to de 
Tevil ! '^^ 

From 1732 to 1740 Handel's life presents the 
suggestive and often-repeated experience in the 
lives of men of genius a soul with a great crea- 
tive mission, of which it is half unconscious, part- 
ly yielding to and partly struggling against the 
tendencies of the age, yet gradually crystallizing 
into its true form, and getting consecrated to its 
true work. In these eight years Handel presented 
to the public ten operas and five oratorios. It 
was in 1731 that the great significant fact, though 
unrecognized by himself and others, occurred, 
which stamped the true bent of his genius. This 
was the production of his first oratorio in Eng- 
land. He was already playing his operas to emp- 
ty houses, the subject of incessant scandal and 
abuse on the part of his enemies, but holding his 
way with steady cheerfulness and courage. Twelve 
years before this he had composed the oratorio of 
" Esther," but it was still in manuscript, uncared 
for and neglected. It was finally produced by a 
society called Philharmonic, under the direction of 
Bernard Gates, the royal chapel-master. Its fame 
spread wide, and we read these significant words 



38 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

in one of the old English newspapers : " ' Esther,' 
an English oratorio, was performed six times, and 
very full." 

Shortly after this Handel himself conducted 
" Esther " at the Haymarket by royal command. 
His success encouraged him to write " Deborah," 
another attempt in the same field, and it met a 
warm reception from the public, March 17, 1733. 

For about fifteen years Handel had struggled 
heroically in the composition of Italian operas. 
With these he had at first succeeded ; but his 
popularity waned more and more, and he became 
finally the continued target for satire, scorn, and 
malevolence. In obedience to the drift of opinion, 
all the great singers, who had supported him at 
the outset, joined the rival ranks or left England. 
In fact it may be almost said that the English 
public were becoming dissatisfied with the whole 
system and method of Italian music. Colley 
Gibber, the actor and dramatist, explains why 
Italian opera could never satisfy the requirement 
of Handel, or be anything more than an artificial 
luxury in England : " The truth is, this kind of 
entertainment is entirely sensational." Still both 
Handel and his friends and his foes, all the ex- 
ponents of musical opinion in England, persevered 
obstinately in warming this foreign exotic into a 
new lease of life. 9 

The quarrel between the great Saxon com- 
poser and his opponents raged incessantly both 



HANDEL. 39 

in public and private. The newspaper and the 
drawing-room rang alike with venomous dia- 
tribes. Handel was called a swindler, a drunkard, 
and a blasphemer, to whom Scripture even was 
not sacred. The idea of setting Holy Writ to 
music scandalized the Pharisees, who reveled in 
the licentious operas and love-songs of the Italian 
school. All the small wits of the time showered 
on Handel epigram and satire unceasingly. Tlie 
greatest of all the wits, however, Alexander Pope, 
was his firm friend and admirer ; and in the 
" Dunciad," wherein the wittiest of poets impaled 
so many of the small fry of the age with his pun- 
gent and vindictive shaft, he also stew some of 
the most malevolent of Handel's foes. 

Fielding, in " Tom Jones," has an amusing hit 
at the taste of the period : " It was Mr. Western's 
custom every afternoon, as soon as he was drunk, 
to hear his daughter play on the harpsichord ; 
for he was a great lover of music, and perhaps, 
had he lived in town, might have passed as a con- 
noisseur, for he always excepted against the finest 
compositions of Mr. Handel." 

So much had it become the fashion to criticise 
Handel's new effects in vocal and instrumental 
composition, that some years later Mr. Sheridan 
makes one of his characters fire a pistol simply to 
shock the audience, and makes him say in a stage 
whisper to the gallery, " This hint, gentlemen, I 
took from Handel." 



iO THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

The composer's Oxford experience was rather 
amusing and suggestive. We find it recorded 
chat in July, 1733, " one Handell, a foreigner, was 
lesired to come" to Oxford to perform in music." 
Again the same writer says : " Handell with his 
lousy crew, a great number of foreign fiddlers, 
tiad a performance for his own benefit at the 
theatre." One of the dons writes of the perform- 
ance as follows : " This is an innovation ; but 
every one paid his five shillings to try how a little 
fiddling would sit upon him. And, notwithstand- 
ing the barbarous and. inhuman combination of 
such a parcel of unconscionable scamps, he [Han- 
del] disposed of the most of his tickets." 

" Handel and his lousy crew," however, left 
Oxford with the prestige of a magnificent victory. 
His third oratorio, " Athaliah," was received with 
vast applause by a great audience. Some of his 
university admirers, who appreciated academic 
honors more than the musician did, urged him to 
accept the degree of Doctor of Music, for which 
he would have to pay a small fee. The charac- 
teristic reply was a Parthian arrow : " Vat te 
tevil I trow my money away for dat vich the 
blockhead vish ? I no vant ! " 

v. 

IN 1738 Handel was obliged to close the thea- 
tre and suspend payment. He had made and 
spent during his operatic career the sum of 10,- 



HANDEL. 41 



000 sterling, besides dissipating the sum of 50,- 
000 subscribed by his noble patrons. The rival 
house lasted but a few months longer, and the 
Duchess of Marlborough and her friends, who 
ruled the opposition clique and imported Bonon- 
cini, paid 12,000 for the pleasure of ruining Han- 
del. His failure as an operatic composer is due 
in part to the same causes which ccmstituted his 
success in oratorio and cantata. It is a little sig- 
nificant to notice that, alike by the progress of his 
own genius and by the force of conditions, he was 
forced out of the operatic field at the very time 
when he strove to tighten his grip on it. 

His free introduction of choral and instrumen- 
tal music, his creation of new forms,; and remod- 
deling of old ones, his entire subordination of the 
words in the story to a pure musical purpose, 
offended the singers and retarded the action of 
the drama in the eyes of the audience ; yet it was 
by virtue of these unpopular characteristics that 
the public mind was being moulded to understand 
and love the form of the oratorio. 

From 1734 to 1738 Handel composed and pro- 
duced a number of operatic works, the principal 
ones of which were " Alcina," 1735 ; " Arminio," 
1737; and "Berenice," 1737. He also during 
these years wrote the magnificent music to Dry- 
den's " Alexander's Feast," and the great funeral 
anthem on the occasion of Queen Caroline's death 
in the latter part of the year 1737. 



42 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

"We can hardly solve the tenacity of purpose 
with which Handel persevered in the composition 
of operatic music after it had ruined him ; but it 
was still some time before he fully appreciated 
the true turn of his genius, which . could not be 
trifled with or ignored. In Jiis adversity he had 
some consolation. His creditors were patient, 
believing in his integrity. The royal family were 
his firm friends. % 

Southey tells us that Handel, having asked the 
youthful Prince of Wales, then a child, and after- 
ward George the Third, if he loved music, an- 
swered, when the prince expressed his pleasure : 
" A good boy, a good boy ! You shall protect 
my fame when I am dead." Afterward, when 
the half -imbecile George was crazed with family 
and public misfortunes, he found his chief solace 
in the Waverley novels and Handel's music. 

It is also an interesting fact that the poets and 
thinkers of the age were Handel's firm admirers. 
Such men as Gay, Arbuthnot, Hughes, Colley 
Cibber, Pope, Fielding, Hogarth, and Smollett, 
who recognized the deep, struggling tendencies of 
the times, measured Handel truly. They defended 
him in print, and never failed to attend his per- 
formances, and at his benefit concerts their en- 
thusiastic support always insured him an over- 
flowing house. 

The popular instinct was also true to him. 
The aristocratic classes sneered at his oratorioi 



HANDEL. 43 

and complained at his innovations. His music 
was found to be good bait for the popular gardens 
and the holiday-makers of the period. Jonathan 
Tyers was one of the most liberal managers of 
this class. He was proprietor of Yauxhall Gar- 
dens, and Handel (incognito) supplied him with 
nearly all his music. The composer did much the 
same sort of thing for Marylebone Gardens, fur- 
bishing up old and writing new strains with an 
ease that well became the urgency of the circum- 
stances. 

"My grandfather," says the Rev. J. Foun- 
tagne, '* as I have been told, was an enthusiast in 
music, and cultivated most of all the friendship 
of musical men, especially of Handel, who visited 
him often, and had a great predilection for his 
society. This leads me to relate an anecdote 
which I have on the best authority. While Mary- 
lebone Gardens were flourishing, the enchanting 
music of Handel, and probably of Arne, was often 
heard from the orchestra there. One evening, as 
my grandfather and Handel were walking togeth- 
er and alone, a new piece was struck up by the 
band. ' Come, Mr. Fountagne,' said Handel, * let 
us sit down and listen to this piece ; I want to 
know your opinion about it.' Down they sat, 
and after some time the old parson, turning to his 
companion, said, ( It is not worth listening to ; it's 
very poor stuff.' * You are right, Mr. Fountagne,' 
said Handel, ' it is very poor stuff ; I thought so 



44 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

myself when I had finished it.' The old gentle- 
man, being taken by surprise, was beginning to 
apologize ; but Handel assured him there was no 
necessity, that the music was really bad, having 
been composed hastily, and his time for the pro- 
duction limited ; and that the opinion given was 
as correct as it was honest." 

VI. 

THE period of Handel's highest development 
had now arrived. For seven years his genius had 
been slowly but surely maturing, in obedience to 
the inner law of his being. He had struggled 
long in the bonds of operatic composition, but 
even here his innovations showed conclusively 
how he was reaching out toward the form with 
which his name was to be associated through all 
time. The year 1739 was one of prodigious ac- 
tivity. The oratorio of "Saul" was produced, 
of which the "Dead March" is still recognized 
as one of the great musical compositions of all 
time, being one of the few intensely solemn sym- 
phonies written in a major key. Several works 
now forgotten were composed, and the great 
"Israel in Egypt" was written in the incredibly 
short space of twenty-seven days. Of this work 
a distinguished writer on music says : " Handel 
was now fifty-five years old, and had entered, 
after many a long and weary contest, upon his 
last and greatest creative period. His genius cul- 



HANDEL. 45 

' ^ 

"minates in the 'Israel.' Elsewhere he has pro- 
duced longer recitatives and more pathetic arias ; 
nowhere has he written finer tenor songs than 
' The enemy said,' or finer duets than ' The Lord 
is a man of war ; ' and there is not in the history 
of music an example of choruses piled up like so 
many OsSas on Pelions in such majestic strength, 
and hurled in open defiance at a public whose ears 
were itching for Italian love-lays and English bal- 
lads. In these twenty-eight colossal choruses we 
perceive at once a reaction against and a triumph 
over the tastes of the age. The wonder is, not 
that the ' Israel ' was unpopular, but that it should 
have been tolerated ; but Handel, while he appears 
to have been for years driven by the public, had 
been, in reality, driving them. His earliest orato- 
rio, 'II Trionfo del Tempo ' (composed in Italy), 
had but two choruses ; into his operas more and 
more were introduced, with disastrous conse- 
quences ; but when, at the zenith of his strength, 
he produced a work which consisted almost en- 
tirely of these unpopular peculiarities, the public 
treated him with respect, and actually sat out 
three performances in one season ! " ) In addition 
to these two great oratorios, our composer pro- 
duced the beautiful music to Dry den's " St. Caeci- 
lia Ode," and Milton's " L' Allegro " and " II Pen- 
seroso." Henceforth neither praise nor blame 
could turn Handel from his appointed course. 
He was not yet popular with the musical dilet- 



46 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

tanti, but we find no more catering to an absurd 
taste, no more writing of silly operatic froth. 

Our composer had always been very fond of 
the Irish, and, at the invitation of the lord-lieu- 
tenant and prominent Dublin amateurs, he crossed 
the channel in 1741. He was received with the 
greatest enthusiasm, and his house became the 
resort of all the musical people in the city of 
Dublin. One after another his principal works 
were produced before admiring audiences in the 
new Music Hall in Fishamble Street. The 
crush to hear the " Allegro " and " Penseroso " at 
the opening performances was so great that the 
doors had to be closed. The papers declared 
there never had been seen such a scene before in 
Dublin. 

Handel gave twelve performances at very 
short intervals, comprising all of his finest works. 
In these concerts the "Acis and Galatea" and 
" Alexander's Feast " were the most admired ; but 
the enthusiasm culminated in the rendition of the 
" Messiah," produced for the first time on April 
13, 1742. The performance was a beneficiary one 
in aid of poor and distressed prisoners for debt in 
the Marshalsea in Dublin. So, by a remarkable 
coincidence, the first performance of the "Mes- 
siah " literally meant deliverance to the captives. 
The principal singers were Mrs. Gibber (daugh- 
ter-in-law of Colley Gibber, and afterward one of 
the greatest actresses of her time), Mrs. Avoglio, 



HANDEL. 47 

and Mr. Dubourg. The town was wild with ex- 
citement. Critics, poets, fine ladies, and men of 
fashion tore rhetoric to tatters in their admira- 
tion. A clergyman so far forgot his Bible in his 
rapture as to exclaim to Mrs. Gibber, at the close 
of one of her airs, " Woman, for this be all thy 
sins forgiven thee." The penny-a-liners wrote 
that " words were wanting to express the exqui- 
site delight," etc. And supreme compliment of 
all, for Handel was a cynical bachelor the fine 
ladies consented to leave their hoops at home for 
the second performance, that a couple of hundred 
or so extra listeners might be accommodated. 
This event was the grand triumph of Handel's 
life. Years of misconception, neglect, and rival- 
ry were swept out of mind in the intoxicating 
delight of that night's success. 

VII. 

HANDEL returned to London, and composed a 
new oratorio, " Samson," for the following Lenten 
season. This, together with the " Messiah," heard 
for the first time in London, made the stock of 
twelve performances. The fashionable world ig- 
nored him altogether ; the newspapers kept a con- 
temptuous silence ; comic singers were hired to 
parody his noblest airs at the great houses ; and 
impudent Horace Walpole had the audacity to say 
that he " had hired all the goddesses from farces 
and singers of roast-beef, from between the acts 



48 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

of both theatres, with a man with one note in his 
voice, and a girl with never a one ; and so they 
sang and made brave hallelujahs." 

The new field into which Handel had entered 
inspired his genius to its greatest energy. His 
new works for the season of 1744 were the "Det- 
tingen Te Deum," " Semele," and " Joseph and 
his Brethren ; " for the next year (he had again 
rented the Haymarket Theatre), " Hercules," 
" Belshazzar," and a revival of " Deborah." All 
these works were produced in a style of then un- 
common completeness, and the great expense he 
incurred, combined with the active hostility of 
the fashionable world, forced him to close his 
doors and suspend payment. From this time for- 
ward Handel gave concerts whenever he chose, 
and depended on the people, who so supported 
him by their gradually growing appreciation, that 
in two years he had paid off all his debts, and in 
ten years had accumulated a fortune of 10,000. 
The works produced during these latter years 
were " Judas Maccabseus," 1747 ; " Alexander," ' 
1748; "Joshua," 1748; "Susannah," 1749; "Solo- 
mon," 1749; " Theodora," 1750; " Choice of Her- 
cules," 1751 ; " Jephthah," 1752, closing with this 
a stupendous series of dramatic oratorios. While 
at work on the last, his eyes suffered an attack 
which finally resulted in blindness. 

Like Milton in the case of "Paradise Lost," 
Handel preferred one of his least popular ora- 



HANDEL. 49 

torios, "Theodora." It was a great favorite 
with him, and he used to say that the chorus, 
" He saw the lovely youth," was finer than any- 
thing in the "Messiah." The public were not of 
this opinion, and he was glad to give away tickets 
to any professors who applied for them. When 
the " Messiah " was again produced, two of these 
gentlemen who had neglected " Theodora " applied 
for admission. " Oh ! your sarvant, meine Her- 
ren ! " exclaimed the indignant composer. " You 
are tamnable dainty ! You would not go to 
' Theodora ' dere was room enough to dance dere 
when dat was perform." When Handel heard 
that an enthusiast had offered to make himself 
responsible for all the boxes the next time the 
despised oratorio should be given " He is a fool," 
said he ; "the Jews will not come to it as to 
* Judas Maccabseus,' because it is a Christian story ; 
and the ladies will not come, because it is a vir- 
tuous one." 

Handel's triumph was now about to culminate 
in a serene and acknowledged preeminence. The 
people had recognized his greatness, and the reac- 
tion at last conquered all classes. Publishers vied 
with each other in producing his works, and their 
performance was greeted with great audiences 
and enthusiastic applause. His last ten years were 
a peaceful and beautiful ending of a stormy career. 



50 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

VIII. 

THOUGHT lingers pleasantly over this sunset 
period. Handel throughout life was so wedded to 
his art, that he cared nothing for the delights of 
woman's love. His recreations were simple row- 
ing, walking, visiting his friends, and playing on 
the organ. He would sometimes try to play the 
people out at St. Paul's Cathedral, and hold them 
indefinitely. He would resort at night to his 
favorite tavern, the "Queen's Head," where he 
would smoke and drink beer with his chosen 
friends. Here he would indulge in roaring con- 
viviality and fun, and delight his friends with 
sparkling satire and pungent humor, of which he 
was a great master, helped by his amusing com- 
pound of English, Italian, and German. Often 
he would visit the picture galleries, of which he 
was passionately fond. His clumsy but noble 
figure could be seen almost any morning rolling 
through Charing Cross ; and every one who met 
old Father Handel treated him with the deepest 
reverence. 

The following graphic narrative, taken from 
the " Somerset House Gazette," offers a vivid por- 
traiture. Schoelcher, in his " Life of Handel," 
says that "its author had a relative, Zachary 
Hardcastle, a retired merchant, who was intimate- 
ly acquainted with all the most distinguished men 
of his time, artists, poets, musicians, and physi- 



HANDEL. 51 

cians." This old gentleman, who lived at Paper 
Buildings, was accustomed to take his morning 
walk in the garden of Somerset House, where he 
happened to meet with another old man, Colley 
Cibher, and proposed to him to go and hear a 
competition which was to take place at midday 
for the post of organist to the Temple, and he 
invited him to breakfast, telling him at the same 
time that Dr. Pepusch and Dr. Arne were to be 
with him at nine o'clock. They go in ; Pepusch 
arrives punctually at the stroke of nine ; pres- 
ently there is a knock, the door is opened, and 
Handel unexpectedly presents himself. Then fol- 
lows the scene : 

" Handel : ' Vat ! mem dear friend Hardgas- 
dle vat ! you are merry py dimes ! Vat ! and 
Misder Golley Cibbers too ! ay, and Togder 
Peepbush as veil ! Veil, dat is gomigal. Veil, 
mein f riendts, andt how vags the vorldt wid you, 
mein tdears ? Bray, bray, do let me sit town a 
momend.' 

"Pepusch took the great man's hat, Colley 
Gibber took his stick, and my great-uncle wheeled 
round his reading-chair, which was somewhat 
about the dimensions of that in which our kings 
and queens are crowned ; and then the great man 
sat him down. 

" ' Veil, I thank you, gentlemen ; now I am 
at mein ease vonce more. Upon mein vord, dat 
is a picture of a ham. It is very pold of me to 



52 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

gome to preak my fastd wid you uninvided ; and 
I have brought along wid me a nodable abbetite; 
for the wader of old Fader Dems is it not a fine 
pracer of the stomach ? ' 

" ' You do me great honor, Mr. Handel,' said 
my great-uncle. ' I take this early visit as a great 
kindness.' 

" * A delightful morning for the water,' said 
Colley Gibber. 

" ' Pray, did you come with oars or scullers, 
Mr. Handel ? ' said Pepusch. 

" ' Now, how gan you. demand of me dat zilly 
question, you who are a musician and a man of 
science, Togder Peepbush ? Vat gan it concern 
you whether I have one votdermans or two votd- 
ermans whether I bull out mine burce for to pay 
von shilling or two ? Diavolo ! I gannot go here, 
or I gannot go dere, but some one shall send it to 
some newsbaber, as how Misder Chorge Vreder- 
ick Handel did go somedimes last week in a 
votderman's wherry, to preak his fastd wid Mis- 
der Zac. Hardgasdle ; but it shall be all the fault 
wid himeself, if it shall be but in print, whether 
I was rowed by one votdermans or by two votder- 
mans. So, Togder Peepbush, you will blease to 
excuse me from dat.' 

" Poor Dr. Pepusch was for a moment discon- 
certed, but it was soon forgotten in the first dish 
of coffee. 

" * Well, gentlemen,' said my great-uncle Zach- 



HANDEL. 53 

ary, looking at his tompion, ( it is ten minutes past 
nine. Shall we wait more for Dr. Arne ? " 

" ' Let us give him another five minutes' chance, 
Master Hardcastle,' said Colley Gibber ; * he is 
too great a genius to keep time.' 

" * Let us put it to the vote,' said Dr. Pepusch, 
smiling. ' Who holds up hands ? ' 

"'I will segond your motion wid all mine 
heardt,' said Handel. 1 1 will hold up mine feeble 
hands for mine oldt friendt Gustos (Arne's name 
was Augustine), for I know not who I wouldt 
waidt for, over andt above mine oldt rival, Master 
Dom (meaning Pepusch). Only by your bermis- 
sion, I vill dake a snag of your ham, andt a slice 
of French roll, or a modicum of chicken ; for to 
dell you the honest fagd, I am all pote famished, 
for I laid me down on mine billow in bed the 
lastd nightd widout mine supper, at the instance 
of mine physician, for which I am not altoged- 
dere inglined to extend mine fastd no longer.' 
Then, laughing: 'Berhaps, Mister Golley Gibbers, 
you may like to pote this to the vote ? But I shall 
not segond the motion, nor shall I holdt up mine 
hand, as I will, by bermission, embloy it some 
dime in a better office. So, if you blease, do me 
the kindness for to gut me a small slice of ham.' 

" At this instant a hasty footstep was heard on 
the stairs, accompanied by the humming of an air, 
all as gay as the morning, which was beautiful 
and bright. It was the month of May. 



54 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

"'Bresto! be quick,' said Handel; he knew 
it was Arne ; ' fifteen minutes of dime is butty 
well for an ad libitum.' 

" ' Mr. Arne,' said my great-uncle's man. 

" A chair was placed, and the social party com- 
menced their dejeuner. 

" ' Well, and how do you find yourself, my 
dear sir ? ' inquired Arne, with friendly warmth. 

" * Why, by the mercy of Heaven, and the 
waders of Aix-la-Chapelle, andt the addentions of 
mine togders andt physicians, and oggulists, of 
lade years, under Providence, I am surbrizingly 
pedder thank you kindly, Misder Gustos. Andt 
you have also been doing well of lade, as I am 
bleased to hear. You see, sir,' pointing to his 
plate, ' you see, sir, dat I am in the way for to re- 
gruit mine flesh wid the good viands of Misder 
Zachary Hardgasdle.' 

" ' So, sir, I presume you are come to witness 
the trial of skill at the old round church ? I un- 
derstand the amateurs expect a pretty sharp con- 
test,' said Arne. 

" ' Gondest,' echoed Handel, laying down his 
knife and fork. ' Yes, no doubt ; your amadeurs 
have a bassion for gondest. Not vot it vos in our 
remembrance. Hey, mine friendt ? Ha, ha, ha ! ' 

" ' No, sir, I am happy to say those days of 
envy and bickering, and party feeling, are gone and 
past. To be sure we had enough of such disgrace- 
ful warfare : it lasted too long.' 



HANDEL. 55 

" f Why, yes ; it tid last too long, it bereft me 
of mine poor limbs : it tid bereave of that vot is 
the most blessed gift of Him vot made us, andt 
not wee ourselves. And for vot ? Vy, for nod- 
ing in the vorldt pode the bleasure and bastime 
of them who, having no widt, nor no want, set 
at loggerheads such men as live by their widts, 
to worry and destroy one andt anodere as wild 
beasts in the Golloseum in the dimes of the 
Romans.' 

" Poor Dr. Pepuseh during this conversation, 
as my great-uncle observed, was sitting on thorns ; 
he was in the confederacy professionally only. 

"'I hope, sir,' observed the doctor, 'you do 
not include me among those who did injustice to 
your talents ? ' 

" * Nod at all, nod at all, God forbid ! I am a 
great admirer of the airs of the ' Peggar's Obera,' 
andt every professional gendtleman must do his 
best for to live.' 

" This mild return, couched under an apparent 
compliment, was well received ; but Handel, who 
had a talent for sarcastic drolling, added : 

" * Pute why blay the Peggar yourself, togder, 
andt adapt oldt pallad humsdrum, ven, as a man 
of science, you could gombose original airs of 
your own? Here is mine friendt, Custos Arne, 
who has made a road for himself, for to drive 
along his own genius to the demple of fame.' 
Then, turning to our illustrious Arne, he continued, 



56 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

* Min friendt Gustos, you and I must meed togeder 
some dimes before it is long, and hold a tede-d-ttde 
of old days vat is gone ; ha, ha ! Oh ! it is gomi- 
gal now dat id is all gone by. Gustos, to nod you 
remember as it was almost only of yesterday dat 
she-devil Guzzoni, andt dat other brecious taugh- 
ter of iniquity, Pelzebub's spoiled child, the bretty- 
f aced Faustina ? Oh ! the mad rage vot I have to 
answer for, vot with one and the oder of these 
fine latdies' airs andt graces. Again, to you nod 
remember dat ubstardt buppy Senesino, and the 
goxgomb Farinelli? Next, again, mine some- 
dimes nodtable rival Bononcini, and old Borbora ? 
Ha, ha, ha ! all at war wid me, andt all at war wid 
themselves. Such a gonf usion of rivalshibs, andt 
double-facedness, andt hybocrisy, and malice, vot 
would make a gomigal subject for a boem in 
rhymes, or a biece for the stage, as I hopes to be 
saved.' " 

IX. 

WE now turn from the man to his muic. In 
his daily life with the world we get a spectacle of 
a quick, passionate temper, incased in a great burly 
frame, and raging into whirlwinds of excitement 
at small provocation ; a gourmand devoted to the 
pleasure of the table, sometimes indeed gratifying 
his appetite in no seemly fashion, resembling his 
friend Dr. Samuel Johnson in many notable ways. 
Handel as a man was of the earth, earthy, in the 



HANDEL. 57 



extreme, and marked by many whimsical and dis- 
agreeable faults. But in his art we recognize a 
genius so colossal, massive, and self-poised as to 
raise admiration to its superlative of awe. When 
Handel had disencumbered himself of tradition, 
convention, the trappings of time and circum- 
stance, he attained a place in musical creation, 
solitary and unique. His genius found expres- 
sion in forms large and austere, disdaining the lux- 
uriant and trivial. He embodied the spirit of 
Protestantism in music ; and a recognition of this 
fact is probably the key of the admiration felt for 
him bv the Anglo-Saxon races. * 

$* < v ^ 

Handel possessed an inexhaustible fund of 
melody of the noblest order ; an almost unequaled 
command of musical expression ; perfect power 
over all the resources of his science ; the faculty 
of wielding huge masses of tone with perfect ease 
and felicity ; and he was without rival in the 
sublimity of ideas. The problem which he so 
successfully solved in the oratorio was that of 
giving such dramatic force to the music, in which 
he clothed the sacred texts, as to be able to dis- 
pense w'th all scenic and stage effects. One of 
the finest operatic composers of the time, the rival 
of Bach as an instrumental composer, and per- 
former on the harpsichord or organ, the unanimous 
verdict of the musical world is that no one has 
ever equaled him in completeness, range of effect, 
elevation and variety of conception, and sublimity 



58 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

in the treatment of sacred music. We can readily 
appreciate Handel's own words when describing 
his own sensations in writing the " Messiah : " "I 
did think I did see all heaven before me, and the 
great God himself." 

