Volume I Part 7 (2/2)

He did not wed until he was forty-three years old, and then on February 25, 1726, he ot Of her Maret says: ”Madame Rameau is a virtuous woman, sweet and amiable, and she has made her husband very happy She has ood taste in song” They had three children, one a son, who becahter who became a nun, and another who”a savage, a stranger to every sentireat Diderot, in a book called ”The Nephew of Rameau,” referred caustically to Rameau's experiments and theories in acoustics, and added:

”He is a philosopher in his way; he thinks only of himself, and the rest of the universe is as the puff of a bellows His daughter and his wife have only to die when they please; provided the bells of the parish which toll for them continue to sound the 12th and the 17th overtones, all will be well”

Fetis credits these feelings to men who loved neither Rameau nor French music He paid a pension to his invalid sister ”Sombre and unsociable he fled the world, and kept, even amid his family, a silence almost absolute” I do not knohether or not Rae Rao to Italy and take Pergolesi for his olesi, died in 1736, at the age of twenty-six It was consumption that carried him off, and I find no record of any love of his The saccharine roer, Elise Polko, has a rather h on what authority, I anorant As Lincoln said, ”For those that like that sort of thing, it is about the sort of thing they'll like”

KEISER

A contemporary of his was Reinhard Keiser, who died three years later at the age of sixty-six, and rote one hundred and sixteen operas for the Gerenificent bankruptcy, but quite unlike the woman-hater Handel, he married his way out of poverty

In 1709 he entered into a hter of an aristocratic town er, and her talent brought new charm to the production of his works, and restored prosperity She seee he went to Moscoith his daughter, as a proement there

She married a Russian violinist, Verocai, and her father spent his last years at her home

BONONCINI AND THE SCARLATTIS

Of that exquisite and elegant scareat rival of Handel in the London operatic war, I find no ah Hawkins says he was the favourite of the duchess of Marlborough, who gave him a pension of 500 per year, and had him live in her home until he was compelled to leave London, by various scandals attached to his repute as an honest gentlereat admirer of the style of Alessandro Scarlatti, an eminent composer, both in opera and sacred music, of whom little is known, except his work; he left a son, Doareat destitution, from which the famous artificial soprano, Farinelli, rescued them

CHAPTER XIII

MOZART

As we co the personal lives of coin toallusion to the ”stranger h to make a brochure When we reach Mozart, his letters alone fill two comfortable volumes Of Beethoven there are still ner and Liszt we are fairly overwhelmed

Search not for the artist's self in his works of art This is good cautious advice But there are occasional exceptions, and of these Mozart is the most radiant The qualities of eternal youth and of juventine gaiety; of intiers; of love that is ever deep but sunlit to the depth; and of tragedy with a touch of fatalistic horror,--all those qualities that are found scattered through his sonatas and symphonies and his various operas--all the qualities that are combined in ”Don Giovanni,” are the qualities of Mozart's own nature, always excepting the ruthlessness and the fanatic libertinisenius is he who never quite outgrows the childhood of his attitude toward the world Mozart was always the subliive life and personality to his letters, and place thehtful letters in existence

Ludwig Nohl collected most of them into two volulish, with a certain a amount of spirit withal They h they are out of print; and any one interested in musicians or in lovers or in letters, should olden volumes to his library

As the first letter ritten in his thirteenth year and the last in the thirty-fifth and final year of his life, and as they constitute two volumes of the size of this one, it issummary of his heart-history--woe's row by exercise Mozart was so devoted and so enthusiastic in his fondness for his father and raduated early for any demand Theinfant prodigies, that he was a pocket-Paderewski, at a period when most children cannot even trundle a hoop, and that he was deep in composition before the usual child is out of kilts Everybody has seen the pictures of the littler Mozart and his little sister perched like robins on a piano stool and giving a concert before crowned heads, with the assistance of the father and the mother, themselves musicians

The elder Mozart h he was a gifted ent man on his own account He was in no sense one of your child-beating brutes whotheir children into slaves He believed that his son was capable of being one of the world's greatest ave a splendid and perh all his vicarious ambition he kept his son's love and kept it almost to the point of idolatry Indeed the boy once wrote, ”Next to God comes papa”

The domestic relations of the family were indeed as happy as they well could be Mozart's letters to his sister, Maria Anna, as nicknahtly interest in her own love affairs His relations with his mother and father were full, not only of filial piety, but of that far better proof of real affection, a playful humour

Mozart's ether He wrote the news of her death to a friend of his father's and bade him tell the father only that she was seriously ill but would probably recover, and gradually to prepare him for the worst This letter he wrote at two o'clock in theletter full of news, incidentally saying that his mother was very ill, but that he hoped for the best, and that, in any case, resignation to the will of God was i the bitter truth, and telling it with most devout concern for his father's health and reconciliation with the divine dispensation In this letter he seeallant of twenty-two It was a good heart the boy had

Mozart had been so much caressed and flattered by court beauties as a child that he was precocious in flirtation His sister was the confidante and er of all sorts of boyish amours There is a fine mysteriousness in the letters he wrote hisa musical conquest of Milan like a veteranhis fourteen-year-old boyishness only in such phrases as this: ”I kiss your hand a thousand tireat deal to say to my sister; but what? That is known only to God and myself Please God I hope soon to be able to confide it