The great man died on Good Friday night, 
1759, aged seventy-five years. He had often 
wished " he might breathe his last on Good Fri- 
day, in hope," he said, " of meeting his good God, 
his sweet Lord and Saviour, on the day of his res- 
urrection." The old blind musician had his wish. 



GLUCK. 



GLTTCK is a noble and striking figure in musical 
history, alike in the services he rendered to his art 
and the dignity and strength of his personal char- 
acter. As the predecessor of Wagner and Meyer- 
beer, who among the composers of this century 
have given opera its largest and noblest expression, 
he anticipated their important reforms, and in his 
musical creations we see all that is best in what is 
called the new school. 

The man, the Ritter CHRISTPPH WILIBALD VON 
GLUCK, is almost as interesting to us as the musi- 
cian. He moved in the society of princes with a 



GLUCK. 59 

calm and haughty dignity, their conscious peer, 
and never prostituted his art to gain personal ad- 
vancement or to curry favor with the great ones 
of the earth. He possessed a majesty of nature 
which was the combined effect of personal pride, 
a certain lofty self-reliance, and a deep convic- 
tion that he was the apostle of an important musi- 
cal mission. 

Gluck's whole life was illumined by an indomi- 
table sense of his own strength, and lifted by it into 
an atmosphere high above that of his rivals, whom 
the world has now almost forgotten, except as 
they were immortalized by being his enemies. 
Like Milton and Bacon, who put on record their 
knowledge that they had written for all time, 
Gluck had a magnificent consciousness of himself. 
" I have written," he says, " the music of my * Ar- 
mida' in such a manner as to prevent its soon 
growing old." This is a sublime vanity insepara- 
ble from the great aggressive geniuses of the world, 
the wind of the speed which measures their force 
of impact. 

Duplessis's portrait of Gluck almost takes the 
man out of paint to put him in flesh and blood. 
He looks down with wide-open eyes, swelling nos- 
trils, firm mouth, and massive chin. The noble 
brow, dome-like and expanded, relieves the mas- 
siveness of his face ; and the whole countenance 
and figure express the repose of a powerful and 
passionate nature schooled into balance and sym- 



60 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

metry : altogether the presentment of a great man, 
who felt that he could move the world and had 
found the pou sto. Of a large and robust type of 
physical beauty, Nature seems to have endowed 
him on every hand with splendid gifts. Such a 
man as this could say with calm simplicity to 
Marie Antoinette, who inquired one night about 
his new opera of " Armida," then nearly finished : 
"Madame, il est bientotfini, et vraiment ce sera 
superbe." 

One night Handel listened to a new opera from 
a young and unknown composer, the "Caduta de' 
Giganti," one of Gluck's very earliest works, writ- 
ten when he was yet corrupted with all the vices 
of the Italian method. " Mein Gott ! he is an 
idiot," said Handel ; " he knows no more of coun- 
terpoint then mein cook." Handel did not see 
with prophetic eyes. He never met Gluck after- 
ward, and we do not know his later opinion of the 
composer of " Orpheus and Eurydice " and " Iphi- 
genia in Tauris." But Gluck had ever the pro- 
foundest admiration for the author of the "Mes- 
siah." There was something in these two strik- 
ingly similar, as their music was alike characterized 
by massive simplicity and strength, not rough- 
hewn, but shaped into austere beauty. 

Before we relate the great episode of our com- 
poser's life, let us take a backward glance at his 
youth. He was the son of a forester in the ser- 
vice of Prince Lobkowitz born at Weidenwang in 



GLUCK. 61 

the Upper Palatinate, July 2, 1714. Gluck was de- 
voted to music from early childhood, but received, 
in connection with the musical art, an excellent 
education at the Jesuit College of Kommotau. 
Here he learned singing, the organ, the violin 
and harpsichord, and had a mind to get his living 
by devoting his musical talents to the Church. 
The Prague public recognized in him a musician 
of fair talent, but he found but little encourage- 
ment to stay at the Bohemian capital. So he de- 
cided to finish his musical education at Vienna, 
where more distinguished masters could be had. 
Prince Lobkowitz, who remembered his game- 
keeper's son, introduced the young man to the 
Italian Prince Melzi, who induced him to accom- 
pany him to Milan. As the pupil of the Italian 
organist and composer, Sammartini, he made rapid 
progress in operatic composition. He was success- 
ful in pleasing Italian audiences, and in four years 
produced eight operas, for which the world has 
forgiven him in forgetting them. Then Gluck 
must go to London to see what impression he 
could make on English critics ; for London then, 
as now, was one of the great musical centres, 
where every successful composer or singer must 
get his brevet. 

Gluck's failure to please in London was, per- 
haps, an important epoch in his career. With a 
mind singularly sensitive to new impressions, and 
already struggling with fresh ideas in the laws of 



62 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

operatic composition, Handel's great music must 
have had a powerful effect in stimulating his un- 
conscious progress. His last production in Eng- 
land, " Pyramus and Thisbe," was a %>qs&ccio ope- 
ra, in which he embodied the best bits out of his 
previous works. The experiment was a glaring 
failure, as it ought to have been ; for it illustrated 
the Italian method, which was designed for mere 
vocal display, carried to its logical absurdity. 

n. 

IN 1748 Gluck settled in Vienna, where almost 
immediately his opera of " Semiramide " was pro- 
duced. Here he conceived a passion for Mari- 
anne, the daughter of Joseph Pergin, a rich bank- 
er ; but on account of the father's distaste for a 
musical son-in-law, the marriage did not occur till 
1750. " Telemacco " and " Clemenza di Tito " were 
composed about this time, and performed in Vien- 
na, Rome, and Naples. In 1755 our composer re- 
ceived the order of the Golden Spur from the 
Roman pontiff in recognition of the merits of two 
operas performed at Rome, called " II Trionf o di 
Camillo" and "Antigono." Seven years were 
now actively employed in producing operas for 
Vienna and Italian cities, which, without possess- 
ing great value, show the change which had be- 
gun to take place in this composer's theories of 
dramatic music. In Paris he had been struck 
with the operas of Rameau, in which the declama- 



GLUCK. 63 

tory form was strongly marked. His early Ital- 
ian training had fixed in his mind the importance 
of pure melody. From Germany he obtained his 
appreciation of harmony, and had made a deep 
study of the uses of the orchestra. So we see this 
great reformer struggling on with many faltering 
steps toward that result which he afterward sum- 
med up in the following concise description : 
"My purpose was to restrict music to its true 
office, that of ministering to the expression of 
poetry, without interrupting the action." 

In Calzabigi Gluck had met an author who 
fully appreciated his ideas, and had the talent of 
writing a libretto in accordance with them. This 
coadjutor wrote all the librettos that belonged to 
Gluck's greatest period. He had produced his 
" Orpheus and Eurydice " and " Alceste " in Vi- 
enna with a fair amount of success ; but his tastes 
drew him strongly to the French stage, where the 
art of acting and declamation was cultivated then, 
as it is now, to a height unknown in other parts of 
Europe. So we find him gladly accepting an offer 
from the managers of the French Opera to migrate 
to the great city, in which were fermenting with 
much noisy fervor those new ideas in art, litera- 
ture, politics, and society, which were turning the 
eyes of all Europe to the French capital. 

The world's history has hardly a more pict- 
uresque and striking spectacle, a period more 
fraught with the working of powerful forces, 



64 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

than that exhibited by French society in the lat- 
ter part of Louis XV. 's reign. We see a court 
rotten to the core with indulgence in every 
form of sensuality and vice, yet glittering with 
the veneer of a social polish which made it the 
admiration of the world. A dissolute king was 
ruled by a succession of mistresses, and all the 
courtiers vied in emulating the vice and extrava- 
gance of their master. Yet in this foul compost- 
heap art and literature flourished with a tropical 
luxuriance. Voltaire was at the height of his 
splendid career, the most brilliant wit and philos- 
opher of his age. The lightnings of his mockery 
attacked with an incessant play the social, politi- 
cal, and religious shams of the period. People 
of all classes, under the influence of his unsparing 
satire, were learning to see with clear eyes what 
an utterly artificial and polluted age they lived 
in, and the cement which bound society in a com- 
pact whole was fast melting under this powerful 
solvent. 

Rousseau, with his romantic philosophy and 
eloquence, had planted his new ideas deep in the 
hearts of his contemporaries, weary with the arti- 
fice and the corruption of a time which had ex- 
hausted itself and had nothing to promise under 
the old social regime. The ideals uplifted in 
the "Nouvelle Heloiise" and the "Confessions" 
awakened men's minds with a great rebound to 
the charms of Nature, simplicity, and a social or- 



GLUCK. 65 

der untrammeled by rules or conventions. The 
eloquence with which these theories were pro- 
pounded carried the French people by storm, and 
Rousseau was a demigod at whose shrine wor- 
shiped alike duchess and peasant. The Encyclo- 
pedists stimulated the ferment by their literary 
enthusiasm, and the heartiness with which they 
cooperated with the whole current of revolutionary 
thought. 

The very atmosphere was reeking with the 
prophecy of imminent change. - Versailles itself 
did not escape the contagion. Courtiers and aris- 
tocrats, in worshiping the beautiful ideals set up 
by the new school, which were as far removed as 
possible from their own effete civilization, did not 
realize that they were playing with the fire which 
was to burn out the whole social edifice of France 
with such a terrible conflagration ; for, back and 
beneath all this, there was a people groaning un- 
der long centuries of accumulated wrong, in 
whose imbruted hearts the theories applauded by 
their oppressors with a sort of doctrinaire delight 
were working with a fatal fever. 

in. 

IN this strange condition of affairs Gluck found 
his new sphere of labor Gluck, himself over- 
flowing with the revolutionary spirit, full of the 
enthusiasm of reform. At first he carried every- 
thing before him. Protected by royalty, he pro- 
5 



66 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

duced, on the basis of an admirable libretto by 
Du Rollet, one of the great wits of the time, 
"Iphigenia in Aulis." It was enthusiastically re- 
ceived. The critics, delighted to establish the 
reputation of one especially favored by the Dau- 
phiness Marie Antoinette, exhausted superlatives 
on the new opera. The Abbe Arnaud, one of the 
leading dilettanti, exclaimed : " With such music 
one might found a new religion ! " To be sure, 
the connoisseurs could not understand the com- 
plexities of the music ; but, following the rule of 
all connoisseurs before or since, they considered 
it all the more learned and profound. So led, the 
general public clapped their hands, and agreed 
to consider Gluck as a great composer. He was 
called the Hercules of music ; the opera-house 
was crammed night after night ; his footsteps 
were dogged in the streets by admiring enthusi- 
asts ; the wits and poets occupied themselves with 
composing sonnets in his praise ; brilliant cour- 
tiers and fine ladies showered valuable gifts on the 
new musical oracle ; he was hailed as the expo- 
nent of Rousseauism in music. We read that it 
was considered to be a priceless privilege to be 
admitted to the rehearsal of a new opera, to see 
Gluck conduct in nightcap and dressing-gown. 

Fresh adaptations of " Orpheus and Eurydice " 
and of "Alceste" were produced. The first, 
brought out in 1784, was received with an enthu- 
siasm which could be contented only with forty- 



GLUCK. 67 

nine consecutive performances. The second act 
of this work has been called one of the most as- 
tonishing productions of the human mind. The 
public began to show signs of fickleness, how- 
ever, on the production of the "Alceste." On 
the first night a murmur arose among the specta- 
tors : " The piece has fallen." Abbe Arnaud, 
Gluck's devoted defender, arose in his box and 
replied : " Yes ! fallen from heaven." While 
Mademoiselle Levasseur was singing one of the 
great airs, a voice was heard to say, " Ah ! you 
tear out my ears ; " to which the caustic rejoinder 
was : " How fortunate, if it is to give you others ! " 

Gluck himself was badly bitten, in spite of 
his hatred of shams and shallowness, with the 
pretenses of the time, which professed to dote on 
nature and simplicity. In a letter to his old pu- 
pil, Marie Antoinette, wherein he disclaims any 
pretension of teaching the French a new school 
of music, he says : " I see with satisfaction that 
the language of Nature is the universal language." 

So, here on the crumbling crust of a volcano, 
where the volatile French court danced and fid- 
dled and sang, unreckoning of what was soon to 
come, our composer and his admirers patted each 
other on the back with infinite complacency. 

But after this high tide of prosperity there 
was to come a reverse. A powerful faction, that 
for a time had been crushed by Gluck's triumph, 
after a while raised their heads and organized an 



68 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

attack. There were second-rate composers whose 
scores had been laid on the shelf in the rage for 
the new favorite ; musicians who were shocked 
and enraged at the difficulties of his instrumenta- 
tion ; wits who, having praised Gluck for a while, 
thought they could now find a readier field for 
their quills in satire ; and a large section of the 
public who changed for no earthly reason but 
that they got tired of doing one thing. 

Therefore, the Italian Piccini was imported to 
be pitted against the reigning deity. The French 
court was broken up into hostile ranks. Marie 
Antoinette was Gluck's patron, but Madame Du 
Barry, the king's mistress, declared for Piccini. 
Abbe Arnaud fought for Gluck ; but the witty 
Marmontel was the advocate of his rival. The 
keen-witted Du Rollet was Gluckist ; but La 
Harpe, the eloquent, was Piccinist. So this bat- 
tle-royal in art commenced and raged with viru- 
lence. The green-room was made unmusical with 
contentions carried out in polite Billingsgate. 
Gluck tore up his unfinished score in rage when he 
learned that his rival was to compose an opera on 
the same libretto. La Harpe said : " The famous 
Gluck may puff his own compositions, but he 
can't prevent them from boring us to death." 
Thus the wags of Paris laughed and wrangled 
over the musical rivals. Berton, the new director, 
fancied he could soften the dispute and make 
the two composers friends ; so at a dinner-party, 



GLUCK. 69 

when they were all in their cups, he proposed 
that they should compose an opera jointly. This 
was demurred to ; but it was finally arranged 
that they should compose an opera on the same 
subject. 

" Iphigenia in Tauris," Gluck's second " Iphi- 
genia," produced in 1779, was such a masterpiece 
that his rival shut his own score in his portfolio, 
and kept it two years. All Paris was enraptured 
with this great work, and Gluck's detractors were 
silenced in the wave of enthusiasm which swept 
the public. Abbe Arnaud's opinion was the echo 
of the general mind : " There was but one beau- 
tiful part, and that was the whole of it." This 
opera may be regarded as the most perfect exam- 
ple of Gluck's school in making the music the 
full reflex of the dramatic action. While Orestes 
sings in the opera, " My heart is calm," the or- 
chestra continues to paint the agitation of his 
thoughts. During the rehearsal the musician 
failed to understand the exigency and ceased 
playing. The composer cried out, in a rage : 
" Don't you see he is lying ? Go on, go on ; he 
has just killed his mother." 

On one occasion, when he was praising Ra- 
meau's chorus of " Castor and Pollux," an admirer 
of his flattered him with the remark, " But what 
a difference between this chorus and that of your 
* Iphigenie ' ! " " Yet it is very well done," said 
Gluck ; " one is only a religious ceremony, the 



70 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

other is a real funeral." He was wont to soy that 
in composing he always tried to forget he was a 
musician. 

Gluck, however, a few months subsequent to 
this, was so much humiliated at the non-success of 
" Echo and Narcissus," that he left Paris in bit- 
ter irritation, in spite of Marie Antoinette's 
pleadings that he should remain at the French 
capital. 

The composer was now advanced in years, 
and had become impatient and fretful. He left 
Paris for Vienna in 1780, having amassed consid- 
erable property. There, as an old, broken-down 
man, he listened to the young Mozart's new sym- 
phonies and operas, and applauded them with 
great zeal ; for Gluck, though fiery and haughty 
in the extreme, was singularly generous in recog- 
nizing the merits of others. 

This was exhibited in Paris in his treatment 
of M6hul, the Belgian composer, then a youth of 
sixteen, who had just arrived in the gay city. It 
was on the eve of the first representation of 
" Iphigenia in Tauris," when the operatic battle 
was agitating the public. With all the ardor of 
a novice and a devotee, the young musical stu- 
dent immediately threw himself into the affray, 
and by the aid of a friend he succeeded in gam- 
ing admittance to the theatre for the final rehear- 
sal of Gluck's opera. This so enchanted him that 
he resolved to be present at the public perform- 



GLUCK. 71 

ance. But, unluckily for the resolve, he had no 
money, and no prospect of obtaining any ; so, 
with a determination and a love for art which 
deserve to be remembered, he decided to hide 
himself in one of the boxes and there to wait for 
the time of representation. 

" At the end of the rehearsal," writes George 
Hogarth in his " Memoirs of the Drama," " he 
was discovered in h:' s place of concealment by the 
servants of the theatre, who proceeded to turn 
him out very roughly. Gluck, who had not left 
the house, heard the noise, came to the spot, 
and found the young man, whose spirit was 
roused, resisting the indignity with which he was 
treated. Mehul, finding in whose presence he 
was, was ready to sink with confusion ; but, in 
answer to Gluck's questions, he told him that he 
was a young musical student from the country, 
whose anxiety to be present at the performance 
of the opera had led him into the commission of 
an impropriety. Gluck, as may be supposed, was 
delighted with a piece of enthusiasm so flattering 
to himself, and not only gave his young admirer 
a ticket of admission, but desired his acquaint- 
ance." From this artistic contretemps, then, arose 
a friendship alike creditable to the goodness and 
generosity of Gluck, as it was to the sincerity 
and high order of MehuFs musical talent. 

Gluck's death, in 1787, was caused by over- 
indulgence in wine at a dinner which he gave to 



72 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

seme of his friends. The love of stimulants had 
grown upon him in his old age, and had become 
almost a passion. An enforced abstinence of 
some months was succeeded by a debauch, in 
which he drank an immense quantity of brandy. 
The effects brought on a fit of apoplexy, of which 
he died, aged seventy-three. 

Gluck's place in musical history is peculiar 
and well marked. He entered the field of oper- 
atic composition when it was hampered with a 
great variety of dry forms, and utterly without 
soul and poetic spirit. The object of composers 
seemed to be to show mere contrapuntal learning, 
or to furnish singers opportunity to display vocal 
agility. The opera, as a large and symmetrical 
expression of human emotions, suggested in the 
collisions of a dramatic story, was utterly an un- 
known quantity in art. Gluck's attention was 
early called to this radical inconsistency ; and, 
though he did not learn for many years to de- 
velop his musical ideas according to a theory, and 
never carried that theory to the logical results in- 
sisted on by his great after-type, Wagner, he ac- 
complished much in the way of sweeping reform. 
He elaborated the recitative or declamatory ele- 
ment in opera with great care, and insisted that 
his singers should make this the object of their 
most careful efforts. The arias, duos, quartets, 
etc., as well as the choruses and orchestral parts, 
were made consistent with the dramatic motive 



GLUCK. 73 

and situations. In a word, Gluck aimed with a 
single-hearted purpose to make music the expres- 
sion of poetry and sentiment. 

The principles of Gluck's school of operatic 
writing may be briefly summarized as follows : 
That dramatic music can only reach its highest 
power and beauty when joined to a simple and 
poetic text, expressing passions true to Nature ; 
that music can be made the language of all the 
varied emotions of the heart ; that the music of 
an opera must exactly follow the rhythm and 
melody of the words ; that the orchestra must be 
only used to strengthen and intensify the feeling 
embodied in the vocal parts, as demanded by the 
text or dramatic situation. We get some further 
light on these principles from Gluck's letter of 
dedication to the Grand-Duke of Tuscany on the 
publication of " Alceste." He writes : " I am of 
opinion that music must be to poetry what live- 
liness of color and a happy mixture of light and 
shade are for a faultless and well-arranged draw- 
ing, which serve to add life to the figures with- 
out injuring the outlines ; . . . that the overture 
should prepare the auditors for the character of 
the action which is to be presented, and hint at 
the progress of the same ; that the instruments 
must be employed according to the degree of in- 
terest and passion ; that the composer should 
avoid too marked a disparity in the dialogue be- 
tween the air and recitative, in order not to break 



74 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

the sense of a period, or interrupt the energy of 
the action. . . . Finally, I have even felt com- 
pelled to sacrifice rules to the improvement of the 
effect," 

We find in this composer's music, therefore, a 
largeness and dignity of treatment which have 
never been surpassed. His command of melody 
is quite remarkable, but his use of it is under 
severe artistic restraint ; for it is always charac- 
terized by breadth, simplicity, and directness. He 
aimed at and attained the symmetrical balance of 
an old Greek play. ) 



HAYDN. 



"PAPA HAYDN!" Thus did Mozart ever 
speak of his foster-father in music, and the title, 
transmitted to posterity, admirably expressed the 
sweet, placid, gentle nature, whose possessor was 
personally beloved no less than he was admired. 
His life flowed, broad and unruffled, like some 
great river, unvexed for the most part by the 
rivalries, jealousies, and sufferings, oftentimes self- 
inflicted, which have harassed the careers of other 
great musicians. He remained to the last the fa- 
vorite of the imperial court of Vienna, and princes 
followed his remains to their last resting-place. 



HAYDN. 75 

JOSEPH HAYDN was the eldest of the twenty 
children of Matthias Haydn, a wheelwright at 
Rohrau, Lower Austria, where he was born in 
1732. At the age of twelve years he was engaged 
to sing in Vienna. He became a chorister in St. 
Stephen's Church, but offended the choir-master 
by the revolt on the part of himself and parents 
from submitting to the usual means then taken to 
perpetuate a fine soprano in boys. So Haydn, 
who had surreptitiously picked up a good deal of 
musical knowledge apart from the art of singing, 
was at the age of sixteen turned out on the world. 
A compassionate barber, however, took him in,, and 
Haydn dressed and powdered wigs down-stairs, 
while he worked away at a little worm-eaten 
harpsichord at night in his room. Unfortunate 
boy ! he managed to get himself engaged to the 
barber's daughter, Anne Keller, who was for a 
good while the Xantippe of his gentle life, and 
he paid dearly for his father-in-law's early hospi- 
tality. 

The young musician soon began to be known, 
as he played the violin in one church, the organ 
in another, and got some pupils. His first rise 
was his acquaintance with Metastasio, the poet 
laureate of the court. Through him, Haydn 
got introduced to the mistress of the Venetian 
embassador, a great musical enthusiast, and in her 
circle he met Porpora y the best music-master in 
the world, but a crusty, snarling old man. For- 



76 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

pora held at Vienna the position of musical dic- 
tator and censor, and he exercised the tyrannical 
privileges of his post mercilessly. Haydn was a 
small, dark - complexioned, insignificant - looking 
youth, and Porpora, of course, snubbed him most 
contemptuously. But Haydn wanted instruction, 
and no one in the world could give it so well as 
the savage old maestro. So he performed all sorts 
of menial services for him, cleaned his shoes, 
powdered his wig, and ran all his errands. The 
result was that Porpora softened and consented 
to give his young admirer lessons no great hard- 
ship, for young Haydn proved a most apt and 
gifted pupil. And it was not long either before 
the young musician's compositions attracted public 
attention and found a sale. The very curious re- 
lations between Haydn and Porpora are brill- 
iantly sketched in George Sand's " Consuelo." 

At night Haydn, accompanied by his friends, 
was wont to wander about Vienna by moonlight, 
and serenade his patrons with trios and quartets 
of his own composition. He happened one night 
to stop under the window of Bernardone Kurz, 
a director of a theatre and the leading clown of 
Vienna. Down rushed Kurz very excitedly. 
" Who are you ? " he shrieked. " Joseph Haydn." 
" Whose nmsic is it ? " " Mine." " The deuce it 
is ! And at your age, too ! " " Why, I must be- 
gin with something." " Come along up-stairs." 

The .enthusiastic director collared his prize, 



HAYDN. 77 

and was soon deep in explaining a wonderful li- 
bretto, entitled " The Devil on Two Sticks." To 
write music for this was no easy matter ; for it 
was to represent all sorts of absurd things, among 
others a tempest. The tempest made Haydn de- 
spair, and he sat at the piano, banging away in a 
reckless fashion, while the director stood behind 
him, raving in a disconnected way as to his mean- 
ing. At last the distracted pianist brought his 
fists simultaneously down upon the key-board, 
and made a rapid sweep of all the notes. 

" Bravo ! bravo ! that is the tempest ! " cried 
Kurz. 

The buffoon also laid himself on a chair, and 
had it carried about the room, during which he 
threw out his limbs in imitation of the act of 
swimming. Haydn supplied an accompaniment 
so suitable that Kurz soon landed on terra firma, 
and congratulated the composer, assuring him that 
he was the man to compose the opera. By this 
stroke of good luck our young musician received 
one hundred and thirty florins. 

ii. 

AT the age of twenty-eight Haydn composed 
his first symphony. Soon after this he attracted 
the attention of the old Prince Esterhazy, all the 
members of whose family have become known in 
the history of music as generous Maecenases of 
the art. 



78 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

" What ! you don't mean to say that little 
blackamoor" (alluding to Haydn's brown com- 
plexion and small stature) " composed that sym- 
phony ? " 

"Surely, prince," replied the director Fried- 
burg, beckoning to Joseph Haydn, who advanced 
toward the orchestra. 

" Little Moor," says the old gentleman, " you 
shall enter my service. I am Prince Esterhazy. 
What's your name ? " 

"Haydn." 

"Ah ! I've heard of you. Get along and 
dress yourself like a Kapellmeister. Clap on a 
new coat, and mind your wig is curled. You're 
too short. You shall have red heels ; but they 
shall be high, that your stature may correspond 
with your merit." 

So he went to live at Eisenstadt in the Ester- 
hazy household, and received a salary of four 
hundred florins, which was afterward raised to one 
thousand by Prince Nicholas Esterhazy. Haydn 
continued the intimate friend and associate of 
Prince Nicholas for thirty years, and death only 
dissolved the bond between them. In the Ester- 
hazy household the life of Haydn was a very 
quiet one, a life of incessant and happy industry ; 
for he poured out an incredible number of works, 
among them not a few of his most famous ones. 
So he spent a happy life in hard labor, alternated 
with delightful recreations at the Esterhazy coun- 



HAYDN. 79 

try-seat, mountain rambles, hunting and fishing, 
open-air concerts, musical evenings, etc. 

A French traveler who visited Esterhaz about 
1782 says : " The chateau stands quite solitary, 
and the prince sees nobody but his officials and 
servants, and strangers who come hither from 
curiosity. He has a puppet-theatre, which is cer- 
tainly unique in character. Here the grandest 
operas are produced. One knows not whether to 
be amazed or to laugh at seeing 'Alceste,' 'Al- 
cides,' etc., put on the stage with all due solem- 
nity and played by puppets. His orchestra is one 
of the best I ever heard, and the great Hadyn is 
his court and theatre composer. He employs a 
poet for his singular theatre, whose humor and 
skill in suiting the grandest subjects for the stage, 
and in parodying the gravest effects, are often ex- 
ceedingly happy. He often engages a troupe of 
wandering players for months at a time, and he 
himself and his retinue form the entire audience. 
They are allowed to come on the stage uncombed, 
drunk, their parts not half learned, and half 
dressed. The prince is not for the serious and 
tragic, and he enjoys it when the players, like 
Sancho Panza, give loose reins to their humor." 

Yet Haydn was not perfectly contented. He 
would have been had it not been for his terrible 
wife, the hair-dresser's daughter, who had a dismal, 
mischievous, sullen nature, a venomous tongue, and 
a savage temper. She kept Haydn in hot water 



82 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

come, and, with a good laugh, said : " Well, I 
think I must reconsider my decision. At any 
rate, we will not say * good-by ' now." 



in. 

DURING the thirty years of Haydn's quiet life 
with the Esterhazys he had been gradually acquir- 
ing an immense reputation in France, England, 
and Spain, of which he himself was unconscious. 
His great symphonies had stamped him world- 
'wide as a composer of remarkable creative genius. 
Haydn's modesty prevented him from recogniz- 
ing his own celebrity. Therefore, we can fancy 
his astonishment when, shortly after the death of 
Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, a stranger called on 
him and said : "I am Salomon, from London, and 
must strike a bargain with you for that city im- 
mediately." 

Haydn was dazed with the suddenness of the 
proposition, but the old ties were broken up, and 
his grief needed recreation and change. Still, he 
had many beloved friends, whose society it was 
hard to leave. Chief among these was Mozart. 
" Oh, papa," said Mozart, " you have had no train- 
ing for the wide world, and you speak so few lan- 
guages." " Oh, my language is understood all over 
the world," said Papa Haydn, with a smile. When 
he departed for England, December 15, 1790, Mo- 
zart could with difficulty tear himself away, and 



HAYDN. 83 

said, with pathetic tears, "We shall doubtless 
now take our last farewell." 

Haydn and Mozart were perfectly in accord, 
and each thought and did well toward the other. 
Mozart, we know, was born when Haydn had just 
reached manhood, so that when Mozart became 
old enough to study composition the earlier works 
of Haydn's chamber music had been written ; and 
these undoubtedly formed the studies of the boy 
Mozart, and greatly influenced his style ; so that 
Haydn was the model and, in a sense, the in- 
structor of Mozart. Strange is it then to find, in 
after-years, the master borrowing (perhaps with 
interest ! ) from the pupil. Such, however, was 
the fact, as every amateur knows. At this we 
can hardly wonder, for Haydn possessed unbound- 
ed admiration not only for Mozart, but also for 
his music, which the following shows. Being 
asked by a friend at Prague to send him an opera, 
he replied : 

" With all my heart, if you desire to have it 
for yourself alone, but if you wish to perform it 
in public, I must be excused ; for, being written 
specially for my company at the Esterhazy Palace, 
it would not produce the proper effect elsewhere. 
I would do a new score for your theatre; but what 
a hazardous step it would be to stand in compar- 
ison with Mozart ! Oh, Mozart ! If I could instill 
into the soul of every lover of music the admira- 
tion I have for his matchless works, all countries 



8% THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

come, and, with a good laugh, said : " Well, I 
think I must reconsider my decision. At any 
rate, we will not say ( good-by ' now." 



in. 

DURING the thirty years of Haydn's quiet life 
with the Esterhazys he had been gradually acquir- 
ing an immense reputation in France, England, 
and Spain, of which he himself was unconscious. 
His great symphonies had stamped him world- 
'wide as a composer of remarkable creative genius. 
Haydn's modesty prevented him from recogniz- 
ing his own celebrity. Therefore, we can fancy 
his astonishment when, shortly after the death of 
Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, a stranger called on 
him and said : "I am Salomon, from London, and 
must strike a bargain with you for that city im- 
mediately." 

Haydn was dazed with the suddenness of the 
proposition, but the old ties were broken up, and 
his grief needed recreation and change. Still, he 
had many beloved friends, whose society it was 
hard to leave. Chief among these was Mozart. 
" Oh, papa," said Mozart, " you have had no train- 
ing for the wide world, and you speak so few lan- 
guages." " Oh, my language is understood all over 
the world," said Papa Haydn, with a smile. When 
he departed for England, December 15, 1790, Mo- 
zart could with difficulty tear himself away, and 



HAYDN. 83 

said, with pathetic tears, "We shall doubtless 
now take our last farewell." 

Haydn and Mozart were perfectly in accord, 
and each thought and did well toward the other. 
Mozart, we know, was born when Haydn had just 
reached manhood, so that when Mozart became 
old enough to study composition the earlier works 
of Haydn's chamber music had been written ; and 
these undoubtedly formed the studies of the boy 
Mozart, and greatly influenced his style ; so that 
Haydn was the model and, in a sense, the in- 
structor of Mozart. Strange is it then to find, in 
after-years, the master borrowing (perhaps with 
interest ! ) from the pupil. Such, however, was 
the fact, as every amateur knows. At this we 
can hardly wonder, for Haydn possessed unbound- 
ed admiration not only for Mozart, but also for 
his music, which the following shows. Being 
asked by a friend at Prague to send him an opera, 
he replied : 

" With all my heart, if you desire to have it 
for yourself alone, but if you wish to perform it 
in public, I must be excused ; for, being written 
specially for my company at the Esterhazy Palace, 
it would not produce the proper effect elsewhere. 
I would do a new score for your theatre; but what 
a hazardous step it would be to stand in compar- 
ison with Mozart ! Oh, Mozart ! If I could instill 
into the soul of every lover of music the admira- 
tion I have for his matchless works, all countries 



84 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

would seek to be possessed of so great a treasure. 
Let Prague keep him, ah ! and well reward him, 
for without that the history of geniuses is bad ; 
alas ! we see so many noble minds crushed beneath 
adversity. Mozart is incomparable, and I am an- 
noyed that he is unable to obtain any court ap- 
pointment. Forgive me if I get excited when 
speaking of him, I am so fond of him." 

Mozart's admiration for Haydn's music, too, 
was very marked. He and Herr Kozeluch were 
one day listening to a composition of Haydn's 
which contained some bold modulations. Koze- 
luch thought them strange, and asked Mozart 
whether he would have written them. " I think 
not," smartly replied Mozart, " and for this rea- 
son : because they would not have occurred either 
to you or me ! " 

On another occasion we find Mozart taking to 
task a Viennese professor of some celebrity, who 
used to experience great delight in turning to 
Haydn's compositions to find therein any evidence 
of the master's want of sound theoretical training 
a quest in which the pedant occasionally suc- 
ceeded. One day he came to Mozart with a great 
crime to unfold. Mozart as usual endeavored to 
turn the conversation, but the learned professor 
still went chattering on, till at last Mozart shut 
his mouth with the following pill : " Sir, if you 
and I were both melted down together, we should 
not furnish materials for one Haydn." 



HAYDtf. 85 

It was one of the most beautiful friendships 
in the history of art ; full of tender offices, and 
utterly free from the least taint of envy or selfish- 
ness. 

IV. 

HAYDK landed in England after a voyage 
which delighted him in spite of his terror of the 
sea a feeling which seems to be usual among peo- 
ple of very high musical sensibilities. In his dia- 
ry we find recorded : " By four o'clock we had 
come twenty miles. The large vessel stood out to 
sea five hours longer, till the tide carried it into 
the harbor. I remained on deck the whole pas- 
sage, in order to gaze my fill at that huge mon- 
ster the ocean." 

The novelty of Haydn's concerts of which 
he was to give twenty at fifty pounds apiece 
consisted of their being his own symphonies, con- 
ducted by himself in person. Haydn's name, dur- 
ing his serene, uneventful years with the Ester- 
hazys, had become world-famous. His reception 
was most brilliant. Dinner parties, receptions, 
invitations without end, attested the enthusiasm 
of the sober English ; and his appearance at 
concerts and public meetings was the signal for 
stormy applause. How, in the press of all this 
pleasure in which he was plunged, he continued 
to compose the great number of works produced 
at this time, is a marvel. He must have been 



86 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

little less than a Briareus. It was in England 
that he wrote the celebrated Salomon symphonies, 
the "twelve grand," as they are called. They 
may well be regarded as the crowning-point of 
Haydn's efforts in that form of writing. He took 
infinite pains with them, as, indeed, is well proved 
by an examination of the scores. More elabo- 
rate, more beautiful, and scored for a fuller or- 
chestra than any others of the one hundred and 
twenty or thereabouts which he composed, the 
Salomon set also bears marks of the devout and 
pious spirit in which Haydn ever labored. 

It is interesting to see how, in many of the 
great works which have won the world's admira- 
tion, the religion of the author has gone hand in 
hand with his energy and his genius ; and we find 
Haydn not ashamed to indorse his score with his 
prayer and praise, or to offer the fruits of his 
talents to the Giver of all. Thus, the symphony 
in D (No. 6) bears on the first page of the score 
the inscription, " In nomine, Domini : di me 
Giuseppe Haydn, maia 1791, in London " and 
on the last page, "Fine, Laus Deo, 238." 

That genius may sometimes be trusted to 
judge of its own work may be gathered from 
Haydn's own estimate of these great symphonies. 

" Sir," said the well-satisfied Salomon, after a 
successful performance of one of them, " I am 
strongly of opinion that you will never surpass 
these symphonies." 



HAYDN. 87 

\ 

" No ! " replied Haydn ; " I never mean to 
try." 

The public, as we have said, was enthusiastic ; 
but such a full banquet of severe orchestral music 
was a severe trial to many, and not a few heads 
would keep time to the music by steady nods dur- 
ing the slow movements. Haydn, therefore, com- 
posed what is known as the "Surprise" sym- 
phony. The slow movement is of the most lull- 
ing and soothing character, and about the time 
the audience should be falling into its first snooze, 
the instruments having all died away into the 
softest pianissimo, the full orchestra breaks out 
with a frightful BANG. It is a question whether 
the most vigorous performance of this symphony 
would startle an audience nowadays, accustomed 
to the strident effects of Wagner and Liszt. A 
wag in a recent London journal tells us, indeed, 
that at the most critical part in the work a gentle- 
man opened one eye sleepily and said, " Come 
in." 

Simple-hearted Haydn was delighted at the 
attention lavished on him in London. He tells 
us how he enjoyed his various entertainments and 
feastings by such dignitaries as William Pitt, the 
Lord Chancellor, and the Duke of Lids (Leeds). 
The gentlemen drank freely the whole night, and 
the songs, the crazy uproar, and smashing of 
glasses were very great. He went down to stay 
with the Prince of Wales (George IV.), who 



88 ME GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

played on the violoncello, and charmed the com- 
poser by his kindness. " He is the handsomest 
man on God's earth. He has an extraordinary 
love of music, and a great deal of feeling, but 
very little money." 

To stem the tide of Haydn's popularity, the 
Italian faction had recourse to Giardini ; and 
they even imported a pet pupil of Haydn, Pleyel, 
to conduct the rival concerts. Our composer 
kept his temper, and wrote : " He [Pleyel] be- 
haves himself with great modesty." Later we 
read, " Pleyel's presumption is a public laughing- 
stock ; " but he adds, " I go to all his concerts 
and applaud him." 

Far different were the amenities that passed 
between Haydn and Giardini. " I won't know 
the German hound," says the latter. Haydn 
wrote, "I attended his concert at Ranelagh, and 
he played the 1 - fiddle like a hog." 

Among the pleasant surprises Haydn had in 
England was his visit to Herschel, the great as- 
tronomer, in whom he recognized one of his old 
oboe-players. The big telescope amazed him, 
and so did the patient star-gazer, who often sat 
out-of-doors in the most intense cold for five or 
six hours at a time. 

Our composer returned to Vienna in May, 
1795. with the little fortune of 12,000 florins in 
his pocket. 



HAYDN. 89 



V. 

IN his charming little cottage near Vienna 
Haydn was the centre of a brilliant society. 
Princes and nobles were proud to do honor to 
him ; and painters, poets, scholars, and musicians 
made a delightful coterie, which was not even 
disturbed by the political convulsions of the time. 
The baleful star of Napoleon shot its disturbing 
influences throughout Europe, and the roar of his 
cannon shook the established order of things with 
the echoes of what was to come. Haydn was 
passionately attached to his country and his em- 
peror, and regarded anxiously the rumblings and 
quakings of the period ; but he did not intermit 
his labor, or allow his consecration to his divine 
art to be in the least shaken. Like Archimedes 
of old, he toiled serenely at his appointed work, 
while the political order of things was crumbling 
before the genius and energy of the Corsican ad- 
venturer. 

In 1798 he completed his great oratorio of 
" The Creation," on which he had spent three years 
of toil, and which embodied his brightest genius. 
Haydn was usually a very rapid composer, but 
he seems to have labored at the " Creation " with 
a sort of reverential humility, which never per- 
mitted him to think his work worthy or complete. 
It soon went the round of Germany, and passed, 
to England and France, everywhere awakening 



90 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

enthusiasm by its great symmetry and beauty. 
"Without the sublimity of Handel's " Messiah," it 
is marked by a richness of melody, a serene ele- 
vation, a matchless variety in treatment, which 
make it the most characteristic of Haydn's works. 
Napoleon, the first consul, was hastening to the 
opera-house to hear this, January 24, 1801, when 
he was stopped by an attempt at assassination. 

Two years after "The Creation" appeared 
" The Seasons," founded on Thomson's poem, 
also a great work, and one of his last ; for the 
grand old man was beginning to think of rest, 
and he only composed two or three quartets 
after this. He was now seventy years old, and 
Went but little from his own home. His chief 
pleasure was to sit in his shady garden, and see 
his friends, who loved to solace the musical patri- 
arch with cheerful talk and music. Haydn often 
fell into deep melancholy, and he tells us that 
God revived him ; for no more sweet, devout 
nature ever lived. His art was ever a religion. 
A touching incident of his old age occurred at a 
grand performance of "The Creation" in 1808. 
Haydn was present, but he was so old and feeble 
that he had to be wheeled in a chair into the 
theatre, where a princess of the house of Ester- 
hazy took her seat by his side. This was the last 
time that Haydn appeared in public, and a very 
impressive sight it must have been to see the aged 
father of music listening to " The Creation " of his 



HAYDN. 91 

younger days, but too old to take any active 
share in the performance. The presence of the 
old man roused intense enthusiasm among the 
audience, which could no longer be suppressed as 
the chorus and orchestra burst in full power upon 
the superb passage, " And there was light." 

Amid the tumult of the enraptured audience 
the old composer was seen striving to raise him- 
self. Once on his feet, he mustered up all his 
strength, and, in reply to the applause of the 
audience, he cried out as loud as he was able : 
" No, no ! not from me, but," pointing to heaven, 
" from thence from heaven above comes all ! " 
saying which, he fell back in his chair, faint and 
exhausted, and had to be carried out of the room. 

One year after this Vienna was bombarded by 
the French, and a shot fell in Haydn's garden. 
He requested to be led to his piano, and played 
the " Hymn to the Emperor " three times over 
with passionate eloquence and pathos. This was 
his last performance. He died five days after- 
ward, aged seventy-seven, and lies buried in the 
cemetery of Gumpfenzdorf, in his own beloved 
Vienna. 

VI. 

THE serene, genial face of Haydn, as seen in 
his portraits, measures accurately the character 
of his music. In both we see health fulness, good- 
humor, vivacity, devotional feeling, and warm 



92 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

affections ; a mind contented, but yet attaching 
high importance to only one thing in life, the 
composing of music. Haydn pursued this with a 
calm, insatiable industry, without haste, without 
rest. His works number eight hundred, compris- 
ing cantatas, symphonies, oratorios, masses, con- 
certos, trios, sonatas, quartets, minuets, etc., and 
also twenty-two operas, eight German and four- 
teen Italian. 

As a creative mind in music, Haydn was the 
father of the quartet and symphony. Adopting 
the sonata form as scientifically illustrated by 
Emanuel Bach, he introduced it into compositions 
for the orchestra and the chamber. He developed 
these into a completeness and full- orbed sym- 
metry, which have never been improved. Mo- 
zart is richer, Beethoven more sublime, Schubert 
more luxuriant, Mendelssohn more orchestral and 
passionate ; but Haydn has never been surpassed 
in his keen perception of the capacities of instru- 
ments, his subtile distribution of parts, his variety 
in treating his themes, and his charmingly legiti- 
mate effects. He fills a large space in musical 
history, not merely from the number, originality, 
and beauty of his compositions, but as one who 
represents an era in art-development. 

In Haydn genius and industry were happily 
united. With a marvelously rich flow of musical 
ideas, he clearly knew what he meant to do, and 
never neglected the just elaboration of each one. 



HAYDN. 93 

He would labor on a theme till it had shaped it- 
self into perfect beauty. 

Haydn is illustrious in the history of art as a 
complete artistic life, which worked out all of its 
contents as did the great Goethe. In the words 
of a charming writer : " His life was a rounded 
whole. There was no broken light about it ; it 
orbed slowly, with a mild, unclouded lustre, into 
a perfect star. Time was gentle with him, and 
Death was kind, for both waited upon his genius 
until all was won. Mozart was taken away at an 
age when new and dazzling effects had not ceased 
to flash through his brain : at the very moment 
when his harmonies began to have a prophetic 
ring of the nineteenth century, it was decreed 
that he should not see its dawn. Beethoven 
himself had but just entered upon an unknown 
'sea whose margin seemed to fade forever and 
forever as he moved ; ' but good old Haydn had 
come into port over a calm sea and after a pros- 
perous voyage. The laurel wreath was this time 
woven about silver locks ; the gathered-in harvest 
was ripe and golden." 



94 THE GEEAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

MOZART. 



THE life of WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART, one 
of the immortal names in music, contradicts the 
rule that extraordinary youthful talent is apt to 
be followed by a sluggish and commonplace ma- 
turity. His father entered the room one day with 
a friend, and found the child bending over a music 
score. The little Mozart, not yet five years old, 
told his father he was writing a concerto for the 
piano. The latter examined it, and tears of joy 
and astonishment rolled down his face on perceiv- 
ing its accuracy. 

" It is good, but too difficult for general use," 
said the friend. 

" Oh," said Wolfgang, " it must be practised 
till it is learned. This is the way it goes." So 
saying, he played it with perfect correctness. 

About the same time he offered to take the 
violin at a performance of some chamber music. 
His father refused, saying, " How can you ? You 
have never learned the violin." 

" One needs not study for that," said this mu- 
sical prodigy ; and taking the instrument, he 
played second violin with ease and accuracy. 
Such precocity seems almost incredible, and only 
in the history of music does it find any parallel. 

Born in Salzburg, January 27, 1756, he was 



MOZART. 95 

carefully trained by his father, who resigned his 
place as court musician to devote himself more ex- 
clusively to his family. From the earliest age he 
snowed an extraordinary passion for music and 
mathematics, scrawling notes and diagrams in 
every place accessible to his insatiate pencil. 

Taken to Vienna, the six-year-old virtuoso as- 
tonished the court by his brilliant talents. The 
future Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, was 
particularly delighted with him, and the little 
Mozart naively said he would like to marry her, 
for she was so good to him. His father devoted 
several years to an artistic tour, with him and his 
little less talented sister, through the German 
cities, and it was also extended to Paris and Lon- 
don. Everywhere the greatest enthusiasm was 
evinced in this charming bud of promise. The 
father writes home : " We have swords, laces, 
mantillas, snuff-boxes, gold cases, sufficient to 
furnish a shop ; but as for money, it is a scarce 
article, and I am positively poor." 

At Paris they were warmly received at the 
court, and the boy is said to have expressed his 
surprise when Mme. Pompadour refused to kiss 
him, saying : " Who is she, that she will not kiss 
me ? Have I not been kissed by the queen ? " In 
London his improvisations and piano sonatas ex- 
cited the greatest admiration. Here he also pub- 
lished his third work. These journeys were an 
uninterrupted chain of triumphs for the child- 



96 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

virtuoso on the piano, organ, violin, and in sing- 
ing. He was made honorary member of the Acad- 
emies of Bologna and Verona, decorated with 
orders, and received at the age of thirteen an 
order to write the opera of " Mithridates," which 
was successfully produced at Milan in 1770. Sev- 
eral other fine minor compositions were also writ- 
ten to order at this time for his Italian admirers. 
At Rome Mozart attended the Sistine Chapel and 
wrote the score of Allegri's great mass, forbidden 
by the pope to be copied, from the memory of a 
single performance. 

The record of Mozart's youthful triumphs 
might be extended at great length ; but aside 
from the proof they furnish of his extraordinary 
precocity, they have lent little vital significance 
in the great problem of his career, except so far 
as they stimulated the marvelous boy to lay a 
deep foundation for his greater future, which, 
short as it was, was fruitful in undying results. 

ii. 

MOZART'S life in Paris, where he lived with 
his mother in 1778 and 1779, was a disappoint- 
ment, for he despised the French nation. His 
deep, simple, German nature revolted from Pari- 
sian frivolity, in which he found only sensuality 
and coarseness, disguised under a thin veneering 
of social grace. He abhorred French music in 
these bitter terms : " The French are and always 



MOZART. 97 

will be downright donkeys. They cannot sing, 
they scream." It was just at this time that Gluck 
and Piccini were having their great art-duel. We 
get a glimpse of the pious tendency of the young 
composer in his characterization of Voltaire : " The 
ungodly arch- villain, Voltaire, has just died like a 
dog." Again he writes : " Friends who have no 
religion cannot long be my friends. ... I have 
such a sense of religion that I shall never do any- 
thing that I would not do before the whole 
world." 

With Mozart's return to Germany in 1779, 
being then twenty-three years of age, comes the 
dawn of his classical period as a composer. The 
greater number of his masses had already been 
written, and now he settled himself in serious 
earnest to the cultivation of a true German oper- 
atic school. This found its dawn in the produc- 
tion of " Idomeneo," his first really great work 
for the lyric stage. 

The young composer had hard struggles with 
poverty in these days. His letters to his father 
are full of revelations of his friction with the lit- 
tle worries of life. Lack of money pinched him 
close, yet his cheerful spirit was ever buoyant. 
" I have only one small room ; it is quite crammed 
with a piano, a table, a bed, and a chest of 
drawers," he writes. 

Yet he would marry ; for he was willing to 
face poverty in the companionship of a loving 
d 



98 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

woman who dared to face it with him. At Mann- 
heim he had met a beautiful young singer, Aloy- 
sia Weber, and he went to Munich to offer her 
marriage. She, however, saw nothing attractive 
in the thin, pale young man, with his long nose, 
great eyes, and little head ; for he was anything 
but prepossessing. A younger sister, Constance, 
however, secretly loved Mozart, and he soon trans- 
ferred his repelled affections to this charming 
woman, whom he married in 1782 at the house 
of Baroness Waldstetten. His naive reasons for 
marrying show Mozart's ingenuous nature. He 
had no one to take care of his linen, he would not 
live dissolutely like other young men, and he 
loved Constance Weber. His answer to his fa- 
ther, who objected on account of his poverty, is 
worth quoting : 

" Constance is a well-conducted, good girl, of 
respectable parentage, and I am in a position to 
earn at least daily bread for her. We love each 
other, and are resolved to marry. All that you 
have written or may possibly write on the subject 
can be nothing but well-meant advice, which, 
however good and sensible, can no longer apply 
to a man who has gone so far with a girl." 

Poor as Mozart was, he possessed such integ- 
rity and independence that he refused a most lib- 
eral offer from the King of Prussia to become his 
chapel-master, for some unexplained reason which 
involved his sense of right and wrong. The first 



MOZART. 99 

year of his marriage lie wrote " II Seraglio," and 
made the acquaintance of the aged Gluck, who 
took a deep interest in him and warmly praised 
his genius. Haydn, too, recognized his brilliant 
powers. "I tell you, on the word of an honest 
man," said the author of the " Creation " to Leo- 
pold Mozart, the father, who asked his opinion, 
" that I consider your son the greatest composer 
I have ever heard. He writes with taste, and 
possesses a thorough knowledge of composition." 

Poverty and increasing expense pricked Mo- 
zart into intense, restless energy. His life had no 
lull in its creative industry. His splendid genius, 
insatiable and tireless, broke down his body, like 
a sword wearing out its scabbard. He poured 
out symphonies, operas, and sonatas with such 
prodigality as to astonish us, even when recol- 
lecting how fecund the musical mind has often 
been. Alike as artist and composer, he never 
ceased his labors. Day after day and night after 
night he hardly snatched an hour's rest. We can 
almost fancy he foreboded how short his brilliant 
life was to be, and was impelled to crowd into its 
brief compass its largest measure of results. 

Yet he was always pursued by the spectre of 
want. Oftentimes his sick wife could not obtain 
needed medicines. He made more money than 
most musicians, yet was always impoverished. 
But it was his glory that he was never impover- 
ished by sensual indulgence, extravagance, and 



100 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

riotous living, but by his lavish generosity to 
those who in many instances needed help less than 
himself. Like many other men of genius and 
sensibility, he could not say " no " to even the 
pretense of distress and suffering. 

in. 

THE culminating point of Mozart's artistic de- 
velopment was in 1786. The " Marriage of Fi- 
garo " was the first of a series of masterpieces 
which cannot be surpassed alike for musical great- 
ness and their hold on the lyric stage. The next 
year " Don Giovanni " saw the light, and was pro- 
duced at Prague. The overture of this opera was 
composed and scored in less than six hours. The 
inhabitants of Prague greeted the work with the 
wildest enthusiasm, for they seemed to understand 
Mozart better than the Viennese. 

During this period he made frequent concert 
tours to recruit his fortunes, but with little finan- 
cial success. Presents of watches, snuff-boxes, 
and rings were common, but the returns were so 
small that Mozart was frequently obliged to pawn 
his gifts to purchase a dinner and lodging. What 
a comment on the period which adored genius, 
but allowed it to starve ! His audiences could be 
enthusiastic enough to carry him to his hotel on 
their shoulders, but probably never thought that 
the wherewithal of a hearty supper was a more 
seasonable homage. So our musician struggled 



MOZART. 101 

on through the closing years of his life with the 
wolf constantly at his door, and an invalid wife 
whom he passionately loved, yet must needs see 
suffer from the want of common necessaries. In 
these modern days, when distinguished artists 
make princely fortunes by the exercise of their 
musical gifts, it is not easy to believe that Mo- 
zart, recognized as the greatest pianoforte player 
and composer of his time by all of musical Ger- 
many, could suffer such dire extremes of want as 
to be obliged more than once to beg for a dinner. 
In 1791 he composed the score of the "Magic 
Flute " at the request of Schikaneder, a Viennese 
manager, who had written the text from a fairy 
tale, the fantastic elements of which are peculiarly 
German in their humor. Mozart put great ear- 
nestness into the work, and made it the first Ger- 
man opera of commanding merit, which embodied 
the essential intellectual sentiment and kindly 
warmth of popular German life. The manager 
paid the composer but a trifle for a work whose 
transcendent success enabled him to build a new 
opera-house and laid the foundation of a large 
fortune. We are told, too, that at the time of 
jlozart's death in extreme want, when his sick 
wife, half maddened with grief, could not buy a 
coffin for the dead composer, this hard-hearted 
wretch, who owed his all to the genius of the 
great departed, rushed about through Vienna be- 
wailing the loss to music with sentimental tears, 



102 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

but did not give the heart-broken widow one 
kreutzer to pay the expense of a decent burial. 

In 1791 Mozart's health was breaking down 
with great rapidity, though he himself would 
never recognize his own swiftly advancing fate. 
He experienced, however, a deep melancholy which 
nothing could remove. For the first time his ha- 
bitual cheerfulness deserted him. His wife had 
been enabled through the kindness of her friends 
to visit the healing waters of Baden, and was 
absent. 

An incident now occurred which impressed 
Mozart with an ominous chill. One night there 
came a stranger, singularly dressed in gray, with 
an order for a requiem to be composed without 
fail within a month. The visitor, without reveal- 
ing his name, departed in mysterious gloom, as 
he came. Again the stranger called and solemnly 
reminded Mozart of his promise. The composer 
easily persuaded himself that this was a visitor 
from the other world, and that the requiem would 
be his own ; for he was exhausted with labor and 
sickness, and easily became the prey of supersti- 
tious fancies. When his wife returned, she found 
him with a fatal pallor on his face, silent and 
melancholy, laboring with intense absorption on 
the funereal mass. He would sit brooding over 
the score till he swooned away in his chair, and 
only come to consciousness to bend his waning 
energies again tc their ghastly work. The mys- 



MOZART. 103 

terious visitor, whom Mozart believed to be the 
precursor of his death, we now know to have been 
Count Walseck, who had recently lost his wife, 
and wished a musical memorial. 

His final sickness attacked the composer while 
laboring at the requiem. ' The musical world was 
ringing with the fame of his last opera. To the 
dying man was brought the offer of the rich ap- 
pointment of organist of St. Stephen's Cathedral. 
Most flattering propositions were made him by 
eager managers, who had become thoroughly 
awake to his genius when it was too late. The 
great Mozart was dying in the very prime of his 
youth and his powers, when success was in his 
grasp and the world opening wide its arms to 
welcome his glorious gifts with substantial recog- 
nition ; but all too late ; for he was doomed to 
die in his spring-tide, though "a spring mellow 
with all the fruits of autumn." 

The unfinished requiem lay on the bed, and 
his last efforts were to imitate some peculiar in- 
strumental effects, as he breathed out his life in 
the arms of his wife and his friend Silssmaier. 

The epilogue to this life-drama is one of the 
saddest in the history of art : a pauper funeral for 
one of the world's greatest geniuses. " It was 
late one winter afternoon," says an old record, 
" before the coffin was deposited on the side aisles 
on the south side of St. Stephen's. Van Swieten, 
Salieri, Silssmaier, and two unknown musicians 



J.04 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

were the only persons present besides the officiat- 
ing priest and the pall-bearers. It was a terribly 
inclement day ; rain and sleet came down fast ; 
and an eye-witness describes how the little band 
of mourners stood shivering in the blast, with 
their umbrellas up, round the hearse, as it left the 
door of the church. It was then far on in the 
dark cold December afternoon, and the evening 
was fast closing in before the solitary hearse had 
passed the Stubenthor, and reached the distant 
graveyard of St. Marx, in which, among the 
* third class,' the great composer of the * G minor 
Symphony ' and the ' Requiem ' found his resting- 
place. By this time the weather had proved too 
much for all the mourners ; they had dropped off 
one by one, and Mozart's body was accompanied 
only by the driver of the carriage. There had 
been already two pauper funerals that day one 
of them a midwife and Mozart was to be the 
third in the grave and the uppermost. 

" When the hearse drew up in the slush and 
sleet at the gate of the graveyard, it was wel- 
comed by a strange pair, Franz Harruschka, the 
assistant grave-digger, and his mother Katharina, 
known as ' Frau Katha,' who filled the quaint 
office of official mendicant to the place. 

" The old woman was the first to speak : 
' Any coaches or mourners coming ? 

" A shrug from the driver of the hearse was 
the only response. 



MOZART. 105 

" ' Whom have you got there, then ? ' continued 
she. 

" * A band-master,' replied the other. 

" * A musician ? they're a poor lot ; then I've 
no more money to look for to-day. It is to be 
hoped we shall have better luck in the .morning.' 

" To which the driver said, with a laugh: * I'm 
devilish thirsty, too not a kreutzer of drink- 
money have I had.' 

"After this curious colloquy the coffin was 
dismounted and shoved into the top of the grave 
already occupied by the two paupers of the morn- 
ing ; and such was Mozart's last appearance on 
earth." 

To-day no stone marks the spot where were 
deposited the last remains of one of the brightest 
of musical spirits ; indeed, the very grave is un- 
known, for it was the grave of a pauper. 

IV. 

MOZART'S charming letters reveal to us such a 
gentle, sparkling, affectionate nature, as to inspire 
as much love for the man as admiration for his 
genius. Sunny humor and tenderness bubble in 
almost every sentence. A clever writer says that 
" opening these is like opening a painted tomb. 
. . . The colors are all fresh, the figures are all 
distinct." 

No better illustration of the man Mozart can 
be had than in a few extracts from his corre- 



J.06 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

spondence. He writes to his sister from Rome 
while yet a mere lad : 

" I am, thank God ! except my miserable pen, 
well, and send you and mamma a thousand kisses. 
I wish you were in Rome ; I am sure it would 
please you. Papa says I am a little fool, but that 
is nothing new. Here we have but one bed ; it is 
easy to understand that I .can't rest comfortably 
with papa. I shall be glad when we get into new 
quarters. I have just finished drawing the Holy 
Peter with his keys, the Holy Paul with his 
sword, and the Holy Luke with my sister. I have 
had the honor of kissing St. Peter's foot ; and 
because I am so small as to be unable to reach it, 
they had to lift me up. I am the same old 

" WOLFGANG." 

Mozart was very fond of this sister Nannerl, 
and he used to write to her in a playful mosaic 
of French, German, and Italian. Just after his 
wedding he writes : 

"My darling is now a hundred times more 
joyful at the idea of going to Salzburg, and I am 
willing to stake ay, my very life, that you will 
rejoice still more in my happiness when you know 
her ; if, indeed, in your estimation, as in mine, a 
high-principled, honest, virtuous, and pleasing 
wife ought to make a man happy." 



MOZART. 1Q7 

Late in his short life he writes the follow- 
ing characteristic note to a friend, whose life 
does not appear to have been one of the most 
regular : 

" Now tell me, my dear friend, how you are. 
I hope you are all as well as we are. You cannot 
fail to be happy, for you possess everything that 
you can wish for at your age and in your position, 
especially as you now seem to have entirely given 
up your former mode of life. Do you not every 
day become more convinced of the truth of the 
little lectures I used to inflict on you ? Are not 
the pleasures of a transient, capricious passion 
widely different from the happiness produced by 
rational and true love ? I feel sure that you often 
in your heart thank me for my admonitions. I 
shall feel quite proud if you do. But, jesting 
apart, you do really owe me some little gratitude 

if you are become worthy of Fraulein N , for 

I certainly played no insignificant part in your 
improvement or reform. 

" My great-grandfather used to say to his 
wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told it 
to her daughter, my mother, who repeated it to 
her daughter, my own sister, that it was a very 
great art to talk eloquently and well, but an 
equally great one to know the right moment to 
stop. I therefore shall follow the advice of my 
sister, thanks to our mother, grandmother, and 



108 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

great-grandmother, and thus end, not only my 
moral ebullition, but my letter." 

His playful tenderness lavished itself on his 
wife in a thousand quaint ways. He would, for 
example, rise long before her to take his horse- 
back exercise, and always kiss her sleeping face 
and leave a little note like the following resting 
on her forehead : " Good-morning, dear little 
wife ! I hope you have had a good sleep and 
pleasant dreams. I shall be back in two hours. 
Behave yourself like a good little girl, and don't 
run away from your husband." 

Speaking of an infant child, our composer 
would say merrily, " That boy will be a true Mo- 
zart, for he always cries in the very key in which 
I am playing." 

Mozart's musical greatness, shown in the sym- 
metry of his art as well as in the richness of his 
inspirations, has been unanimously acknowledged 
by his brother composers. Meyerbeer could not 
restrain his tears when speaking of him. Weber, 
Mendelssohn, Rossini, and Wagner always praise 
him in terms of enthusiastic admiration. Haydn 
called him the greatest of composers. In fertility 
of invention, beauty of form, and exactness of 
method, he has never been surpassed, and has but 
one or two rivals. The composer of three of the 
greatest operas in musical history, besides many 
of much more than ordinary excellence ; of syni- 



BEETHOVEN. 109 

phonies that rival Haydn's for symmetry and 
melodic affluence ; of a great number of quar- 
tets, quintets, etc. ; and of pianoforte sonatas 
which rank high among the best; of many masses 
that are standard in the service of the Catholic 
Church ; of a great variety of beautiful songs 
there is hardly any form of music which he did 
not richly adorn with the treasures of his genius. 
We may well say, in the words of one of his 
most competent critics : 

" Mozart was a king and a slave king in his 
own beautiful realm of music ; slave of the cir- 
cumstances and the conditions of this world. 
Once over the boundaries of his own kingdom, 
and he was supreme ; but the powers of the earth 
acknowledged not his sovereignty." 



BEETHOVEN. 



THE name and memory of this composer awa- 
ken, in the heart of the lover of music, sentiments 
of the deepest reverence and admiration. His 
life was so marked with affliction and so isolated 
as to make^nim, in his environment of conditions 
as a composer, a> unique figure. 

The principal fact which made the exterior 
life of Beethoven so bare of the ordinary pleas- 
ures that brighten and sweeten existence, his total 



30 



HO THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

deafness, greatly enriched his spiritual life. Music 
finally became to him a purely intellectual concep- 
tion, for he was without any sensual enjoyment 
of its effects. To this Samson of music, for whom 
the ear was like the eye to other men, Milton's 
lines may indeed well apply : 

" Oh ! dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon ! 
Irrecoverably dark total eclipse, 
Without all hope of day ! 
Oh first created Beam, and thou, great Word, 
* Let there be light,' and light was over all, 
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree ? 
The sun to me is dark." 

To his severe affliction we owe alike many of 
the defects of his character and the splendors of 
his genius. All his powers, concentrated into a 
spiritual focus, wrought such things as lift him 
into a solitary greatness. The world has agreed 
to measure this man as it measures Homer, Dante, 
and Shakespeare. We do not compare him with 
others. 

Beethoven had the reputation among his con- 
temporaries of being harsh, bitter, suspicious, and 
unamiable. There is much to justify this in the 
circumstances of his life ; yet our readers will 
discover much to show, on the other hand, how 
deep, strong, and tender was the heart which 
was so wrung and tortured, and wounded to the 
quick by 

"The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.' 1 



BEETHOVEN. Hi 

Weber gives a picture of Beethoven : " The 
square Cyclopean figure attired in a shabby coat 
with torn sleeves." Everybody will remember 
his noble, austere face, as seen in the numerous 
prints : the square, massive head, with the forest 
of rough hair ; the strong features, so furrowed 
with the marks of passion and sadness ; the eyes, 
with their look of introspection and insight ; the 
whole expression of the countenance as of an an- 
cient prophet. Such was the impression made by 
Beethoven on all who saw him, except in his 
moods of fierce wrath, which toward the last were 
not uncommon, though short-lived. A sorely tried, 
sublimely gifted man, he met his fate stubbornly, 
and worked out his great mission with all his 
might and main, through long years of weariness 
and trouble. Posterity has rewarded him by en- 
throning him on the highest peaks of musical fame. 



IT. 

LTJDWIG VAN BEETHOVEX was born at Bonn, 
in 1770. It is a singular fact that at an early age 
he showed the deepest distaste for music, unlike 
the other great composers, who evinced their bent 
from their earliest years. His father was obliged 
to whip him severely before he would consent to 
sit down at the harpsichord ; and it was not till 
he was past ten that his genuine interest in music 
showed itself. His first compositions displayed 
10 



112 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

his genius. Mozart heard him play them, and 
said, " Mind, you will hear that boy talked of." 
Haydn, too, met Beethoven for the first and only 
time when the former was on his way to England, 
and recognized his remarkable powers. He gave 
him a few lessons in composition, and was after 
that anxious to claim the young Titan as a pupil. 

" Yes," growled Beethoven, who for some 
queer reason never liked Haydn, " I had some 
lessons of him, indeed, but I was not his disciple. 
I never learned anything from him." 

Beethoven made a profound impression even 
as a youth on all who knew him. Aside from the 
palpable marks of his power, there was an indom- 
itable hauteur, a mysterious, self-wrapped air as 
of one constantly communing with the invisible, an 
unconscious assertion of mastery about him, which 
strongly impressed the imagination. 

At the very outset of his career, when life 
promised all fair and bright things to him, two 
comrades linked themselves to him, and ever after 
that refused to give him up grim poverty and 
still grimmer disease. About the same time that 
he lost a fixed salary through the death of his 
friend the Elector of Cologne, he began to grow 
deaf. Early in 1800, walking one day in the 
woods with his devoted friend and pupil, Ferdi- 
nand Hies, he disclosed the sad secret to him that 
the whole joyous world of sound was being grad- 
ually closed up to him ; the charm of the human 



BEETHOVEN. 113 

voice, the notes of the woodland birds, the sweet 
babblings of Nature, jargon to others, but intelli- 
gible to genius, the full-born splendors of heard 
music all, all were fast receding from his grasp. 

Beethoven was extraordinarily sensitive to the 
influences of Nature. Before his disease became 
serious he writes : " I wander about here with 
music-paper among the hills, and dales, and val- 
leys, and scribble a good deal. No man on earth 
can love the country as I do." But one of Na- 
ture's most delightful modes of speech to man 
was soon to be utterly lost to him. At last he 
became so deaf that the most stunning crash of 
thunder or the fortissimo of the full orchestra 
were to him as if they were not. His bitter, heart- 
rending cry of agony, when he became convinced 
that the misfortune was irremediable, is full of 
eloquent despair : " As autumn leaves wither and 
fall, so are my hopes blighted. Almost as I came, 
I depart. Even the lofty courage, which so often 
animated me in the lovely days of summer, is 
gone forever. O Providence ! vouchsafe me one 
day of pure felicity ! How long have I been 
estranged from the glad echo of true joy ! When, 
O my God ! when shall I feel it again in the tem- 
ple of Nature and man ? Never ! " 

And the small-souled, mole-eyed gossips and 
critics called him hard, churlish, and cynical 
him, for whom the richest thing in Nature's splen- 
did dower had been obliterated, except a soul, 
8 



114 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

which never in its deepest sufferings lost its noble 
faith in God and man, or allowed its indomitable 
courage to be one whit weakened. That there 
were periods of utterly rayless despair and gloom 
we may guess ; but not for long did Beethoven's 
great nature cower before its evil genius. 

in. 

WITHIN three years, from 1805 to 1808, Beet- 
hoven composed some of his greatest works : the 
oratorio of " The Mount of Olives," the opera of 
" Fidelio," and the two noble symphonies, " Pas- 
torale " and " Eroica," besides a large number of 
concertos, sonatas, songs, and other occasional 
pieces. However gloomy the externals of his life, 
his creative activities knew no cessation. 

The " Sinf onia Eroica," the " Choral " only ex- 
cepted, is the longest of the immortal nine, and 
is one of the greatest examples of musical por- 
traiture extant. All the great composers from 
Handel to Wagner have attempted what is called 
descriptive music with more or less success, but 
never have musical genius and skill achieved a re- 
sult so admirable in its relation to its purpose and 
by such strictly legitimate means as in this work. 

" The ' Eroica,' " says a great writer, " is an 
attempt to draw a musical portrait of an histori- 
cal character a great statesman, a great general, 
a noble individual ; to represent in music Beet- 
hoven's own language what M. Thiers has gives 



BEETHOVEN". 115 

in words and Paul Delaroche in painting." Of 
Beethoven's success another writer has said : " It 
wants no title to tell its meaning, for throughout 
the symphony the hero is visibly portrayed." 

It is anything but difficult to realize why Beet- 
hoven should have admired the first Napoleon. 
Both the soldier and musician were made of that 
sturdy stuff which would and did defy the world ; 
and it is not strange that Beethoven should have 
desired in some way and he knew of no better 
course than through his art to honor one so char- 
acteristically akin to himself, and who at that 
time was the most prominent man in Europe. 
Beethoven began the work in 1802, and in 1804 it 
was completed, and bore the following title : 

Sinfonia grande 

" Napoleon Bonaparte " 

1804 in August 

del Sigr 

Louis van Beethoven 

Sinfonia 3. 

Op. 55. 

This was copied and the original score dispatched 
to the embassador for presentation, while Beetho- 
ven retained the copy. Before the composition was 
laid before Napoleon, however, the great general 
had accepted the title of Emperor. No sooner 
did Beethoven hear of this from his pupil Ries 
than he started up in a rage, and exclaimed : " Af- 



.J.16 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

ter all, then, he's nothing but an ordinary mortal ! 
He will trample the rights of men under his feet ! " 
saying which, he rushed to his table, seized the 
copy of the score, and tore the title-page com- 
pletely off. From this time Beethoven hated Xa- 
poleon, and never again spoke of him in connec- 
tion with the symphony until he heard of his 
death in St. Helena, when he observed, " I have 
already composed music for this calamity," evi- 
dently referring to the " Funeral March " in this 
symphony. 

The opera of "Fidelio," which he composed 
about the same time, may be considered, in the 
severe sense of a great and symmetrical musical 
work, the finest lyric drama ever written, with the 
possible exception of Gluck's " Orpheus and Eury- 
dice " and " Iphigenia in Tauris." It is rarely per- 
formed, because its broad, massive, and noble effects 
are beyond the capacity of most singers, and be- 
long to the domain of pure music, demanding but 
little alliance with the artistic clap-trap of star- 
tling scenery and histrionic extravagance. Yet 
our composer's conscience shows its completeness 
in his obedience to the law of opera ; for the 
music he has written to express the situations 
cannot be surpassed for beauty, pathos, and pas- 
sion. Beethoven, like Mendelssohn, revolted from 
the idea of lyric drama as an art-inconsistency, 
but he wrote " Fidelio " to show his possibilities 
in a direction with which he had but little syn> 



BEETHOVEN". 117 

pathy. He composed four overtures for this 
opera at different periods, on account of the crit- 
ical caprices of the Viennese public a concession 
to public taste which his stern independence rare- 
ly made. 



IV. 



BEETHOVEN'S relations with women were pecul- 
iar and characteristic, as were all the phases of a 
nature singularly self -poised and robust. Like all 
men of powerful imagination and keen (though 
perhaps not delicate) sensibility, he was strongly 
attracted toward the softer sex. But a certain 
austerity of morals, and that purity of feeling 
which is the inseparable shadow of one's devotion 
to lofty aims, always kept him within the bounds 
of Platonic affection. Yet there is enough in 
Beethoven's letters, as scanty as their indications 
are in this direction, to show what ardor and glow 
of feeling he possessed. 

About the time that he was suffering keenly 
with the knowledge of his fast-growing infirmity, 
he was bound by a strong tie of affection to 
Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, his " immortal be- 
loved," "his angel," "his all," "his life," as he 
called her in a variety of passionate utterances. 
It was to her that he dedicated his song " Ade- 
laida," which as an expression of lofty passion is 
world-famous. Beethoven was very much dissat- 



118 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

isfied with the work even in the glow of composi- 
tion. Before the notes were dry on the music 
paper, the composer's old friend Barth was an- 
nounced. " Here," said Beethoven, putting a roll of 
score paper in Earth's hands, "look at that. I 
have just finished it, and don't like it. There is 
hardly fire enough in the stove to burn it, but I 
will try." Barth glanced through the composi- 
tion, then sang it, and soon grew into such enthu- 
siasm as to draw from Beethoven the expression, 
"No? then we will not burn it, old fellow." 
Whether it was the reaction of disgust, which so 
often comes to genius after the tension of work, 
or whether his ideal of its lovely theme was so 
high as to make all effort seem inadequate, the 
world came very near losing what it could not 
afford to have missed. 

The charming countess, however, preferred 
rank, wealth, and unruffled ease to being linked 
even with a great genius, if, indeed, the affair 
ever looked in the direction of marriage. She 
married another, and Beethoven does not seem to 
have been seriously disturbed. It may be that, 
like Goethe, he valued the love of woman not for 
itself or its direct results, but as an art-stimulus 
which should enrich and fructify his own intellect- 
ual life. 

We get glimpes of successors to the fair count- 
ess. The beautiful Marie Pachler was for some 
time the object of his adoration. The affair is a 



BEETHOVEN. U9 

somewhat mysterious one, and the lady seems to 
have suffered from the fire through which her 
powerful companion passed unscathed. Again, 
quaintest and oddest of all, is the fancy kindled 
by that " mysterious sprite of genius," as one of 
her contemporaries calls her, Bettina Brentano, 
the gifted child-woman, who fascinated all who 
came within her reach, from Goethe and Beet- 
hoven down to princes and nobles. Goethe's cor- 
respondence with this strange being has embalmed 
her life in classic literature. 

Our composer's intercourse with women for 
he was always alive to the charms of female so- 
ciety was for the most part homely and practi- 
cal in the extreme, after his deafness destroyed 
the zest of the more romantic phases of the divine 
passion. He accepted adoration, as did Dean 
Swift, as a right. He permitted his female ad- 
mirers to knit him stockings and comforters, and 
make him dainty puddings and other delicacies, 
which he devoured with huge gusto. He conde- 
scended, in return, to go to sleep on their sofas, 
after picking his teeth with the candle-snuffers 
(so says scandal), while they thrummed away at 
his sonatas, the artistic slaughter of which Beet- 
hoven was mercifully unable to hear. 

v. 

THE friendship of the Archduke Rudolph re- 
lieved Beethoven of the immediate pressure of 



J[20 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

poverty ; for in 1809 he settled a small life-pen- 
sion upon him. The next ten years were passed 
by him in comparative ease and comfort, and in 
this time he gave to the world five of his immor- 
tal symphonies, and a large number of his finest 
sonatas and masses. His general health improved 
very much ; and in his love for his nephew Karl, 
whom Beethoven had adopted, the lonely man 
found an outlet for his strong affections, which 
was medicine for his soul, though the object was 
worthless and ungrateful. 

We get curious and amusing insights into the 
daily tenor of Beethoven's life during this period 
things sometimes almost grotesque, were they 
not so sad. The composer lived a solitary life, 
and was very much at the mercy of his servants 
on account of his self -absorption and deafness. 
He was much worried by these prosaic cares. 
One story of a slatternly servant is as follows : 
The master was working at the mass in D, the 
great work which he commenced in 1819 for the 
celebration of the appointment of the Archduke 
Rudolph as Archbishop of Olmutz, and which 
should have been completed by the following 
year. Beethoven, however, became so engrossed 
with his work, and increased its proportions so 
much, that it was not finished until some two 
years after the event which it was intended to 
celebrate. While Beethoven was engaged upon 
this score, he one day woke up to the fact that 



BEETHOVEN. 121 

some of his pages were missing. "Where on 
earth could they be ? " he asked himself, and the 
servant too ; but the problem remained unsolved. 
Beethoven, beside himself, spent hours and hours 
in searching, and so did the servant, but it was 
all in vain. At last they gave up the task as a 
useless one, and Beethoven, mad with despair, and 
pouring the very opposite to blessings upon the 
head of her who, he believed, was the author of 
the mischief, sat down with the conclusion that 
he must rewrite the missing part. He had no 
sooner commenced a new Kyrie for this was the 
movement which was not to be found than some 
loose sheets of score paper were discovered in the 
kitchen ! Upon examination they proved to be the 
identical pages that Beethoven so much desired, 
and which the woman, in her anxiety to be " tidy " 
and to " keep things straight," had appropriated at 
some time or other for wrapping up, not only old 
boots and clothes, but also some superannuated 
pots and pans that were greasy and black ! 

Thus he was continually fretted by the care- 
lessness or the rascality of the servants in whom 
he was obliged to trust. He writes in his diary : 
" Nancy is too uneducated for a housekeeper in- 
deed, quite a beast." " My precious servants were 
occupied from seven o'clock till ten trying to kin- 
dle a fire." "The cook's off again." "I shied 
half a dozen books at her head." They made his 
dinner so nasty he couldn't eat it. " No soup to- 



122 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

day, no beef, no eggs. Got something from the 
inn at last." 

His temper and peculiarities, too, made it diffi- 
cult for him to live in peace with landlords and 
fellow-lodgers. As his deafness increased, he 
struck and thumped harder at the keys of his 
piano, the sound of which he could scarcely hear. 
Nor was this all. The music that filled his brain 
gave him no rest. He became an inspired mad- 
man. For hours he would pace the room " howl- 
ing and roaring " (as his pupil Ries puts it) ; or 
he would stand beating time with hand and foot 
to the music which was so vividly present to his 
mind. This soon put him into a feverish excite- 
ment, when, to cool himself, he would take his 
water- jug, and, thoughtless of everything, pour 
its contents over his hands, after which he could 
sit down to his piano. With all this it can easily 
be imagined that Beethoven was frequently re- 
monstrated with. The landlord complained of a 
damaged ceiling, and the fellow-lodgers declared 
that either they or the madman must leave the 
house, for they could get no rest where he was. 
So Beethoven never for long had a resting-place. 
Impatient at being interfered with, he immediate- 
ly packed up and went off to some other vacant 
lodging. From this cause he was at one time 
paying the rent of four lodgings at once. At 
times he would get tired of this changing from 
one place to another from the suburbs to the 



BEETHOVEN. 123 

town and then lie would fall back upon the hos- 
pitable home of a patron, once again taking pos- 
session of an apartment which he had vacated, 
probably without the least explanation or cause. 
One admirer of his genius, who always reserved 
him a chamber in his establishment, used to say 
to his servants: "Leave it empty; Beethoven is 
sure to come back again." 

The instant that Beethoven entered the house 
he began to write and cipher on the walls, the 
blinds, the table, everything, in the most abstract- 
ed manner. He frequently composed on slips of 
paper, which he afterward misplaced, so that he 
had great difficulty in finding them. At one time, 
indeed, he forgot his own name and the date of 
his birth. 

It is said that he once went into a Viennese 
restaurant, and, instead of giving an order, began 
to write a score on the back of the bill-of-fare, 
absorbed and unconscious of time and place. At 
last he asked how much he owed. "You owe 
nothing, sir," said the waiter. " What ! do you 
think I have not dined?" "Most assuredly." 
" Very well, then, give me something." " What 
do you wish ? " " Anything." 

These infirmities do not belittle the man* of 
genius, but set off his greatness as with a foil. 
They illustrate the thought of Goethe : "It is all 
the same whether one is great or small, he has to 
pay the reckoning of humanity." 



124 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

VI. 

YET beneath these eccentricities what wealth 
of tenderness, sympathy, and kindliness existed ! 
His affection for his graceless nephew Karl is a 
touching picture. With the rest of his family he 
had never been on very cordial terms. His feel- 
ing of contempt for snobbery and pretense is 
very happily illustrated in his relations with his 
brother Johann. The latter had acquired proper- 
ty, and he sent Ludwig his card, inscribed " Jo- 
hann van Beethoven, land-owner." The caustic 
reply was a card, on which was written, " Ludwig 
van Beethoven, brain-owner." But on Karl all 
the warmest feelings of a nature which had been 
starving to love and be loved poured themselves 
out. He gave the scapegrace every luxury and 
indulgence, and, self-absorbed as he was in an 
ideal sphere, felt the deepest interest in all the 
most trivial things that concerned him. Much to 
the uncle's sorrow, Karl cared nothing for music ; 
but, worst of all, he was an idle, selfish, heartless 
fellow, who sneered at his benefactor, and valued 
him only for what he could get from him. At 
last Beethoven became fully aware of the lying 
ingratitude of his nephew, and he exclaims : " I 
know now you have no pleasure in coming to see 
me, which is only natural, for my atmosphere is 
too pure for you. God has never yet forsaken 
me, and no doubt some one will be found to close 



BEETHOVEN". 125 

my eyes." Yet the generous old man forgave 
him, for he says in the codicil of his will, " I ap- 
point my nephew Karl my sole heir." 

Frequently, glimpses of the true vein showed 
themselves in such little episodes as that which 
occurred when Moscheles, accompanied by his 
brother, visited the great musician for the first 
time. 

"Arrived at the door of the house," writes 
Moscheles, " I had some misgivings, knowing Beet- 
hoven's strong aversion to strangers. I therefore 
told my brother to wait below. After greeting 
Beethoven, I said : ' Will you permit me to intro- 
duce my brother to you ? ' 

" ' Where is he ? ' he suddenly replied. 

" < Below.' 

" ( What, down-stairs ? ' and Beethoven imme- 
diately rushed off, seized hold of my brother, say- 
ing : * Am I such a savage that you are afraid to 
come near me ? ' 

" After this he showed great kindness to us." 

While referring to the relations of Moscheles 
and Beethoven, the following anecdote related by 
Mme. Moscheles will be found suggestive. The 
pianist had been arranging some numbers of " Fi- 
delio," which he took to the composer. He, d la 
Haydn, had inscribed the score with the words, 
" By God's help." Beethoven did not fail to per- 
ceive this, and he wrote underneath this phylac- 
tory the characteristic advice : "0 man, help thy- 
self." 



126 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

The genial and sympathetic nature of Beetho- 
ven is illustrated in this quaint incident : 

It was in the summer of 1811 that Ludwig 
Lowe, the actor, first met Beethoven in the dining- 
room of the Blue Star at Toplitz. Lowe was pay- 
ing his addresses to the landlord's daughter ; and 
conversation being impossible at the hour he dined 
there, the charming creature one day whispered to 
him : " Come at a later hour when the customers 
are gone and only Beethoven is here. He cannot 
hear, and will therefore not be in the way." This 
answered for a time ; but the stern parents, ob- 
serving the acquaintanceship, ordered the actor to 
leave the house and not to return. " How great 
was our despair ! " relates Lowe. " We both de- 
sired to correspond, but through whom ? Would 
the solitary man at the opposite table assist us ? 
Despite his serious reserve and seeming churlish- 
ness, I believe he is not unfriendly. I have often 
caught a kind smile across his bold, defiant face." 
Lowe determined to try. Knowing Beethoven's 
custom, he contrived to meet the master when he 
was walking in the gardens. Beethoven instantly 
recognized him, and asked the reason why he no 
longer dined at the Blue Star. A full confession 
was made, and then Lowe timidly asked if he 
would take charge of a letter to give to the 
girl. 

" Why not ? " pleasantly observed the rough- 
looking musician. "You mean what is right." 



BEETHOVEN. 127 

So pocketing the note, he was making his way on- 
ward when Lowe again interfered. 

" I beg your pardon, Herr van Beethoven, that 
is not all." 

" So, so," said the master. 

" You must also bring back the answer," Lowe 
went on to say. 

"Meet me here at this time to-morrow," said 
Beethoven. 

Lowe did so, and there found Beethoven await- 
ing him, with the coveted reply from his lady-love. 
In this manner Beethoven carried the letters back- 
ward and forward for some five or six weeks in 
short, as long as he remained in the town. 

His friendship with Ferdinand Ries commenced 
in a way which testified how grateful he was for 
kindness. When his mother lay ill at Bonn, he 
hurried home from Vienna just in time to witness 
her death. After the funeral he suffered greatly 
from poverty, and was relieved by Hies the violin- 
ist. Years afterward young Ries waited on Beet- 
hoven with a letter of introduction from his father. 
The composer received him with cordial warmth, 
and said : " Tell your father I have not forgotten 
the death of my mother." Ever afterward he 
was a helpful and devoted friend to young Ries, 
and was of inestimable value in forwarding his 
musical career. 

Beethoven in his poverty never forgot to be 
generous. At a concert given in aid of wounded 



128 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

soldiers, where he conducted, he indignantly re- 
fused payment with the words : " Say Beethoven 
never accepts anything where humanity is con- 
cerned." To an Ursuline convent he gave an en- 
tirely new symphony to be performed at their 
benefit concert. Friend or enemy never applied 
to him for help that he did not freely give, even 
to the pinching of his own comfort. 

VII. 

ROSSINI could write best when he was under 
the influence of Italian wine and sparkling cham- 
pagne. Paesiello liked the warm bed in which 
to jot down his musical notions, and we are .told 
that " it was between the sheets that he planned 
the ' Barber of Seville,' the ' Molinara,' and so 
many other chefs-d'oeuvre of ease and graceful- 
ness." Mozart could chat and play at billiards 
or bowls at the same time that he composed the 
most beautiful music. Sacchini found it impos- 
sible to write anything of any beauty unless a 
pretty woman was by his side, and he was sur- 
rounded by his cats, whose graceful antics stimu- 
lated and affected him in a marked fashion. 
" Gluck," Bombet says, " in order to warm his 
imagination and to transport himself to Aulis or 
Sparta, was accustomed to place himself in the 
middle of a beautiful meadow. In this situation, 
with his piano before him, and a bottle of cham- 
pagne on each side, he wrote in the open air his 



BEETHOVEN. 129 

two ' Iphigenias,' his * Orpheus,' and some other 
works." The agencies which stimulated Beet- 
hoven's grandest thoughts are eminently charac- 
teristic of the man. He loved to let the winds 
and storms beat on his bare head, and see the 
dazzling play of the lightning. Or, failing the 
sublimer moods of Nature, it was his delight to 
walk in the woods and fields, and take in at every 
pore the influences which she so lavishly bestows 
on her favorites. His true life was his ideal life 
in art. To him it was a mission and an inspira- 
tion, the end and object of all things ; for these 
had value only as they fed the divine craving 
within. 

"Nothing can be more sublime," he writes, 
" than to draw nearer to the Godhead than other 
men, and to diffuse here on earth these Godlike 
rays among mortals." Again : " What is all this 
compared to the grandest of all Masters of Har- 
mony above, above ? " 

" All experience seemed an arch, wherethrough 
Gleamed that untraveled world, whose margin fades 
Forever and forever as we move." 

The last four years of our composer's life were 
passed amid great distress from poverty and 
feebleness. He could compose but little ; and, 
though his friends solaced his latter days with at- 
tention and kindness, his sturdy independence 
would not accept more. It is a touching fact that 



130 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

Beethoven voluntarily suffered want and priva* 
tion in his last years, that he might leave the 
more to his selfish and ungrateful nephew. He 
died in 1827, in his fifty-seventh year, and is 
buried in the Wahring Cemetery near Vienna. 
Let these extracts from a testamentary paper ad- 
dressed to his brothers in 1802, in expectation of 
death, speak more eloquently of the hidden life 
of a heroic soul than any other words could : 

" O ye, who consider or declare me to be hos- 
tile, obstinate, or misanthropic, what injustice ye 
do me ! Ye know not the secret causes of that 
which to you wears such an appearance. My 
heart and my mind were from childhood prone to 
the tender feelings of affection. Nay, I was al- 
ways disposed even to perform great actions. 
But, only consider that, for the last six years, I 
have been attacked by an incurable complaint, 
aggravated by the unskillful treatment of medical 
men, disappointed from year to year in the hope 
of relief, and at last obliged to submit to the en- 
durance of an evil the cure of which may last 
perhaps for years, if it is practicable at all. Born 
with a lively, ardent disposition, susceptible to 
to the diversions of society, I was forced at an 
early age to renounce them, and to pass my life 
in seclusion. If I strove at any time to set my- 
self above all this, oh how cruelly was I driven 
back by the doubly painful experience of my de- 



BEETHOVEN. 131 

fective hearing ! and yet it was not possible for 
me to say to people, * Speak louder bawl for I 
am deaf ! ' Ah ! how could I proclaim the de- 
fect of a sense that I once possessed in the highest 
perfection in a perfection in which few of my 
colleagues possess or ever did possess it ? Indeed, 
I cannot ! Forgive me, then, if ye see me draw 
back when I would gladly mingle among you. 
Doubly mortifying is my misfortune to me, as it 
must tend to cause me to be misconceived. From 
recreation in the society of my fellow-creatures, 
from the pleasures of conversation, from the effu- 
sions of friendship, I am cut off. Almost alone 
in the world, I dare not venture into society more 
than absolute necessity requires. I am obliged to 
live as an exile. If I go into company, a painful 
anxiety comes over me, since I am apprehensive 
of being exposed to the danger of betraying my 
situation. Such has been my state, too, during 
this half year that I have spent in the country. 
Enjoined by my intelligent physician to spare my 
hearing as much as possible, I have been almost 
encouraged by him in my present natural disposi- 
tion, though, hurried away by my fondness for 
society, I sometimes suffered myself to be enticed 
into it. But what a humiliation when any one 
standing beside me could hear at a distance a flute 
that I could not hear, or any one heard the shep- 
herd singing, and I could not distinguish a sound ! 
Such circumstances brought me to the brink of 



132 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

despair, and had wellnigh made me put an end 
to my life : nothing but my art held my hand. 
Ah ! it seemed to me impossible to quit the world 
before I had produced all that I felt myself called 
to accomplish. And so I endured this wretched 
life so truly wretched, that a somewhat speedy 
change is capable of transporting me from the 
best into the worst condition. Patience so I 
am told I must choose for my guide. Steadfast, 
I hope, will be my resolution to persevere, till it 
shall please the inexorable Fates to cut the thread. 
" Perhaps there may be an amendment per- 
haps not ; I am prepared for the worst I, who so 
early as my twenty-eighth year was forced to be- 
come a philosopher it is not easy for the artist 
more difficult than for any other. O God ! thou 
lookest down upon my misery ; thou knowest 
that it is accompanied with love of my fellow- 
creatures, and a disposition to do good ! O 
men ! when ye shall read this, think that ye have 
wronged me ; and let the child of affliction take 
comfort on finding one like himself, who, in spite 
of all the impediments of Nature, yet did all that 
lay in his power to obtain admittance into the 
rank of worthy artists and men. ... I go to 
meet death with joy. If he comes before I have 
had occasion to develop all my professional abili- 
ties, he will come too soon for me, in spite of my 
hard fate, and I should wish that he had delayed 
his arrival. But even then I am content, for he 



BEETHOVEN. 133 

will release me from a state of endless suffering. 
Come when thou wilt, I shall meet thee with 
firmness. Farewell, and do not quite forget me 
after I am dead ; I have deserved that you should 
think of me, for in my lifetime I have often 
thought of you to make you happy. May you 
ever be so ! " 

VIII. 

THE music of Beethoven has left a profound 
impress on art. In speaking of his genius it is 
difficult to keep expression within the limits of 
good taste. For who has so passed into the very 
inner penetralia of his great art, and revealed to 
the world such heights and depths of beauty and 
power in sound ? 

Beethoven composed nine symphonies, which, 
by one voice, are ranked as the greatest ever 
written, reaching in the last, known as the 
" Choral," the full perfection of his power and 
experience. Other musicians have composed 
symphonic works remarkable for varied excel- 
lences, but in Beethoven this form of writing 
seems to have attained its highest possibilities, 
and to have been illustrated by the greatest 
variety of effects, from the sublime to such as are 
simply beautiful and melodious. His hand swept 
the whole range of expresskm with unfaltering 
mastery. Some passages may seem obscure, some 
too elaborately wrought, some startling and ab- 



134 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

rupt, but on all is stamped the die of his great 
genius. 

Beethoven's compositions for the piano, the 
sonatas, are no less notable for range and power 
of expression, their adaptation to meet all the 
varied moods of passion and sentiment. Other 
pianoforte composers have given us more warm 
and vivid color, richer sensual effects of tone, 
more wild and bizarre combination, perhaps even 
greater sweetness in melody ; but we look in vain 
elsewhere for the spiritual passion and poetry, the 
aspiration and longing, the lofty humanity, which 
make the Beethoven sonatas the suspiria de pro- 
fundis of the composer's inner life. In addition 
to his symphonies and sonatas, he wrote the great 
opera of " Fidelio," and in the field of oratorio as- 
serted his equality with Handel and Haydn by 
composing " The Mount of Olives." A great va- 
riety of chamber music, masses, and songs, bear 
the same imprint of power. He may be called 
the most original and conscientious of all the 
composers. Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, 
and Mendelssohn were inveterate thieves, and pil- 
fered the choicest gems from old and forgotten 
writers without scruple. Beethoven seems to 
have been so fecund in great conceptions, so lifted 
on the wings of his tireless genius, so austere in 
artistic morality, that he stands for the most part 
above the reproach deservedly borne by his brother 
composers. 



SCHUBERT, SCHUMANN, AND FRANZ. 135 

Beethoven's principal title to fame is in his 
superlative place as a symphonic composer. In 
the symphony music finds its highest intellectual 
dignity ; in Beethoven the symphony has found 
its loftiest master. 



SCHUBERT, SCHUMANN, AND FRANZ. 



HEINRICH HEIXE, in his preface to a transla- 
lation of " Don Quixote," discusses the creative 
powers of different peoples. To the Spaniard 
Cervantes is awarded the first place in novel- 
writing, and to our own Shakespeare, of course, 
the transcendent rank in drama. 

" And the Germans," he goes on to say, " what 
palm is due to them? Well, we are the best 
writers of songs in the world. No people pos- 
sesses such beautiful JLieder as the Germans. Just 
at present the nations have too much political 
business on hand ; but, after that has once been 
settled, we Germans, English, Spaniards, French- 
men, and Italians, will all go to the green forest 
and sing, and the nightingale shall be umpire. I 
feel sure that in this contest the song of Wolfgang 
Goethe will gain the prize." 

There are few, if any, who will be disposed 

to dispute the verdict of the German poet, him- 
12 



136 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

self no mean rival, in depth and variety of lyric 
inspiration, even of the great Goethe. But a 
greater poet than either one of this great pair 
bears the suggestive and impersonal name of 
" The People." It is to the countless wealth of 
the German race in folk-songs, an affluence which 
can be traced back to the very dawn of civiliza- 
tion among them, that the possibility of such lyric 
poets as Goethe, Heine, Riickert, and Uhland is 
due. From the days of the " Nibelungenlied," 
that great epic which, like the Homeric poems, 
can hardly be credited to any one author, every 
hamlet has rung with beautiful national songs, 
which sprung straight from the fervid heart of 
the people. These songs are balmy with the 
breath of the forest, the meadow, and river, and 
have that simple and bewitching freshness of mo- 
tive and rhythm which unconsciously sets itself 
to music. 

The German Volkslied, as the exponent of the 
popular heart, has a wide range, from mere com- 
ment on historical events, and quaint, droll satire, 
such as may be found in Hans Sachs, to the grand 
protest against spiritual bondage which makes the 
burden of Luther's hymn, " Ein' feste Burg." 
But nowhere is the beauty of the German song so 
marked as in those Lieder treating of love, deeds 
of arms, and the old mystic legends so dear to the 
German heart. Tieck writes of the " Minnesinger 
period : " " Believers sang of faith, lovers of love ; 



SCHUBERT, SCHUMANN, AND FRANZ. 137 

knights described knightly actions and battles, 
and loving, believing knights were their chief au- 
diences. The spring, beauty, gayety, were objects 
that could never tire ; great duels and deeds of 
arms carried away every hearer, the more surely 
the stronger they were painted ; and as the pil- 
lars and dome of the church encircled the flock, 
so did Religion, as the highest, encircle poetry 
and reality, and every heart in equal love hum- 
bled itself before her." 

A similar spirit has always inspired the popu- 
lar German song, a simple and beautiful reverence 
for the unknown, the worship of heroism, a vital 
sympathy with the various manifestations of Na- 
ture. Without the fire of the French chansons, 
the sonorous grace of the Tuscan stornetti, these 
artless ditties, with their exclusive reliance on 
true feeling, possess an indescribable charm. 

The German Lied always preserved its charac- 
teristic beauty. Goethe, and the great school of 
lyric poets clustered around him, simply perfected 
the artistic form, without departing from the sim- 
plicity and soulfulness of the stock from which it 
came. Had it not been for the rich soil of popu- 
lar song, we should not have had the peerless 
lyrics of modern Germany. Had it not been for 
the poetic inspiration of such word-makers as 
Goethe and Heine, we should not have had such 
music-makers in the sphere of song as Schubert 
and Franz. 



138 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

The songs of these masters appeal to the in- 
terest and admiration of the world, then, not 
merely in virtue of musical beauty, but in that 
they are the most vital outgrowths of Teutonic 
nationality and feeling. 

The immemorial melodies to which the popu- 
lar songs of Germany were set display great sim- 
plicity of rhythm, even monotony, with frequent 
recurrence of the minor keys, so well adapted to 
express the melancholy tone of many of the po- 
ems. The strictly strophic treatment is used, or, 
in other words, the repetition of the melody of 
the first stanza in all the succeeding ones. The 
chasm between this and the varied form of the 
artistic modern song is deep and wide, yet it was 
overleaped in a single swift bound by the remark- 
able genius of Franz Schubert, who, though his 
compositions were many and matchless of their 
kind, died all' too young ; for, as the inscription 
on his tombstone pathetically has it, he was " rich 
in what he gave, richer in what he promised." 

IT. 

THE great masters of the last century tried 
their hands in the domain of song with only com- 
parative success, partly because they did not fully 
realize the nature of this form of art, partly be- 
cause they could not limit the sweep of the crea- 
tive power within such narrow limits. Schubert 
was a revelation to his countrymen in his musical 



SCHUBERT, SCHUMANN, AND FRANZ. 147 

parried his own songs with exquisite effect. Once 
only his friends organized a concert for him, and 
the success was very brilliant. But he was pre- 
vented from repeating the good fortune by that 
fatal illness which soon set in. So he lived out 
the last glimmers of his life, poverty-stricken, de- 
spondent, with few even of the amenities of friend- 
ship to soothe his declining days. Yet those who 
know the beautiful results of that life, and have 
even a faint glow of sympathy with the life of & 
man of genius, will exclaim with one of the moat 
eloquent critics of Schubert : 

" But shall we, therefore, pity a mam wfto all the 
while reveled in the treasures of bis- creative ore, and 
from the very depths of whose despair sprang the sweet- 
est flowers of song? "Who would not battle with the 
iciest blast of the north if out of storm and snow he 
could bring back to his chamber the germs of the 4 Win- 
terreise? ' Who would grudge the moisture of his eyes 
if he could render it immortal in the strains of Schubert's 
'LobderThrane?'" 

Schubert died in the flower of his youth, No- 
vember 19, 1828 ; but he left behind him nearly 
a thousand compositions, six hundred of which 
were songs. Of his operas only the " Enchanted 
Harp " and " Rosamond " were put on the stage 
during his lifetime. " Fierabras," considered to 
be his finest dramatic work, has never been pro- 
duced. His church music, consisting of six mass- 
es, many offertories, and the great " Hallelujah " 
is 



148 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

of Klopstock, is still performed in Germany. 
Several of his symphonies are ranked among the 
greatest works of this nature. His pianoforte 
compositions are brilliant, and strongly in the 
style of Beethoven, who was always the great ob- 
ject of Schubert's devoted admiration, his artistic 
idol and model. It was his dying request that he 
should be buried by the side of Beethoven, of 
whom the art-world had been deprived the year 
before. 

Compared with Schubert, other composers seem 
to have written in prose. His imagination burned 
with a passionate love of Nature. The lakes, the 
woods, the mountain heights, inspired him with 
eloquent reveries that burst into song ; but he al- 
ways saw Nature through the medium of human 
passion and sympathy, which transfigured it. He 
was the faithful interpreter of spiritual suffering, 
and the joy which is born thereof. 

The genius of Schubert seems to have been 
directly formed for the expression of subjective 
emotion in music. That his life should have been 
simultaneous with the perfect literary unfolding 
of the old Volkslied in the superb lyrics of Goethe, 
Heine, and their school, is quite remarkable. Poe- 
try and song clasped hands on the same lofty sum- 
mits -*of genius. Liszt has given to our composer 
the title of le musicien le plus poetique, which 
very well expresses his place in art. 

In ;the . song as created by Schubert and trans- 



SCHUBERT, SCHUMANN, AND FRANZ. 149 

mitted to his successors, there are three forms, the 
first of which is that of the simple Lied, with one 
unchanged melody. A good example of this is the 
setting of Goethe's " Haideroslein," which is full 
of quaint grace and simplicity. A second and 
more elaborate method is what the Germans call 
"through-composed," in which all the different 
feelings are successively embodied in the changes 
of the melody, the sense of unity being preserved 
by the treatment of the accompaniment, or the 
recurrence of the principal motive at the close of 
the song. Two admirable models of this are found 
in the " Lindenbaum " and " Serenade." 

The third and finest art-method, as applied by 
Schubert to lyric music, is the "declamatory." 
In this form we detect the consummate flower of 
the musical lyric. The vocal part is lifted into a 
species of passionate chant, full of dramatic fire 
and color, while the accompaniment, which is ex- 
tremely elaborate, furnishes a most picturesque set- 
ting. The genius of the composer displays itself 
here fully as much as in the vocal treatment. 
When the lyric feeling rises to its climax it ex- 
presses itself in the crowning melody, this high 
tide of the music and poetry being always in uni- 
son. As masterpieces of this form may be cited 
" Die Stadt " and " Der Erlkonig," which stand 
far beyond any other works of the same nature 
m the literature of music. 



150 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

(/ 

IV. 

ROBEET SCHUMANN, the loving critic, admirer, 
and disciple of Schubert in the province of song, 
was in most respects a man of far different type. 
The son of a man of wealth and position, his 
mind and tastes were cultivated from early youth 
witn the utmost care. Schumann is known in Ger- 
many no less as a philosophical thinker and critic 
than as a composer. As the editor of the Neue 
Zeitschrift fttr Musik, he exercised a powerful in- 
fluence over contemporary thought in art-matters, 
and established himself both as a keen and incisive 
thinker and as a master of literary style. Schu- 
mann was at first intended for the law, but his un- 
conquerable taste for music asserted itself in spite 
of family opposition. His acquaintance with the 
celebrated teacher Wieck, whose gifted daughter 
Clara afterward became his wife, finally estab- 
lished his career ; for it was through Wieck's ad- 
vice that the Schumann family yielded their op- 
position to the young man's bent. 

Once settled in his new career, Schumann gave 
himself up to work with the most indefatigable 
ardor. The early part of the present century was 
a halcyon time for the virtuosi, and the fame and 
wealth that poured themselves on such players as 
Paganini and Liszt made such a pursuit tempting 
in the extreme. Fortunately, the young musician 
was saved from such a career. In his zeal of 



SCHUBERT, SCHUMANN, AND FRANZ. 151 

practice and desire to attain a perfectly indepen- 
jlent action for each finger on the piano, Schu- 
mann devised some machinery, the result of which 
was to weaken the sinews of his third finger by 
undue distention. By this he lost the effective 
use of the whole right hand, and of course his 
career as a virtuoso practically closed. 

Music gained in its higher walks what it lost 
in a lower. Schumann devoted himself to com- 
position and aesthetic criticism, after he had passed 
through a thorough course of preparatory studies. 
Both as a writer and a composer Schumann fought 
against Philistinism in music. Ardent, progres- 
sive, and imaginative, he soon became the leader 
of the romantic school, and inaugurated the cru- 
sade which had its parallel in France in that car- 
ried on by Victor Hugo in the domain of poetry. 
His early pianoforte compositions bear the strong 
impress of this fiery, revolutionary spirit. His 
great symphonic works belong to a later period, 
when his whole nature had mellowed and ripened 
without losing its imaginative sweep and brillian- 
cy. Schumann's compositions for the piano and 
orchestra are those by which his name is most 
widely honored, but nowhere do we find a more 
characteristic exercise of his genius than in his 
song, to which this article will call more special 
attention. 

Such works as the "Etudes Symphoniques " 
and the " Kreisleriana " express much of the spirit 






152 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

of unrest and longing aspiration, the struggle to 
get away from prison-bars and limits, which seem 
to have sounded the key-note of Schumann's 
deepest nature. But these feelings could only 
find their fullest outlet in the musical form ex- 
pressly suited to subjective emotion. According- 
ly, the " Sturm and Drang " epoch of his life, when 
all his thoughts and conceptions were most un- 
settled and visionary, was most fruitful in lyric 
song. In Heinrich Heine he found a fitting poet- 
ical co-worker, in whose moods he seemed to see 
a perfect reflection of his own Heine, in whom 
the bitterest irony was wedded to the deepest 
pathos, " the spoiled favorite of the Graces," " the 
knight with the laughing tear in his scutcheon " 
Heine, whose songs are charged with the bright- 
est light and deepest gloom of the human heart. 

Schumann's songs never impress us as being de- 
liberate attempts at creative effort, consciously se- 
lected forms through which to express thoughts 
struggling for speech. They are rather involun- 
tary experiments to relieve one's self of some wo- 
ful burden, medicine for the soul. Schumann is 
never distinctively the lyric composer ; his imagi- 
nation had too broad and majestic a wing. But 
in those moods, peculiar to genius, where the soul 
is flung back on itself with a sense of impotence, 
our composer instinctively burst into song. He 
did not in the least advance or change its artistic 
form, as fixed by Schubert. This, indeed, would 



SCHUBERT, SCHUMANN, AND FRANZ. 153 

have been irreconcilable with his use of the song 
as a simple medium of personal feeling, an outlet 
and safeguard. 

The peculiar place of Schumann as a song- 
writer is indicated by his being called the musi- 
cal exponent of Heine, who seems to be the other 
half of his soul. The composer enters into each 

^ shade and detail of the poet's meaning with an in- 
tensity and fidelity which one can never cease ad- 
miring. It is this phase which gives the Schu- 
mann songs their great artistic value. In their 
clean-cut, abrupt, epigrammatic force there is 
something different from the work of any other 

^musical lyrist. So much has this impressed the 
students of the composer that more than one able 
critic has ventured to prophesy that Schumann'? 
greatest claim to immortality would yet be found 
in such works as the settings of " Ich grolle nicht " 
and the " Dichterliebe " series a perverted esti- 
mate, perhaps, but with a large substratum of 
truth. The duration of Schumann's song-time was 
short, the greater part of his Lieder having been 
written in 1840. After this he gave himself up to 
oratorio, symphony, and chamber-music. 



v. 

AMONG the contemporary masters of the mu- 
sical lyric, the most shining name is that of ROB- 
EET FBANZ, a marked individuality, and, though 



154 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

indirectly moulded by the influence of Schubert 
and Schumann, a creative mind of a striking 
type. 

The art-impulse, strikingly characteristic of 
Franz as a song composer, or, perhaps, to express 
it more accurately, the art-limitation, is that the 
musical inspiration is directly dependent on the 
poetic strength of the Lied. He would be utterly 
at a loss to treat a poem which lacked beauty and 
force. With but little command over absolute 
music, that flow of melody which pours from some 
natures like a perennial spring, the poetry of word 
is necessary to evoke poetry of tone. 

Robert Franz, like Schumann, was embarrassed 
in his youth by the bitter opposition of his family 
to his adoption of music, and, like the great apos- 
tle of romantic music, his steady perseverance 
wore it out. He made himself a severe student 
of the great masters, and rapidly acquired a deep 
knowledge of the mysteries of harmony and coun- 
terpoint. There are no songs with such intricate 
and difficult accompaniments, though always vital 
to the lyrical motive, as those of Robert Franz. 
For a long time, even after he felt himself fully 
equipped, Franz refrained from artistic produc- 
tion, waiting till the processes of fermenting and 
clarifying should end, in the mean while promis- 
ing he would yet have a word to say for him- 
self. 

With him, as with many other men of genius, 



SCHUBERT, SCHUMANN, AND FRANZ. 155 

the blow which broke the seal of inspiration was 
an affair of the heart. He loved a beautiful and 
accomplished woman, but loved unfortunately. 
The catastrophe ripened him into artistic maturity, 
and the very first effort of his lyric power was 
marked by surprising symmetry and fullness of 
power. He wrote to give overflow to his deep 
feelings, and the song came from his heart of 
hearts. Robert Schumann, the generous critic, 
gave this first work an enthusiastic welcome, and 
the young composer leaped into reputation at a 
bound. Of the four hundred or more songs writ- 
ten by Robert Franz, there are perhaps fifty which 
rank as masterpieces. His life has passed devoid 
of incident, though rich in spiritual insight and 
passion, as his Lieder unmistakably show. Though 
the instrumental setting of this composer's songs 
is so elaborate and beautiful oftentimes, we fre- 
quently find him at his best in treating words full 
of the simplicity and naivete of the old Volkslied. 
Many of his songs are set to the poems of Robert 
Burns, one of the few British poets who have 
been able to give their works the subtile singing 
quality which comes not merely of the rhythm 
but of the feeling of the verse. Heine also fur- 
nished him with the themes of many of his finest 
songs, for this poet has been an inexhaustible 
treasure-trove to the modern lyric composer. One 
of the most striking features of Franz as a com- 
poser is found in the delicate light and shade, 



156 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

introduced into the songs by the simplest means, 
which none but the man of genius would think 
of ; for it is the great artist who attains his ends 
through the simplest effects. 

While the same atmosphere of thought and 
feeling is felt in the spiritual life of Robert Franz 
which colored the artistic being of Schubert and 
Schumann, there is a certain repose and balance 
all his own. We get the idea of one never carried 
away by his genius, or delivering passionate ut- 
terances from the Delphic tripod, but the master 
of all his powers, the conscious and skillful ruler 
of his own inspirations. If the sense of spontane- 
ous freshness is sometimes lost, perhaps there is a 
gain in breadth and finish. If Schubert has un- 
equaled melody and dramatic force, Schumann 
drastic and pointed intensity, Robert Franz de- 
serves the palm for the finish and symmetry of 
his work. 

Of the great song composers, Franz Schubert 
is the unquestioned master. To him the modern 
artistic song owes its birth, and, as in the myth 
of Pallas, we find birth and maturity simultaneous. 
It bloomed at once into perfect flower, and the 
world will probably never see any essential ad- 
vances in it. It is this form of music which ap- 
peals most widely to the human heart, to old and 
young, high and low, learned and ignorant. It 
has " the one touch of Nature which makes the 
whole world kin." Even the mind not attuned 



CHOPIN. 157 

to sympathy with the more elaborate forms of 
music is soothed and delighted by it ; for 

"It is old and plain; 

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, 
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones, 
Do use to chant it ; it is silly sooth, 
And dallies with the innocence of love 
Like the old age." 



CHOPIN. 



NEVER has Paris, the Mecca of European art, 
genius, and culture, presented a more brilliant 
social spectacle than it did in 1832. Hitherward 
came pilgrims from all countries, poets, painters, 
and musicians, anxious to breathe the inspiring 
air of the French capital, where society laid its 
warmest homage at the feet of the artist. Here 
came, too, in dazzling crowds, the rich nobles and 
the beautiful women of Europe to find the pleas- 
ure, the freedom, the joyous unrestraint, with 
which Paris offers its banquet of sensuous and 
intellectual delights to the hungry epicure. Then 
as now the queen of the art- world, Paris absorbed 
and assimilated to herself the most brilliant in- 
fluences in civilization. 

In all of brilliant Paris there was no more 
charming and gifted circle than that which gath- 



158 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

ered around the young Polish pianist and com- 
poser, Chopin, then a recent arrival in the gay 
city. His peculiarly original genius, his weird 
and poetic style of playing, which transported 
his hearers into a mystic fairy-land of sunlight 
and shadow, his strangely delicate beauty, the 
alternating reticence and enthusiasm of his man- 
ners, made him the idol of the clever men and 
women, who courted the society of the shy and 
sensitive musician ; for to them he was a fresh 
revelation. Dr. Franz Liszt gives the world some 
charming pictures of this art-coterie, which was 
wont often to assemble at Chopin's rooms in the 
Chaussee d'Antin. 

His room, taken by surprise, is all in darkness 
except the luminous ring thrown off by the can- 
dies on the piano, and the flashes flickering from 
the fireplace. The guests gather around infor- 
mally as the piano sighs, moans, murmurs, or 
dreams under the fingers of the player. Hein- 
rich Heine, the most poetic of humorists, leans 
on the instrument, and asks, as he listens to the 
music and watches the firelight, "if the roses 
always glowed with a flame so triumphant? if 
the trees at moonlight sang always so harmoni- 
ously ? " Meyerbeer, one of the musical giants, 
sits near at hand lost in reverie ; for he forgets 
his own great harmonies, forged with hammer of 
Cyclops, listening to the dreamy passion and 
poetry woven into such quaint fabrics of sound. 



CHOPIN. 159 

Adolphe Nourrit, passionate and ascetic, with the 
spirit of some mediaeval monastic painter, an en- 
thusiastic servant of art in its purest, severest 
form, a combination of poet and anchorite, is also 
there ; for he loves the gentle musician, who seems 
to be a visitor from the world of spirits. Eugene 
Delacroix, one of the greatest of modern paint- 
ers, his keen eyes half closed in meditation, ab- 
sorbs the vague mystery of color which imagina- 
tion translates from the harmony, and attains new 
insight and inspiration through the bright links of 
suggestion by which one art lends itself to an- 
other. The two great Polish poets, Niemcewicz 
and Mickiewicz (the latter the Dante of the Slavic 
race), exiles from their unhappy land, feed their 
sombre sorrow, and find in the wild, Oriental 
rhythms of the player only melancholy memories 
of the past. Perhaps Victor Hugo, Balzac, La- 
martine, or the aged Chateaubriand, also drop in 
by-and-by, to recognize, in the music, echoes of 
the daring romanticism which they opposed to the 
classic and formal pedantry of the time. 

Buried in a fauteuil, with her arms resting 
upon a table, sits Mme. George Sand (that name 
so tragically mixed with Chopin's life), "cu- 
riously attentive, gracefully subdued." With the 
second sight of genius, which pierces through 
the mask, she saw the sweetness, the passion, the 
delicate emotional sensibility of Chopin ; and her 
insatiate nature must unravel and assimilate this 
H 



160 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

new study in human enjoyment and suffering. 
She had then just finished " Lelia," that strange 
and powerful creation, in which she embodied all 
her hatred of the forms and tyrannies of society, 
her craving for an impossible social ideal, her tem- 
pestuous hopes and desires, in such startling types. 
Exhausted by the struggle, she panted for the 
rest and luxury of a companionship in which 
both brain and heart could find sympathy. She 
met Chopin, and she recognized in the poetry of 
his temperament and the fire of his genius what 
she desired. Her personality, electric, energetic, 
and imperious, exercised the power of a magnet 
on the frail organization of Chopin, and he loved 
once and forever, with a passion that consumed 
him ; for in Mme. Sand he found the blessing and 
curse of his life. This many-sided woman, at this 
point of her development, found in the fragile 
Chopin one phase of her nature which had never 
been expressed, and he was sacrificed to the de- 
mands of an insatiable originality, which tried all 
things in turn, to be contented with nothing but 
an ideal which could never be attained. 

About the time of Chopin's arrival in Paris 
the political effervescence of the recent revolu- 
tion had passed into art and letters. It was the 
oft-repeated battle of Romanticism against Clas- 
sicism. There could be no truce between those 
who believed that everything must be fashioned 
after old models, that Procrustes must settle the 



CHOPIN. 161 

height and depth, the length and breadth of art- 
forms, and those who, inspired with the new wine 
of liberty and free creative thought, held that the 
rule of form should always be the mere expres- 
sion of the vital, flexible thought. The one side 
argued that supreme perfection already reached 
left the artist hope only in imitation ; the other, 
that the immaterial beautiful could have no fixed 
absolute form. Victor Hugo among the poets, 
Delacroix among the painters, and Berlioz among 
the musicians, led the ranks of the romantic school. 

Chopin found himself strongly enlisted in this 
contest on the side of the new school. His free, 
unconventional nature found in its teachings a 
musical atmosphere true to the artistic and politi- 
cal proclivities of his native Poland ; for Chopin 
breathed the spirit and tendencies of his people 
in every fibre of his soul, both as man and artist. 
Our musician, however, in freeing himself from 
all servile formulas, sternly repudiated the charla- 
tanism which would replace old abuses with new 
ones. 

Chopin, in his views of his art, did not admit 
the least compromise with those who failed ear- 
nestly to represent progress, nor, on the other hand, 
with those who sought to make their art a mere 
profitable trade. With him, as with all the great 
musicians, his art was a religion something so 
sacred that it must be approached with unsullied 
heart and hand. This reverential feeling was 



162 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

shown in the following touching fact : It was a 
Polish custom to choose the garments in which 
one would be buried. Chopin, though among the 
first of contemporary artists, gave fewer concerts 
than any other ; but, notwithstanding this, he left 
directions to be borne to the grave in the clothes 
he had worn on such occasions. 

ii. 

FREDERICK FRANCIS CHOPIN was born near 
Warsaw, in 1810, of French extraction. He 
learned music at the age of nine from Ziwny, a 
pupil of Sebastian Bach, but does not seem to 
have impressed any one with his remarkable tal- 
ent except Madame Catalan!, the great singer, 
who gave him a watch. Through the kindness 
of Prince Radziwill, an enthusiastic patron of art, 
he was sent to Warsaw College, where his genius 
began to unfold itself. He afterward became a 
pupil of the Warsaw Conservatory, and acquired 
there a splendid mastery over the science of music. 
His labor was prodigious in spite of his frail health ; 
and his knowledge of contrapuntal forms was such 
as to exact the highest encomiums from his in- 
structors. 

Through his brother pupils he was introduced 
to the highest Polish society, for his fellows bore 
some of the proudest names in Poland. Chopin 
seems to have absorbed the peculiarly romantic 
spirit of his race, the wild, imaginative melan- 



CHOPIN. 163 

choly, which, almost gloomy in the Polish peasant, 
when united to grace and culture in the Polish 
noble, offered an indescribable social charm. Bal- 
zac sketches the Polish woman in these pictu- 
resque antitheses : " Angel through love, demon 
through fantasy ; child through faith, sage through 
experience ; man through the brain, woman through 
the heart ; giant through hope, mother through 
sorrow ; and poet through dreams." The Polish 
gentleman was chivalrous, daring, and passionate ; 
the heir of the most gifted and brilliant of the 
Slavic races, with a proud heritage of memory 
which gave his bearing an indescribable dignity, 
though the son of a fallen nation. Ardently de- 
voted to pleasure, the Poles embodied in their 
national dances wild and inspiring rhythms, a 
glowing poetry of sentiment as well as motion, 
which mingled with their Bacchanal fire a chaste 
and lofty meaning that became at times funereal. 
Polish society at this epoch pulsated with an ori- 
ginality, an imagination, and a romance, which 
transfigured even the common things of life. 

It was amid such an atmosphere that Cho- 
pin's early musical career was spent, and his genius 
received its lasting impress. One afternoon in 
after-years he was playing to one of the most dis- 
tinguished women in Paris, and she said that his 
music suggested to her those gardens in Turkey 
where bright parterres of flowers and shady bowers 
were strewed with gravestones and burial mounds. 



164 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

This underlying depth of melancholy Chopin's mu- 
sic expresses most eloquently, and it may be called 
the perfect artistic outcome of his people ; for 
in his sweetest tissues of sound the imagination 
can detect agitation, rancor, revolt, and menace, 
sometimes despair. Chateaubriand dreamed of 
an Eve innocent, yet fallen ; ignorant of all, yet 
knowing all ; mistress, yet virgin. He found this 
in a Polish girl of seventeen, whom he paints as a 
" mixture of Odalisque and Valkyr." The roman- 
tic and fanciful passion of the Poles, bold, yet un- 
worldly, is shown in the habit of drinking the 
health of a -sweetheart from her own shoe. 

Chopin, intensely spiritual by temperament and 
fragile in health, born an enthusiast, was colored 
through and through with the rich dyes of Orien- 
tal passion ; but with these were mingled the fan- 
tastic and ideal elements which, 

" Wrapped in sense, yet dreamed of heavenlier joys." 

And so he went to Paris, the city of his fate, ripe 
for the tragedy of his life. After the revolution 
of 1830, he started to go to London, and, as he 
said, " passed through Paris." Yet Paris he did 
not leave till he left it with Mme. Sand to live 
a brief dream of joy in the beautiful isle of Ma- 
jorca. 

in. 

LISZT describes Chopin in these words : " His 
blue eyes were more spiritual than dreamy ; his 



CHOPIX. 165 

bland smile never writhed into bitterness. The 
transparent delicacy of his complexion pleased the 
eye ; his fair hair was soft and silky ; his nose 
slightly aquiline ; his bearing so distinguished, 
and his manners stamped with such high breeding, 
that involuntarily he was always treated en prince. 
His gestures were many and graceful ; the tones 
of his voice veiled, often stifled. His stature was 
low, his limbs were slight." Again, Mme. Sand 
paints him even more characteristically in her 
novel " Lucrezia Floriani : " " Gentle, sensitive, 
and very lovely, he united the charm of adoles- 
cence with the suavity of a more mature age ; 
through the want of muscular development he re- 
tained a peculiar beauty, an exceptional physiog- 
nomy, which, if we may venture so to speak, be- 
longed to neither age nor sex. ... It was more like 
the ideal creations with which the poetry of the 
middle ages adorned the Christian temples. The 
delicacy of his constitution rendered him interest- 
ing in the eyes of women. The full yet graceful 
cultivation of his mind, the sweet and captivating 
originality of his conversation, gained for him the 
attention of the most enlightened men ; while 
those less highly cultivated liked him for the ex- 
quisite courtesy of his manners." 

All this reminds us of Shelley's dream of Her- 
maphroditus, or perhaps of Shelley himself, for 
Chopin was the Shelley of music. 

His life in Paris was quiet and retired. The 



166 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

most brilliant and beautiful women desired to be 
his pupils, but Chopin refused except where he 
recognized in the petitioners exceptional earnest- 
ness and musical talent. He gave but few con- 
certs, for his genius could not cope with great 
masses of people. He said to Liszt : "I am not 
suited for concert-giving. The public intimidate 
me, their breath stifles me. You are destined for 
it ; for when you do not gain your public, you have 
the force to assault, to overwhelm, to compel 
them." It was his delight to play to a few chosen 
friends, and to evoke for them such dreams from 
the ivory gate, which Virgil fabled to be the por- 
tal of Elysium, as to make his music 

" The silver key of the fountain of tears, 

Where the spirit drinks till the brain is wild : 

Softest grave of a thousand fears, 
Where their mother, Care, like a weary child, 

Is laid asleep in a bed of flowers." 

He avoided general society, finding in the 
great artists and those sympathetic with art his 
congenial companions. His life was given up to 
producing those unique compositions which make 
him, par excellence, the king of the pianoforte. 
He was recognized by Liszt, Kalkbrenner, Pleyel, 
Field, and Meyerbeer, as being the most wonderful 
of players ; yet he seemed to disdain such a repu- 
tation as a cheap notoriety, ceasing to appear in 
public after the first few concerts, which produced 
much excitement and would have intoxicated most 



CHOPIN. 

performers. He sought largely the society of the 
Polish exiles, men and women of the highest rank 
who had thronged to Paris. 

His sister Louise, whom he dearly loved, fre- 
quently came to Paris from Warsaw to see him ; 
and he kept up a regular correspondence with his 
own family. Yet he abhorred writing so much 
that he would go to any shifts to avoid answering 
a note. Some of his beautiful countrywomen, 
however, possess precious memorials in the shape 
of letters written in Polish, which he loved much 
more than French. His thoughtfulness was con- 
tinually sending pleasant little gifts and souve- 
nirs to his Warsaw friends. This tenderness and 
consideration displayed itself too in his love of 
children. He would spend whole evenings in play- 
ing blind-man's-buff or telling them charming 
fairy-stories from the folk-lore in which Poland is 
singularly rich. 

Always gentle, he yet knew how to rebuke ar- 
rogance, and had sharp repartees for those who 
tried to force him into musical display. On one 
occasion, when he had just left the dining-room, 
an indiscreet host, who had had the simplicity to 
promise his guests some piece executed by him as 
a rare dessert, pointed him to an open piano. 
Chopin quietly refused, but on being pressed said, 
with a languid and sneering drawl : " Ah, sir, I 
have just dined ; your hospitality, I see, demands 
payment." 



168 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 



IV. 

MME. SAND, in her " Lettres d'un Voyageur," 
depicts the painful lethargy which seizes the ar- 
tist when, having incorporated the emotion which 
inspired him in his work, his imagination still re- 
mains under the dominance of the insatiate idea, 
without being able to find a new incarnation. She 
was suffering in this way when the character of 
Chopin excited her curiosity and suggested a 
healthful and happy relief. Chopin dreaded to 
meet this modern Sibyl. The superstitious awe 
he felt was a premonition whose meaning was 
hidden from him. They met, and Chopin lost his 
fear in one of those passions which feed on the 
whole being with a ceaseless hunger. 

In the fall of 1837 Chopin yielded to a severe 
attack of the disease which was hereditary in his 
frame. In company with Mme. Sand, who had 
become his constant companion, he went to the 
isle of Majorca, to find rest and medicine in the 
balmy breezes of the Mediterranean. All the 
happiness of Chopin's life was gathered in the 
focus of this experience. He had a most loving 
and devoted nurse, who yielded to all his whims, 
soothed his fretfulness, and watched over him as 
a mother does over a child. The grounds of the 
villa where they lived were as perfect as Nature 
and art could make them, and exquisite scenes 



CHOPIN. 139 

greeted the eye at every turn. Here they spent 
long golden days. 

The feelings of Chopin for his gifted com- 
panion are best painted by herself in the pages of 
" Lucrezia Floriani," where she is the " Floriani," 
Liszt " Count Salvator Albani," and Chopin 
" Prince Karol : " " It seemed as if this fragile 
being was absorbed and consumed by the strength 
of his affection. . . . But he loved for the sake of 
loving. . . . His love was his life, and, delicious or 
bitter, he had not the power of withdrawing him- 
self a single moment from its domination." Slowly 
she nursed him back into temporary health, and in 
the sunlight of her love his mind assumed a gayety 
and cheerfulness it had never known before. 

It had been the passionate hope of Chopin to 
marry Mme. Sand, but wedlock was alien alike to 
her philosophy and preference. After a protracted 
intimacy, she wearied of his persistent entreaties, 
or perhaps her self-development had exhausted 
what it sought in the poet :? musician. An absolute 
separation came, and his mistress buried the epi- 
sode in her life with the epitaph : " Two natures, 
one rich in its exuberance, the other in its exclu- 
siveness, could never really mingle, and a whole 
world separated them." Chopin said: "All the 
cords that bind me to life are broken." His sad 
summary of all was that his life had been an epi- 
sode which began and ended in Paris. What a 
contrast to the being of a few years before, of 



170 TEE GEE AT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

whom it is written : " He was no longer on the 
earth ; he was in an empyrean of golden clouds 
and perfumes ; his imagination, so full of exqui- 
site beauty, seemed engaged in a monologue with 
God himself !"* 

Both Liszt and Mme. Dudevant have painted 
Chopin somewhat as a sickly sentimentalist, living 
in an atmosphere of moonshine and unreality. 
Yet this was not precisely true. In spite of his 
delicacy of frame and romantic imagination, Cho- 
pin was never ill till within the last ten years of 
his life, when the seeds of hereditary consumption 
developed themselves. As a young man he was 
lively and joyous, always ready for frolic, and 
with a great fund of humor, especially in carica- 
ture. Students of human character know how 
consistent these traits are with a deep undercur- 
rent of melancholy, which colors the whole life 
when the immediate impulse of joy subsides. 

From the date of 1840 Chopin's health de- 
clined ; but through the seven years during which 
his connection with Mme. Sand continued, he 
persevered actively in his work of composition. 
The final rupture with the woman he so madly 
loved seems to have been his death-blow. He 
spoke of Mme. Sand without bitterness, but his 
soul pined in the bitter-sweet of memory. He 
recovered partially, and spent a short season of 
concert-giving in London, where he was feted and 

* " Lucrezia Floriani." 



CHOPIN. 171 

caressed by the best society as lie had been in 
Paris. Again he was sharply assailed by his fatal 
malady, and he returned to Paris to die. Let us 
describe one of his last earthly experiences, on 
Sunday, the 15th of October, 1849. 

Chopin had lain insensible from one of his 
swooning attacks for some time. His sister 
Louise was by his side, and the Countess Delphine 
Potocka, his beautiful countrywoman and a most 
devoted friend, watched him with streaming eyes. 
The dying musician became conscious, and faintly 
ordered a piano to be rolled in from the adjoining 
room. He turned to the countess, and whispered, 
feebly, " Sing." She had a lovely voice, and, gath- 
ering herself for the effort, she sang that famous 
canticle to the Virgin which, tradition says, saved 
Stradella's life from assassins. "How beautiful 
it is ! " he exclaimed. " My God ! how very beau- 
tiful ! " Again she sang to him, and the dying 
musician passed into a trance, from which he nev- 
er fully aroused till he expired, two days after- 
ward, in the arms of his pupil, M. Gutman. 

Chopin's obsequies took place at the Madeleine 
Church, and Lablache sang on this occasion the 
same passage, the "Tuba Mirum" of Mozart's 
Requiem Mass, which he had sung at the funeral 
of Beethoven in 1827 ; while the other solos 
were given by Mme. Viardot Garcia and Mme. 
Castellan. He lies in Pere Lachaise, beside Che- 

rubini and Bellini. 
15 



172 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

v. 

THE compositions of Chopin were exclusively 
for the piano ; and alike as composer and virtuoso 
he is the founder of a new school, or perhaps may 
be said to share that honor with Robert Schumann 
the school which to-day is represented in its ad- 
vanced form by Liszt and Von Btilow. Schumann 
called him " the boldest and proudest poetic spirit 
of the times." In addition to this remarkable po- 
etic power, he was a splendidly-trained musician, 
a great adept in style, and one of the most original 
masters of rhythm and harmony that the records 
of music show. All his works, though wanting 
in breadth and robustness of tone, are character- 
ized by the utmost finish and refinement. Full of 
delicate and unexpected beauties, elaborated with 
the finest touch, his effects are so quaint and fresh 
as to fill the mind of the listener with pleasurable 
sensations, perhaps not to be derived from grand- 
er works. 

Chopin was essentially the musical exponent 
of his nation ; for he breathed in all the forms of 
his art the sensibilities, the fires, the aspirations, 
and the melancholy of the Polish race. This is 
not only evident in his polonaises, hig waltzes and 
mazurkas, in which the wild Oriental rhythms of 
the original dances are treated with the creative 
skill of genius ; Tbut also in the 'etudes, the pre- 
ludes, noctures, scherzos, ballads, etc., with which 



CHOPIN. 173 

he so enriched musical literature. His genius 
could never confine itself within classic bonds, 
but, fantastic and impulsive, swayed and bent it- 
self with easy grace to inspirations that were al- 
ways novel and startling, though his boldness was 
chastened by deep study and fine art-sense. 

All of the suggestions of the quaint and beau- 
tiful Polish dance-music were worked by Chopin 
into a* variety of forms, and were greatly enriched 
by his skill in handling. He dreamed out his 
early reminiscences in music, and these national 
memories became embalmed in the history of art. 
The polonaises are marked by the fire and ardor 
of his soldier race, and the mazurkas are full of 
the coquetry and tenderness of his countrywomen; 
while the ballads are a free and powerful render- 
ing of. Polish folk-music, beloved alike in the 
herdsman's hut and the palace of the noble. In 
deriving his inspiration direct from the national 
heart, Chopin did what Schumann, Schubert, and 
Weber did in Germany, what Rossini did in Italy, 
and shares with them a freshness of melodic pow- 
er to be derived from no other source. Rather 
tender and elegiac than vigorous, the deep sad- 
ness underlying the most sparkling forms of his 
work is most notable. One can at times almost 
recognize the requiem of a nation in the passion- 
ate melancholy on whose dark background his 
fancy weaves such beautiful figures and colors. 

Franz Liszt, in characterizing Chopin as a 



174 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

composer, furnishes an admirable study : " We 
meet with beauties of a high order, expressions 
entirely new, and a harmonic tissue as original as 
erudite. In his compositions boldness is always 
justified ; richness, often exuberance, never inter- 
feres with clearness ; singularity never degener- 
ates into the uncouth and fantastic ; the sculptur- 
ing is never disordered ; the luxury of ornament 
never overloads the chaste eloquence of the prin- 
cipal lines. His best works abound in combina- 
tions which may be said to be an epoch in the 
handling of musical style. Daring, brilliant, and 
attractive, they disguise their profundity under 
so much grace, their science under so many 
charms, that it is with difficulty we free ourselves 
sufficiently from their magical inthrallment, to 
judge coldly of their theoretical value." 

As a romance composer Chopin struck out his 
own path, and has no rival. Full of originality, 
his works display the utmost dignity and refine- 
ment. He revolted from the bizarre and eccentric, 
though the peculiar influences which governed his 
development might well have betrayed one less 
finely organized. 

As a musical poet, embodying the feelings and 
tendencies of a people, Chopin advances his chief 
claim to his place in art. He did not task himself 
to be a national musician ; for he is utterly with- 
out pretense and affectation, and sings spontane- 
ously, without design or choice, from the fullness 



CHOPIN. 175 

of a rich nature. He collected "in luminous 
sheaves the impressions felt everywhere through 
his country vaguely felt, it is true, yet in frag- 
ments pervading all hearts." 

Chopin was repelled by the lusty and almost 
coarse humor sometimes displayed by Schubert, 
for he was painfully fastidious. He could not 
fully understand nor appreciate Beethoven, whose 
works are full of lion-marrow, robust and mascu- 
line alike in conception and treatment. He did 
not admire Shakespeare, because his great delinea- 
tions are too vivid and realistic. Our musician 
was essentially a dreamer and idealist. His range 
was limited, but within it he reached perfection 
of finish and originality never surpassed. But, 
with all his limitations, the art-judgment of the 
world places him high among those 

u . . . . whom Art's service pure 

Hallows and claims, whose hearts are made her throne, 
Whose lips her oracle, ordained secure 
To lead a priestly life and feed the ray 
Of her eternal shrine ; to them alone 
Her glorious countenance unveiled is shown." 



176 THE SREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 
WEBER. 



THE genius which inspired the three great 
works, "Per Freischutz," " Euryanthe," and " Obe- 
ron," has stamped itself as one of the most origi- 
nal and characteristic in German music. Full of 
bold and surprising strokes of imagination, these 
operas are marked by the true atmosphere of na- 
tional life and feeling, and we feel in them the 
fresh, rich color of the popular traditions and 
song-music which make the German Lieder such 
an inexhaustible treasure-trove. As Weber was 
maturing into that fullness of power which gave 
to the world his greater works, Germany had been 
wrought into a passionate patriotism by the Napo- 
leonic wars. The call to arms resounded from 
one end of the Fatherland to the other. Every 
hamlet thrilled with fervor, and all the resources 
of national tradition were evoked to heighten the 
love of country into a puissance which should save 
the land. Germany had been humiliated by a 
series of crushing defeats, and national pride was 
stung to vindicate the grand old memories. France, 
in answer to a similar demand for some art-expres- 
sion of its patriotism, had produced its Rouget de 
Lisle ; Germany produced the poet Korner and 
the musician Weber. 

It is not easy to appreciate the true quality 



WEBER. 177 

and significance of Weber's art-life without con- 
sidering the peculiar state of Germany at the 
time ; for if ever creative imagination was forged 
and fashioned by its environments into a logical 
expression of public needs and impulses, it was in 
the case of the father of German romantic opera. 
This inspiration permeated the whole soil of na- 
tional thought, and its embodiment in art and let- 
ters has hardly any parallel except in that brilliant 
morning of English thought which we know as 
the Elizabethan era. To understand Weber the 
composer, then, we must think of him not only as 
the musician, but as the patriot and revivalist of 
ancient tendencies in art, drawn directly from the 
warm heart of the people. 

KARL MARIA VON WEBER was born at Eutin, 
in Holstein, December 18, 1786. His father had 
been a soldier, but, owing to extravagance and 
folly, had left the career of arms, and, being an 
educated musician, had become by turns attached 
to an orchestra, director of a theatre, Kapellmei- 
ster, and wandering player never remaining long 
in one position, for he was essentially vagrant and 
desultory in character. Whatever Karl Maria 
had to suffer from his father's folly and eccentric- 
ity, he was indebted to him for an excellent train- 
ing in the art of which he was to become so brill- 
iant an ornament. He had excellent masters in 
singing and the piano, as also in drawing and en- 
graving. So he grew up a melancholy, imagina- 



178 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

tive recluse, absorbed in his studies, and living in 
a dream-land of his own, which he peopled with 
ideal creations. His passionate love of Nature, 
tinged with old German superstition, planted in 
his imagination those fruitful germs which bore 
such rich results in after-years. 

In 1797 Weber studied the piano and composi- 
tion under Hanschkel, a thoroughly scientific musi- 
cian, and found in his severe drill a happy coun- 
ter-balancing influence to the more desultory stud- 
ies which had preceded. Major Weber's restless 
tendencies did not permit his family to remain 
long in one place. In 1798 they moved to Salz- 
burg, where young Weber was placed at the mu- 
sical institute of which Michael Haydn, brother 
of the great Joseph, was director. Here a varie- 
ty of misfortunes assailed the Weber family. 
Major Franz Anton was unsuccessful in all his 
theatrical undertakings, and extreme poverty 
stared them all in the face. The gentle mother, 
too, whom Karl so dearly loved, sickened and 
died. This was a terrible blow to the affection- 
ate boy, from which he did not soon recover. 

The next resting-place in the pilgrimage of 
the Weber family was Munich, where Major 
Weber, who, however flagrant his shortcomings 
in other ways, was resolved that the musical pow- 
ers of his son should be thoroughly trained, placed 
him under the care of the organist Kalcher for 
studies in composition. 



WEBER. 179 

For several years, Karl was obliged to lead the 
shifting, nomadic sort of life, never stop- 
ping long, but dragged hither and thither in obe- 
dience to his father's vagaries and necessities, but 
always studying under the best masters who could 
be obtained. While under Kalcher, several masses, 
sonatas, trios, and an opera, " Die Macht der Liebe 
und des Weins " (" The Might of Love and Wine "), 
were written. Another opera, "Das Waldmad- 
chen" ("The Forest Maiden"), was composed 
and produced when he was fourteen ; and two 
years later in Salzburg he composed "Peter 
Schmoll und seine Nachbarn," an operetta, which 
exacted warm praise from Michael Haydn. 

At the age of seventeen he became the pupil 
of the great teacher Abbe* Yogler, under whose 
charge also Meyerbeer was then studying. Our 
young composer worked with great assiduity un- 
der the able instruction of Vogler, who was of 
vast service in bringing the chaos of his previous 
contradictory teachings into order and light. All 
these musical Wanderjahre, however trying, had 
steeled Karl Maria into a stern self-reliance, and 
he found in his skill as an engraver the means to 
remedy his father's wastefulness and folly. 

ii. 

A CURIOUS episode in Weber's life was his 
connection with the royal family of WUrtemberg, 
where he found a dissolute, poverty-stricken court, 



180 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

and a whimsical, arrogant, half -crazy king. Here 
he remained four years in a half -official musical 
position, his nominal duty being that of secretary 
to the king's brother, Prince Ludwig. This part 
of his career was almost a sheer waste, full of 
dreary and irritating experiences, which Weber 
afterward spoke of with disgust and regret. His 
spirit revolted from the capricious tyranny which 
he was obliged to undergo, but circumstances seem 
to have coerced him into a protracted endurance of 
the place. His letters tell us how bitterly he de- 
tested the king and his dull, pompous court, though 
Prince Ludwig in a way seemed to have been at- 
tached to his secretary. One of his biographers 
says : 

" "Weber hated the king, of whose wild caprice 
and vices he witnessed daily scenes, before whose 
palace-gates he was obliged to slink bareheaded, 
and who treated him with unmerited ignominy. 
Sceptre and crown had never been imposing ob- 
jects in his eyes, unless worn by a worthy man ; 
and consequently he was wont, in the thoughtless 
levity of youth, to forget the dangers he ran, and 
to answer the king with a freedom of tone which 
the autocrat was all unused to hear. In turn he 
was detested by the monarch. As negotiator for 
the spendthrift Prince Ludwig, he was already 
obnoxious enough ; and it sometimes happened 
that, by way of variety to the customary torrent 



WEBER. igi 

of invective, the king, after keeping the secretary 
for hours in his antechamber, would receive him 
only to turn him rudely out of the room, without 
hearing a word he had to say." 

At last Karl Maria's indignation burst over 
bounds at some unusual indignity ; and he played 
a practical joke on the king. Meeting an old 
woman in the palace one day near the door of the 
royal sanctum, she asked him where she could find 
the court-washerwoman. " There," said the* reck- 
less Weber, pointing to the door of the king's 
cabinet. The king, who hated old women, was 
in a transport of rage, and, on her terror-stricken 
explanation of the intrusion, had no difficulty in 
fixing the mischief in the right quarter. Weber 
was thrown into prison, and had it not been for 
Prince Ludwig's intercession he would have re- 
mained there for several years. While confined 
he managed to compose one of his most beautiful 
songs, " Ein steter Kampf ist unser Leben." He 
had not long been released when he was again im- 
prisoned on account of some of his father's 
wretched follies, that arrogant old gentleman be- 
ing utterly reckless how he involved others, so 
long as he carried out his own selfish purposes and 
indulgence. His friend Danzi, director of the 
royal opera at Stuttgart, proved his good genius 
in this instance ; for he wrangled with the king 
till his young friend was released. 



JL82 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

Weber's only consolations during this dismal 
life in Stuttgart were the friendship of Danzi, 
and his love for a beautiful singer named Gretchen. 
Danzi was a true mentor and a devoted friend. 
He was wont to say to Karl : " To be a true artist, 
you must be a true man." But the lovely Gret- 
chen, however she may have consoled his some- 
what arid life, was not a beneficial influence, for 
she led him into many sad extravagances and an 
unwholesome taste for playing the cavalier. 

In spite of his discouraging surroundings, 
Weber's creative power was active during this 
period, and showed how, perhaps unconsciously 
to himself, he was growing in power and depth of 
experience. He wrote the cantata " Der erste 
Ton," a large number of songs, the first of his 
great piano sonatas, several overtures and sym- 
phonies, and the opera " Sylvana " (" Das Wald- 
madchen " rewritten and enlarged), which, both in 
its music and libretto, seems to have been the pre- 
cursor of his great works " Der Freischiitz " and 
" Euryanthe." At the first performance of " Syl- 
vana " in Frankfort, September 16, 1810, he met 
Miss Caroline Brandt, who sang the principal 
character. She afterward became his wife, and 
her love and devotion were the solace of his 
life. 

Weber spent most of the year 1810 in Darm- 
stadt, where he again met Vogler and Meyerbeer. 
Vogler's severe artistic instructions were of great 



WEBER. 183 

value to Weber in curbing his extravagance, and 
impressing on him that restraint was one of the 
most valuable factors in art. What Vogler 
thought of Weber we learn from a letter in 
which he writes : " Had I been forced to leave 
the world before I found these two, Weber and 
Meyerbeer, I should have died a miserable man." 

* 

in. 

IT was about this time, while visiting Mann- 
heim, that the idea of " Der FreischtLtz " first 
entered his mind. His friend the poet Kind was 
with him, and they were ransacking an old. book, 
ApePs " Ghost Stories." One of these dealt with 
the ancient legend of the hunter Bartusch, a 
woodland myth ranking high in German folk-lore. 
They were both delighted with the fantastic and 
striking story, full of the warm coloring of Na- 
ture, and the balmy atmosphere of the forest and 
mountain. They immediately arranged the frame- 
work of the libretto, afterward written by Kind, 
and set to such weird and enchanting music by 
Weber. 

In 1811 Weber began to give concerts, for his 
reputation was becoming known far and wide as 
a brilliant composer and virtuoso. For two 
years he played a round of concerts in Munich, 
Leipsic, Gotha, Weimar, Berlin, and other places. 
He was everywhere warmly welcomed. Licht en- 
stein, in his " Memoir of Weber," writes of his Ber- 
16 



184 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

lin reception : " Young artists fell on their knees 
before him ; others embraced him wherever they 
could get at him. All crowded around him, till his 
head was crowned, not with a chaplet of flowers, 
but a circlet of happy faces." The devotion of 
his friends, his happy family relations, the suc- 
cess of his published works, conspired to make 
Weber cheerful and joyous beyond his wont, for 
he was naturally of a melancholy and serious 
turn, disposed to look at life from its tragic 
side. * 

In 1813 he was called to Prague to direct the 
music of the German opera in that Bohemian 
capital. The Bohemians had always been a highly 
musical race, and their chief city is associated in 
the minds of the students of music as the place 
where many of the great operas were first pre- 
sented to the public. Mozart loved Prague, for 
he found in its people the audiences who appre- 
ciated and honored him the most. Its traditions 
were honored in their treatment of Weber, for his 
three years there were among the happiest of his 
life. 

Our composer wrote his opera of " Der Frei- 
schiitz" in Dresden. It was first produced in the 
opera-house of that classic city, but it was not till 
1821, when it was performed in Berlin, that its 
greatness was recognized. Weber can best tell 
the story of its reception himself. In his letter 
to his co-author, Kind, he writes : 



WEBER. 185 

"The free-shooter has hit the mark. The 
second representation has succeeded as well as the 
first ; there was the same enthusiasm. All the 
places in the house are taken for the third, which 
comes off to-morrow. It is the greatest triumph 
one can have. You cannot imagine what a lively 
interest your text inspires from beginning to end. 
How happy I should have been if you had only 
been present to hear it for yourself ! Some of the 
scenes produced an effect which I was far from 
anticipating ; for example, that of the young girls. 
If I see you again at Dresden, I will tell you all 
about it ; for I cannot do it justice in writing. 
How much I am indebted to you for your mag- 
nificent poem ! I embrace you with the sincerest 
emotion, returning to your muse the laurels I owe 
her. God grant that you may be happy. Love 
him who loves you with infinite respect. 

"Your WEBER." 

"Der Freischiitz" was such a success as to 
place the composer in the front ranks of the lyric 
stage. The striking originality, the fire, the pas- 
sion of his music, the ardent national feeling, and 
the freshness of treatment, gave a genuine shock 
of delight and surprise to the German world. 

IV. 

THE opera of " Preciosa," also a masterpiece, 
was given shortly after with great kdat y though 



186 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

it failed to inspire the deep enthusiasm which 
greeted " Der Freischutz." In 1823, " Euryanthe " 
was produced in Berlin a work on which Weber 
exhausted all the treasures of his musical genius. 
Without the elements of popular success which 
made his first great opera such an immediate fa- 
vorite, it shows the most finished and scholarly 
work which Weber ever attained. Its symmetry 
and completeness, the elaboration of all the forms, 
the richness and variety of the orchestration, bear 
witness to the long and thoughtful labor expend- 
ed on it. It gradually won its way to popular 
recognition, and has always remained one of the 
favorite works of the German stage. 

The opera of " Oberon " was Weber's last 
great production. The celebrated poet Wieland 
composed the poem underlying the libretto, from 
the mediaeval romance of Huon of Bordeaux. 
The scenes are laid in fairy-land, and it may be 
almost called a German " Midsummer - Night's 
Dream," though the story differs widely from the 
charming phantasy of our own Shakespeare. The 
opera of " Oberon " was written for Kemble, of 
the Covent Garden theatre, in London, and was 
produced by Weber under circumstances of fail- 
ing health and great mental depression. The 
composer pressed every energy to the utmost to 
meet his engagement, and it was feared by his 
friends that he would not live to see it put on the 
stage. It did, indeed, prove the song of the dying 



WEBER. 187 

swan, for he only lived four months after reaching 
London. " Oberon " was performed with immense 
success under the direction of Sir George Smart, 
and the fading days of the author were cheered 
by the acclamations of the English public ; but 
the work cost him his life. He died in London, 
June 5, 1826. His last words were : " God reward 
you for all your kindness to me. Now let me 
sleep." 

Apart from his dramatic compositions, Weber 
is known for his many beautiful overtures and 
symphonies for the orchestra, and his various 
works for the piano, from sonatas to waltzes and 
minuets. Among his most pleasing piano-works 
are the " Invitation to the Waltz," the " Perpet- 
ual Rondo," and the "Polonaise in E major." 
Many of his songs rank among the finest German 
lyrics. He would have been recognized as an able 
composer had he not produced great operas ; but 
the superior excellence of these cast all his other 
compositions in the shade. 

Weber was fortunate in having gifted poets 
to write his dramas. As rich as he was in melodic 
affluence, his creative faculty seems to have had 
its tap-root in deep personal feelings and enthusi- 
asms. One of the most poetic and picturesque of 
composers, he needed a powerful exterior sugges- 
tion to give his genius wings and fire. The Ger- 
many of his time was alive with patriotic ardor, 
and the existence of the nation gathered from its 



188 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

emergencies new strength and force. The heart 
of Weber beat strong with the popular life. Ro- 
mantic and serious in his taste, his imagination fed 
on old German tradition and song, and drew from 
them its richest food. The whole life of the Fa- 
therland, with its glow of love for home, its keen 
sympathies with the influences of Nature, its fan- 
tastic play of thought, its tendency to embody the 
primitive forces in weird myths, found in Weber 
an eloquent exponent ; and we perceive in his 
music all the color and vividness of these influ- 
ences. 

Weber's love of Nature was singularly keen. 
The woods, the mountains, the lakes, and the 
streams, spoke to his soul with voices full of mean- 
ing. He excelled in making these voices speak 
and sing ; and he may, therefore, be entitled the 
father of the romantic and descriptive school in 
German operatic music. With more breadth and 
robustness, he expressed the national feelings of 
his people, even as Chopin did those of dying 
Poland. Weber's motives are generally caught 
from the immemorial airs which resound in every 
village and hamlet, and the fresh beat of the Ger- 
man heart sends its thrill through almost every 
bar of his music. Here is found the ultimate sig- 
nificance of his art-work, apart from the mere 
musical beauty of his compositions. 



MENDELSSOHN. 189 

MENDELSSOHK 



FEW careers could present more startling con- 
trasts than those of Mozart and Mendelssohn, in 
many respects of similar genius, but utterly op- 
posed in the whole surroundings of their lives. 
FELIX MENDELSSOHN-BAETHOLDY was the grand- 
son of the celebrated philosopher Moses Mendels- 
sohn, and the son of a rich Hamburg banker. His 
uncles were distinguished in literary and social 
life. His friends from early childhood were emi- 
nent scholars, poets, painters, and musicians, and 
his family moved in the most refined and wealthy 
circles. He was nursed in the lap of luxury, and 
never knew the cold and hunger of life. All the 
good fairies and graces seemed to have smiled 
benignly on his birth, and to have showered 
on him their richest gifts. Many successful 
wooers of the muse have been, fortunately for 
themselves, the heirs of poverty, and became suc- 
cessful only to yield themselves to fat and sloth- 
ful ease. But, with every incitement to an idle and 
contented life, Mendelssohn toiled like a galley- 
slave, and saw in his wealth only the means of a 
more exclusive consecration to his art. A passion- 
ate impulse to labor was the law of his life. 

Many will recollect the brilliant novel " Charles 
Auchester," in which, under the names of Sera- 



190 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

phael, Aronach, Charles Auchester, Julia Bennett, 
and Starwood Burney, are painted the characters 
of Mendelssohn, Zelter his teacher, Joachim the 
violinist, Jenny Lind, and Sterndale Bennett the 
English composer. The brilliant coloring does 
not disguise nor flatter the lofty Christian purity, 
the splendid genius, and the great personal charm 
of the composer, who shares in largest measure 
the homage which the English public lays at the 
feet of Handel. 

As child and youth Mendelssohn, born at Ham- 
burg, February 3, 1809, displayed the same pre- 
cocity of talent as was shown by Mozart. Sir 
Julius Benedict relates his first meeting with him. 
He was walking in Berlin with Von Weber, and the 
latter called his attention to a boy about eleven 
years old, who, perceiving the author of "Der 
Freischutz," gave him a hearty greeting. " 'Tis 
Felix Mendelssohn," said Weber, introducing the 
marvelous boy. Benedict narrates his amazement 
to find the extraordinary attainments of this beau- 
tiful youth, with curling auburn hair, brilliant 
clear eyes, and lips smiling with innocence and 
candor. Five minutes after young Mendelssohn 
had astonished his English friend by his admirable 
performance of several of his own compositions, 
he forgot Weber, quartets, and counterpoint, to 
leap over the garden hedges and ciimb the trees 
like a squirrel. When scarcely twenty years old 
he had composed his octet, three quartets for 



MENDELSSOHN. 191 

the piano and strings, two sonatas, two sympho- 
nies, his first violin quartet, various operas, many 
songs, and the immortal overture of "A Midsum- 
mer-Night's Dream." 

Mendelssohn received an admirable education, 
was an excellent classicist and linguist, and during 
a short residence at Diisseldorf showed such talent 
for painting as to excite much wonder. Before 
he was twenty he was the friend of Goethe and 
Herder, who delighted in a genius so rich and 
symmetrical. Some of Goethe's letters are full of 
charming expressions of praise and affection, for 
the aged Jupiter of German literature found in 
the promise of this young Apollo something of 
the many-sided power which made himself so re- 
markable. 

n. 

THE Mendelssohn family had moved to Berlin 
when Felix was only three years old, and the Ber- 
liners always claimed him as their own. Strange 
to say, the city of his birth did not recognize his 
talent for many years. At the age of twenty he 
went to England, and the high breeding, personal 
beauty, and charming manner of the young musi- 
cian gave him the entrbe into the most fastidi- 
ous and exclusive circles. His first symphony 
and the "Midsummer-Night's Dream" overture 
stamped his power with the verdict of a warm en- 
thusiasm ; for London, though cold and conserva- 



192 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

tive, is prompt to recognize a superior order of 
merit. 

His travels through Scotland inspired Men- 
delssohn with sentiments of great admiration. 
The scenery filled his mind with the highest sug- 
gestions of beauty and grandeur. He afterward 
tells us that " he preferred the cold sky and the 
pines of the north to charming scenes in the 
midst of landscapes bathed in the glowing rays of 
the sun and azure light." The vague Ossianic 
figures that raised their gigantic heads in the fog- 
wreaths of clouded mountain-tops and lonely 
lochs had a peculiar fascination for him, and acted 
like wine on his imagination. The " Hebrides " 
overture was the fruit of this tour, one of the 
most powerful and characteristic of his minor 
compositions. His sister Fanny (Mrs. Hensel) 
asked him to describe the gray scenery of the 
north, and he replied in music by improvising his 
impressions. This theme was afterward worked 
out in the elaborate overture. 

We will not follow him in his various travels 
through France and Italy. Suffice it to say that his 
keen and passionate mind absorbed everything in 
Art which could feed the divine hunger, for he was 
ever discontented, and had his mind fixed on an ab- 
solute and determined ideal. During this time of 
travel he became intimate with the sculptor Thor- 
waldsen, and the painters Leopold Robert and Ho- 
race Yernet. This period produced " Walpurgis 



MENDELSSOHN. 193 

Night," the first of the " Songs without Words," the 
great symphony in A major, and the " Melusine " 
overture. He is now about to enter on the epoch 
which puts to the fullest test the varied resources 
of his genius. To Moscheles he writes, in answer 
to his old teacher's warm praise : " Your praise is 
better than three orders of nobility." For several 
years we see him busy in multifarious ways, com- 
posing, leading musical festivals, concert-giving, 
directing opera-houses, and yet finding time to 
keep up a busy correspondence with the most dis- 
tinguished men in Europe ; for Mendelssohn 
seemed to find in letter- writing a rest for his over- 
taxed brain. 

In 1835 he completed his great oratorio of " St. 
Paul," for Leipsic. The next year he received the 
title of Doctor of Philosophy and the Fine Arts ; 
and in 1837 he married the charming Cecile Jean- 
renaud, who made his domestic life so gentle and 
harmonious. It has been thought strange that 
Mendelssohn should have made so little mention 
of his lovely wife in his letters, so prone as he was 
to speak of aif airs of his daily life. Be this as it 
may, his correspondence with Moscheles, Devrient, 
and others, as well as the general testimony of his 
friends, shows us unmistakably that his home-life 
was blessed in an exceptional degree with intel- 
lectual sympathy, and the tenderest, most thought- 
ful love. 

In 1841 Mendelssohn became Kapellmeister of 



194 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

the Prussian court. He now wrote the " Athalie " 
music, the " Midsummer-Night's Dream," and a 
large number of lesser pieces, including the " Songs 
without Words," and piano sonatas, as well as 
much church music. The greatest work of this 
period was the "Hymn of Praise," a symphonic 
cantata for the Leipsic anniversary of the inven- 
tion of printing, regarded by many as his finest 
composition. 

Mendelssohn always loved England, and made 
frequent visits across the Channel ; for he felt that 
among the English he was fully appreciated, both 
as man and composer. 

His oratorio of " Elijah " was composed for 
the English public, and produced at the great 
Birmingham festival in 1846, under his own direc- 
tion, with magnificent success. It was given a 
second time in April, 1847, with his final refine- 
ments and revisions ; and the event was regarded 
in England as one of the greatest since the days 
of Handel, to whom, as well as to Haydn and 
Beethoven, Mendelssohn showed himself a worthy 
rival in the field of oratorio composition. Of this 
visit to England Lampadius, his friend and biogra- 
pher, writes : " Her Majesty, who as well as her 
husband was a great friend of art, and herself a 
distinguished musician, received the distinguished 
German in her own sitting-room, Prince Albert 
being the only one present besides herself. As he 
entered she asked his pardon for the somewhat 



MENDELSSOHN. 195 

disorderly state of the room, and began to rear- 
range the articles with her own hands, Mendels* 
sohn himself gallantly offering his assistance. 
Some parrots whose cages hung in the room she 
herself carried into the next room, in which Men- 
delssohn helped her also. She then requested her 
guest to play something, and afterward sang some 
songs of his which she had sung at a court con- 
cert soon after the attack on her person. She was 
not wholly pleased, however, with her own per- 
formance, and said pleasantly to Mendelssohn : 
1 1 can do better ask Lablache if I cannot ; but I 
am afraid of you ! ' " 

This anecdote was related by Mendelssohn 
himself to show the graciousness of the English 
queen. It was at this time that Prince Albert 
sent to Mendelssohn the book of the oratorio " Eli- 
jah " with which he used to follow the perform- 
ance, with the following autographic inscription : 

" To the noble artist, who, surrounded by the 
Baal worship of corrupted art, has been able by 
his genius and science to preserve faithfully like 
another Elijah the worship of true art, and once 
more to accustom our ear, lost in the whirl of an 
empty play of sounds, to the pure notes of ex- 
pressive composition and legitimate harmony to 
the great master, who makes us conscious of the 
unity of his conception through the whole maze 

of his creation, from the soft whispering to the 
17 



196 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

mighty raging of the elements : Written in token 
of grateful remembrance by ALBERT. 

" BUCKINGHAM PALACE, April 24, 1847." 

An occurrence at the Birmingham festival 
throws a clear light on Mendelssohn's presence of 
mind, and on his faculty of instant concentration. 
On the last day, among other things, one of Han- 
del's anthems was given. The concert was already 
going on, when it was discovered that the short 
recitative which precedes the " Coronation Hymn," 
and which the public had in the printed text, was 
lacking in the voice parts. The directors were 
perplexed. Mendelssohn, who was sitting in an 
ante-room of the hall, heard of it, and said, " Wait, 
I will help you." He sat down directly at a table, 
and composed the music for the recitative and the 
orchestral accompaniment in about half an hour. 
It was at once transcribed, and given without any 
rehearsal, and went very finely. 

On returning to Leipsic he determined to pass 
the summer in Vevay, Switzerland, on account of 
his failing health, which had begun to alarm him- 
self and his friends. His letters from Switzerland 
at this period show how the shadow of rapidly ap- 
proaching death already threw a deep gloom over 
his habitually cheerful nature. He returned to 
Leipsic, and resumed hard work. His operetta 
entitled " Return from among Strangers " was his 
last production, with the exception of some lively 



MENDELSSOHN. 197 

songs and a few piano pieces of the "Lieder ohne 
Worte," or " Songs without Words," series. Men- 
delssohn was seized with an apoplectic attack on 
October 9, 1847. Second and third seizures quick- 
ly followed, and he died November 4th, aged thir- 
ty-eight years. 

All Germany and Europe sorrowed over the 
loss of this great musician, and his funeral was 
attended by many of the most distinguished per- 
sons from all parts of the land, for the loss was 
felt to be something like a national calamity. 

< 
in. 

MENDELSSOHN was one of the most intelligent 
and scholarly composers of the century. Learned 
in various branches of knowledge, and personally 
a man of unusual accomplishments, his career was 
full of manly energy, enlightened enthusiasm, and 
severe devotion to the highest forms of the art of 
music. Not only his great oratorios, " St. Paul " 
and " Elijah," but his music for the piano, including 
the " Songs without Words," sonatas, and many 
occasional pieces, have won him a high place 
among his musical brethren. As an orchestral 
composer, his overtures are filled with strikingly 
original thoughts and elevated conceptions, ex- 
pressed with much delicacy of instrumental color- 
ing. He was brought but little in contact with 
the French and Italian schools, and there is found 
in his works a severity of art-form which shows 



198 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

how closely he sympathized with Bach and Handel 
in his musical tendencies. He died while at the 
very zenith of his powers, and we may well be- 
lieve that a longer life would have developed 
much richer beauty in his compositions. Short as 
his career was, however, he left a great number 
of magnificent works, which entitle him to a place 
among the Titans of music. 



RICHARD WAGNER. 



IT is curious to note how often art-controversy 
has become edged with a bitterness rivaling even 
the gall and venom of religious dispute. Schol- 
ars have not yet forgotten the fiery war of words 
which raged between Richard Bentley and his op- 
ponents concerning the authenticity of the " Epis- 
tles of Phalaris," nor how literary Germany was 
divided into *wo hostile camps by Wolf's attack 
on the personality of Homer. It is no less fresh 
in the minds of critics how that modern Jupiter, 
Lessing, waged a long and bitter battle with the 
Titans of the French classical drama, and finally 
crushed them with the thunderbolt of the " Dra- 
maturgic ; " nor what acrimony sharpened the dis- 
cussion between the rival theorists in music, Gluck 
andPiccini, at Paris. All of the intensity of these 



RICHARD WAGNER. 199 

art-campaigns, and many of the conditions of the 
last, enter into the contest between Richard Wag- 
ner and the Italianissimi of the present day. 

The exact points at issue were for a long time 
so befogged by the smoke of the battle that many 
of the large class who are musically interested, but 
never had an opportunity to study the question, 
will find an advantage in a clear and comprehen- 
sive sketch of the facts and principles involved. 
Until recently, there were still many people who 
thought of Wagner as a youthful and eccentric 
enthusiast, all afire with misdirected genius, a 
mere carpet-knight on the sublime battle-field of 
art, a beginner just sowing his wild-oats in works 
like "Lohengrin," "Tristan and Iseult," or the 
"Rheingold." It is a revelation full of sugges- 
tive value for these to realize that he is a musical 
thinker, ripe with sixty years of labor and experi- 
ence ; that he represents the rarest and choicest 
fruits of modern culture, not only as musician, 
but as poet and philosopher ; that he is one of the 
few examples in the history of the art where mas- 
sive scholarship and the power of subtile analysis 
have been united, in a preeminent degree, with 
great creative genius. Preliminary to a study of 
what Wagner and his disciples entitle the " Art- 
work of the Future," let us take a swift survey of 
music as a medium of expression for the beautiful, 
and some of the forms which it has assumed. 

This Ariel of the fine arts sends its messages 



200 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

to the human soul by virtue of a fourfold capaci- 
ty : Firstly, the imitation of the voices of Nature, 
such as the winds, the waves, and the cries of ani- 
mals ; secondly, its potential delight as melody, 
modulation, rhythm, harmony in other words, 
its simple worth as a " thing of beauty," without 
regard to cause or consequence ; thirdly, its force 
of boundless suggestion ; fourthly, that affinity 
for union with the more definite and exact forms 
of the imagination (poetry), by which the intel- 
lectual context of the latter is raised to a far high- 
er power of grace, beauty, passion, sweetness, 
without losing individuality of outline like, in- 
deed, the hazy aureole which painters set on the 
brow of the man Jesus, to fix the seal of the ulti- 
mate Divinity. Though several or all of these 
may be united in the same composition, each mu- 
sical work may be characterized in the main as 
descriptive, sensuous, suggestive, or dramatic, ac- 
cording as either element contributes most largely 
to its purpose. Simple melody or harmony ap- 
peals mostly to the sensuous love of sweet sounds. 
The symphony does this in an enlarged and com- 
plicated sense, but is still more marked by the 
marvelous suggestive energy with which it un- 
locks all the secret raptures of fancy, floods the 
border-lands of thought with a glory not to be 
found on sea or land, and paints ravishing pict- 
ures, that come and go like dreams, with colors 
drawn from the " twelve-tinted tone-spectrum." 



RICHARD WAGNER. 201 

Shelley describes this peculiar influence of music 
in his "Prometheus Unbound," with exquisite 
beauty and truth : 

" My soul is an enchanted boat, 
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float 
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing ; 
And thine doth like an angel sit 
Beside the helm conducting it, 
While all the waves with melody are ringing. 
It seems to float ever, forever, 
Upon that many-winding river, 
Between mountains, woods, abysses, 
A paradise of wildernesses." 

As the symphony best expresses the sugges- 
tive potency in music, the operatic form incarnates 
its capacity of definite thought, and the expression 
of that thought. The term " lyric," as applied to 
the genuine operatic conception, is a misnomer. 
Under the accepted operatic form, however, it has 
relative truth, as the main musical purpose of 
opera seems, hitherto, to have been less to fur- 
nish expression for exalted emotions and thoughts, 
or exquisite sentiments, than to grant the vocal 
virtuoso opportunity to display phenomenal qual- 
ities of voice and execution. But all opera, how- 
ever it may stray from the fundamental idea, sug- 
gests this dramatic element in music, just as mere 
lyricism in the poetic art is the blossom from which 
is unfolded the full-blown perfection of the word- 
drama, the highest form of all poetry. 



202 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 



II. 

THAT music, by and of itself, cannot express 
the intellectual element in the beautiful dream- 
images of art with precision, is a palpable truth. 
Yet, by its imperial dominion over the sphere of 
emotion and sentiment, the connection of the lat- 
ter with complicated mental phenomena is made 
to bring into the domain of tone vague and shift- 
ing fancies and pictures. How much further mu- 
sic can be made to assimilate to the other arts in 
directness of mental suggestion, by wedding to it 
the noblest forms of poetry, and making each the 
complement of the other, is the knotty problem 
which underlies the great art-controversy about 
which this article concerns itself. On the one side 
we have the claim that music is the all-sufficient 
law unto itself ; that its appeal to sympathy is 
through the intrinsic sweetness of harmony and 
tune, and the intellect must be satisfied with what 
it may accidentally glean in this harvest-field ; 
that, in the rapture experienced in the sensuous 
apperception of its beauty, lies the highest phase 
of art-sensibility. Therefore, concludes the syllo- 
gism, it matters nothing as to the character of the 
libretto or poem to whose words the music is ar- 
ranged, so long as the dramatic framework suffices 
as a support for the flowery festoons of song, which 
drape its ugliness and beguile attention by the 
fascinations of bloom and grace. On the other 



RICHARD WAGNER. 203 

hand, the apostles of the new musical philosophy 
insist that art is something more than a vehicle 
for the mere sense of the beautiful, an exquisite 
provocation wherewith to startle the sense of a 
selfish, epicurean pleasure ; that its highest func- 
tion to follow the idea of the Greek Plato, and 
the greatest of his modern disciples, Schopenhauer 
is to serve as the incarnation of the true and 
the good ; and, even as Goethe makes the Earth- 
Spirit sing in " Faust " 

" 'Tis thus ever at the loom of Time I ply, 
And weave for God the garment thou seest him by " 

so the highest art is that which best embodies the 
immortal thought of the universe as reflected in 
the mirror of man's consciousness ; that music, as 
speaking the most spiritual language of any of 
the art-family, is burdened with the most pressing 
responsibility as the interpreter between the finite 
and the infinite ; that all its forms must be meas- 
ured by the earnestness and success with which 
they teach and suggest what is best in aspira- 
tion and truest in thought ; that music, when wed- 
ded to the highest form of poetry (the drama), 
produces the consummate art-result, and sacrifice 
to some extent its power of suggestion, only to a*. 
quire a greater glory and influence, that of invest- 
ing definite intellectual images with spiritual rai- 
ment, through which they shine on the supreme 
altitudes of ideal thought ; that to make this mar- 



204 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

riage perfect as an art-form and fruitful in result, 
the two partners must come as equals, neither one 
the drudge of the other ; that in this organic 
fusion music and poetry contribute, each its best, 
to emancipate art from its thralldom to that which 
is merely trivial, commonplace, and accidental, and 
make it a revelation of all that is most exalted in 
thought, sentiment, and purpose. Such is the aes- 
thetic theory of Richard Wagner's art-work, 

in. 

IT is suggestive to note that the earliest recog- 
nized function of music, before it had learned to 
enslave itself to mere sensuous enjoyment, was 
similar in spirit to that which its latest reformer 
demands for it in the art of the future. The glory 
of its birth then shone on its brow. It was the 
handmaid and minister of the religious instinct. 
The imagination became afire with the mystery of 
life and Nature, and burst into the flames and 
frenzies of rhythm. Poetry was born, but instant- 
ly sought the wings of music for a higher flight 
than the mere word would permit. Even the 
great epics of the " Iliad " and " Odyssey " were 
originally sung or chanted by the Homeridse, and 
the same essential union seems to have been in 
some measure demanded afterward in the Greek 
drama, which, at its best, was always inspired 
with the religious sentiment. There is every rea- 
son to believe that the chorus of the drama of 



RICHARD WAGNER. 205 

yEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides uttered their 
comments on the action of the play with such a 
prolongation and variety of pitch in the rhythmic 
intervals as to constitute a sustained and melodic 
recitative. Music at this time was an essential 
part of the drama. When the creative genius of 
Greece had set toward its ebb, they were divorced, 
and music was only set to lyric forms. Such re- 
mained the status of the art till, in the Italian 
Renaissance, modern opera was born in the re- 
union of music and the drama. Like the other 
arts, it assumed at the outset to be a mere revival 
of antique traditions. The great poets of Italy 
had then passed way, and it was left for music to 
fill the void. 

The muse, Polyhymnia, soon emerged from the 
stage of childish stammering. Guittone di Arezzo 
taught her to fix her thoughts in indelible signs, 
and two centuries of training culminated in the 
inspired composers, Orlando di Lasso and Pales- 
trina. Of the gradual degradation of the operatic 
art as its forms became more elaborate and fixed^ 
of the arbitrary transfer of absolute musical forms 
like the aria, duet, finale, etc., into the action of 
the opera without regard to poetic propriety ; of 
the growing tendency to treat the human voice 
like any other instrument, merely to show its re- 
sources as an organ ; of the final utter bondage of 
the poet to the musician, till opera became little 
more than a congeries of musico-gymiiastic forms, 



206 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

wherein the vocal soloists could display their art, 
it needs not to speak at length, for some of these 
vices have not yet disappeared. In the language 
of Dante's guide through the Inferno, at one stage 
of their wanderings, when the sights were pecul- 
iarly mournful and desolate 

" Non raggioniam da lor, ma guarda e passa." 

The loss of all poetic verity and earnestness in 
opera furnished the great composer Gluck with 
the motive of the bitter and protracted contest 
which he waged with varying success throughout 
Europe, though principally in Paris. Gluck bold- 
ly affirmed, and carried out the principle in his 
compositions, that the task of dramatic music was 
to accompany the different phases of emotion in 
the text, and give them their highest effect of 
spiritual intensity. The singer must be the mouth- 
piece of the poet, and must take extreme care in 
giving the full poetical burden of the song. Thus, 
the declamatory music became of great impor- 
tance, and Gluck's recitative reached an unequaled 
degree of perfection. 

The critics of Gluck's time hurled at him the 
same charges which are familiar to us now as com- 
ing from the mouths and pens of the enemies of 
"Wagner's music. Yet Gluck, however conscious 
of the ideal unity between music and poetry, never 
thought of bringing this about by a sacrifice of 
any of the forms of his own peculiar art. His in- 



RICHARD WAGNER. 207 

fluence, however, was very great, and the tradi- 
tions of the great maestro* s art have been kept 
alive in the works of his no less great disciples, 
Mehul, Cherubini, Spontini, and Meyerbeer. 

Two other attempts to ingraft new and vital 
power on the rigid and trivial sentimentality of 
the Italian forms of opera were those of Rossini 
and Weber. The former was gifted with the 
greatest affluence of pure melodiousness ever given 
to a composer. But even his sparkling originality 
and freshness did little more than reproduce the 
old forms under a more attractive guise. "Weber, 
on the other hand, stood in the van of a movement 
which had its fountain-head in the strong roman- 
tic and national feeling, pervading the whole of 
society and literature. There was a general revi- 
val of mediaeval and popular poetry, with its balmy 
odor of the woods, and fields, and streams. We- 
ber's melody was the direct offspring of the tune- 
fulness of the German Votkslied, and so it ex- 
pressed, with wonderful freshness and beauty, all 
the range of passion and sentiment within the lim- 
its of this pure and simple language. But the 
boundaries were far too narrow to build upon them 
the ultimate union of music and poetry, which 
should express the perfect harmony of the two arts. 
While it is true that all of the great German com- 
posers protested, by their works, against the spirit 
and character of the Italian school of music, Wag- 
ner claims that the first abrupt and strongly- de- 
is 



208 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

fined departure toward a radical reform in art is 
found in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with cho- 
rus. Speaking of this remarkable leap from instru- 
mental to vocal music in a professedly symphonic 
composition, Wagner, in his "Essay on Beetho- 
ven," says : " We declare that the work of art, 
which was formed and quickened entirely by that 
deed, must present the most perfect artistic form, 
i. e., that form in which, as for the drama, so also 
and especially for music, every conventionality 
would be abolished." Beethoven is asserted to 
have founded the new musical school, when he ad- 
mitted, by his recourse to the vocal cantata in the 
greatest of his symphonic works, that he no lon- 
ger recognized absolute music as sufficient unto 
itself. 

In Bach and Handel, the great masters of fugue 
and counterpoint ; in Rossini, Mozart, and Weber, 
the consummate creators of melody then, accord- 
ing to this view, we only recognize thinkers in the 
realm of pure music. In Beethoven, the greatest 
of them all, was laid the basis of the new epoch 
of tone-poetry. In the immortal songs of Schu- 
bert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Franz, 
and the symphonies of the first four, the vitality 
of the reformatory idea is richly illustrated. In 
the music-drama of Wagner, it is claimed by his 
disciples, is found the full flower and development 
of the art- work 

WILLIAM RICHARD WAGNER, the formal pro- 



RICHARD WAGNER. 209 

jector of the great changes whose details are 
yet to be sketched, was born at Leipsic in 1813. 
As a child he displayed no very marked artistic 
tastes, though his ear and memory for music were 
quite remarkable. When admitted to the Kreuz- 
schule of Dresden, the young student, however, 
distinguished himself by his very great talent for 
literary composition and the classical languages. 
To this early culture, perhaps, we are indebted for 
the great poetic power which has enabled him to 
compose the remarkable libretti which have fur- 
nished the basis of his music. His first creative 
attempt was a blood-thirsty drama, where forty- 
two characters are killed, and the few survivors 
are haunted by the ghosts. Young Wagner soon 
devoted himself to the study of music, and, in 
1833, became a pupil of Theodor Weinlig, a dis- 
tinguished teacher of harmony and counterpoint. 
His four years of study at this time were also 
years of activity in creative experiment, as he 
composed four operas. 

His first opera of note was "Rienzi," with 
which he went to Paris in 1837. In spite of 
Meyerbeer's efforts in its favor, this work was re- 
jected, and laid aside for some years. Wagner 
supported himself by musical criticism and other 
literary work, and soon was in a position to offer 
another opera, " Der fliegende Hollander," to the 
authorities of the Grand Opera-House. Again the 
directors refused the work, but were so charmed 



210 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

with the beauty of the libretto that they bought 
it to be reset to music. Until the year 1842, life 
was a trying struggle for the indomitable young 
musician. " Rienzi " was then produced at Dres- 
den, so much to the delight of the King of Saxo- 
ny that the composer was made royal Kapellmei- 
ster and leader of the orchestra. The production 
of " Der fliegende Hollander " quickly followed ; 
next came " Tanhauser " and " Lohengrin," to 
be swiftly succeeded by the " Meistersinger von 
Ntirnberg." This period of our maestro* s musical 
activity also commenced to witness the develop- 
ment of his theories on the philosophy of his art, 
and some of his most remarkable critical writings 
were then given to the world. 

Political troubles obliged Wagner to spend 
seven years of exile in Zurich ; thence he went 
to London, where he remained till 1861 as conduc- 
tor of the London Philharmonic Society. In 
1861 the exile returned to his native country, and 
spent several years in Germany and Russia there 
having arisen quite a furore for his music in the 
latter country. The enthusiasm awakened in 
the breast of King Louis of Bavaria by " Der 
fliegende Hollander" resulted in a summons to 
Wagner to settle at Munich, and with the glories 
of the Royal Opera-House in that city his name 
has since been principally connected. The cul- 
minating art-splendor of his life, however, was 
the production of his stupendous tetralogy, the 



RICHARD WAGNER. 211 

" Ring der Nibelungen," at the great opera-house 
at Baireuth, in the summer of the year 1876. 

IV. 

THE first element to be noted in Wagner's 
operatic forms is the energetic protest against the 
artificial and conventional in music. The utter 
want of dramatic symmetry and fitness in the 
operas we have been accustomed to hear could 
only be overlooked by the force of habit, and the 
tendency to submerge all else in the mere enjoy- 
ment of the music. The utter variance of music 
and poetry was to Wagner the stumbling-block 
which, first of all, must be removed. So he crushed 
at one stroke all the hard, arid forms which ex- 
isted in the lyrical drama as it had been known. 
His opera, then, is no longer a congeries of sepa- 
rate musical numbers, like duets, arias, chorals, 
and finales, set in a flimsy web of formless recita- 
tive, without reference to dramatic economy. His 
great purpose is lofty dramatic truth, and to this 
end he sacrifices the whole framework of accept- 
ed musical forms, with the exception of the cho- 
rus, and this he remodels. The musical energy is 
concentrated in the dialogue as the main factor of 
the dramatic problem, and fashioned entirely ac- 
cording to the requirements of the action. The 
continuous flow of beautiful melody takes the 
place alike of the dry recitative and the set mu- 
sical forms which characterize the accepted school 



212 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

of opera. As the dramatic motif demands, this 
" continuous melody " rises into the highest ecsta- 
sies of the lyrical fervor, or ebbs into a chant-like 
swell of subdued feeling, like the ocean after the 
rush of the storm. If Wagner has destroyed 
musical forms, he has also added a positive ele- 
ment. In place of the aria we have the logos, 
This is the musical expression of the principal 
passion underlying the action of the drama. 
Whenever, in the course of the development of 
the story, this passion comes into ascendency, the 
rich strains of the logos are heard anew, still- 
ing all other sounds. Gounod has, in part, ap- 
plied this principle in "Faust." All. opera-goers 
will remember the intense dramatic effect arising 
from the recurrence of the same exquisite lyric 
outburst from the lips of Marguerite. 

The peculiar character of Wagner's word- 
drama next arouses critical interest and attention. 
The composer is his own poet, and his creative 
genius shines no less here than in the world of 
tone. The musical energy flows entirely from the 
dramatic conditions, like the electrical current 
from the cups of the battery ; and the rhythmi- 
cal structure of the melos (tune) is simply the 
transfiguration of the poetical basis. The poetry, 
then, is all-important in the music-drama. Wag- 
ner has rejected the forms of blank verse and 
rhyme as utterly unsuited to the lofty purposes of 
music, and has gone to the metrical principle of 



RICHARD WAGNER. 213 

all the Teutonic and Slavonic poetry. This rhyth- 
mic element of alliteration, or staffrhyme, We find 
magnificently illustrated in the Scandinavian Ed- 
das, and even in our own Anglo-Saxon fragment^ 
of the days of Csedmon and Alcuin. By the use 
of this new form, verse and melody glide togeth- 
er in one exquisite rhythm, in which it seems im- 
possible to separate the one from the other. The 
strong accents of the alliterating syllables supply 
the music with firmness, while the low-toned syl- 
lables give opportunity for the most varied nu- 
ances of declamation. 

The first radical development of Wagner's 
theories we see in " The Flying Dutchman." In 
"Tanhauser" and "Lohengrin" they find full 
sway. The utter revolt of his mind from the 
trivial and commonplace sentimentalities of Ital- 
ian opera led him to believe that the most heroic 
and lofty motives alone should furnish the dramat- 
ic foundation of opera. For a while he oscillated 
between history and legend, as best adapted to 
furnish his material. In his selection of the 
dream-land of myth and legend, we may detect 
another example of the profound and exigeant 
art-instincts which have ruled the whole of Wag- 
ner's life. There could be no question as to the 
utter incongruity of any dramatic picture of or- 
dinary events, or ordinary personages, finding ex- 
pression in musical utterance. Genuine and pro- 
found art must always be consistent with itself, 



214 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

and what we recognize as general truth. Even 
characters set in the comparatively near back- 
ground of history are too closely related to our 
own familiar surroundings of thought and mood 
to be regarded as artistically natural in the use of 
music as the organ of the every-day life of emo- 
tion and sentiment. But with the dim and heroic 
shapes that haunt the border-land of the super- 
natural, which we call legend, the case is far dif- 
ferent. This is the drama of the demigods, liv- 
ing in a different atmosphere from our own, how- 
ever akin to ours may be their passions and pur- 
poses. For these we are no longer compelled to 
regard the medium of music as a forced and un- 
truthful expression, for do they not dwell in the 
magic lands of the imagination? All sense of 
dramatic inconsistency instantly vanishes, and the 
conditions of artistic illusion are perfect. 

" 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, 
And clothes the mountains with their azure hue." 

\ 

Thus all of Wagner's works, from " Der flie- 
gende Hollander " to the " King der Nibelungen," 
have been located in the world of myth, in obedi- 
ence to a profound art-principle. The opera of 
" Tristan and Iseult," first performed in 1865, an- 
nounced Wagner's absolute emancipation, both in 
the construction of music and poetry, from the 
time-honored and time-corrupted canons, and, 



RICHARD WAGNER. 215 

aside from the last great work, it may be re- 
ceived as the most perfect representation of his 
school. 

The third main feature in the Wagner music 
is the wonderful use of the orchestra as a factor 
in the solution of the art-problem. This is no 
longer a mere accompaniment to the singer, but 
translates the passion of the play into a grand 
symphony, running parallel and commingling 
with the vocal music. Wagner, as a great master 
of orchestration, has had few equals since Beetho- 
ven ; and he uses his power with marked effect 
to heighten the dramatic intensity of the action, 
and at the same time to convey certain meanings 
which can only find vent in the vague and indis- 
tinct forms of pure music. The romantic concep- 
tion of the mediaeval love, the shudderings and 
raptures of Christian revelation, have certain 
phases that absolute music alone can express. 
The orchestra, then, becomes as much an integral 
part of the music-drama, in its actual current 
movement, as the chorus or the leading perform- 
ers. Placed on the stage, yet out of sight, its 
strains might almost be fancied the sound of the 
sympathetic communion of good and evil spirits, 
with whose presence mystics formerly claimed 
man was constantly surrounded. Wagner's use 
of the orchestra may be illustrated from the opera 
of "Lohengrin." 

The ideal background, from which the emo- 



216 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

tions of the human actors in the drama are re- 
flected with supernatural light, is the conception 
of the " Holy Graal," the mystic symbol of the 
Christian faith, and its descent from the skies, 
guarded by hosts of seraphim. This is the sub- 
ject of the orchestral prelude, and never have the 
sweetnesses and terrors of the Christian ecstasy 
been more potently expressed. The prelude opens 
with long-drawn chords of the violins, in the high- 
est octaves, in the most exquisite pianissimo. 
The inner eye of the spirit discerns in this the 
suggestion of shapeless white clouds, hardly dis- 
cernible from the aerial blue of the sky. Sud- 
denly the strings seem to sound from the farthest 
distance, in continued pianissimo, and the mel- 
ody, the Graal-motive, takes shape. Gradually, 
to the fancy, a group of angels seem to reveal 
themselves, slowly descending from the heavenly 
heights, and bearing in their midst the Sangreal. 
The modulations throb through the air, augment- 
ing in richness and sweetness, till the fortissimo 
of the full orchestra reveals the sacred mystery. 
With this climax of spiritual ecstasy the har- 
monious waves gradually recede and ebb away 
in dying sweetness, as the angels return to their 
heavenly abode. This orchestral movement re- 
curs in the opera, according to the laws of dra- 
matic fitness, and its melody is heard also in the 
logos of Lohengrin, the knight of the Graal, to 
express certain phases of his action. The immense 



RICHARD WAGNER. 217 

power which music is thus made to have in dra- 
matic effect can easily be fancied. 

A fourth prominent characteristic of the Wag- 
ner music-drama is that, to develop its full splen- 
dor, there must be a cooperation of all the arts, 
painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as 
poetry and music. Therefore, in realizing its ef- 
fects, much importance rests in the visible beau- 
ties of action, as they may be expressed by the 
painting of scenery and the grouping of human 
figures. Well may such a grand conception be 
called the "Art- work of the Future." 

Wagner for a long time despaired of the visi- 
ble execution of his ideas. At last the celebrated 
pianist Tausig suggested an appeal to the admirers 
of the new music throughout the world for means 
to carry out the composer's great idea, viz., to 
perform the " Nibelungen " at a theatre to be 
erected for the purpose, and by a select company, 
in the manner of a national festival, and before 
an audience entirely removed from the atmosphere 
of vulgar theatrical shows. After many delays 
Wagner's hopes were attained, and in the summer 
of 1876 a gathering of the principal celebrities of 
Europe was present to criticise the fully perfected 
fruit of the composer's theories and genius. This 
festival was so recent, and its events have been 
the subject of such elaborate comment, that fur- 
ther description will be out of place here. 

As a great musical poet, rather epic than 



218 THE GREAT GERMAN COMPOSERS. 

dramatic in his powers, there can be no ques- 
tion as to Wagner's rank. The performance of 
the " Nibelungenring," covering " Rheingold," 
" Die Walkiiren," " Siegfried," and " Gotterdam- 
merung," was one of the epochs of musical Ger- 
many. However deficient Wagner's skill in writ- 
ing for the human voice, the power and symmetry 
of his conceptions, and his genius in embodying 
them in massive operatic forms, are such as to 
storm even the prejudices of his opponents. The 
poet-musician rightfully claims that in his music- 
drama is found that wedding of two of the noblest 
of the arts, pregnantly suggested by Shakespeare : 

" If Music and sweet Poetry both agree, 

As they must needs, the sister and the brother ; 

One God is God of both, as poets feign." 




THE END. 




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Music 



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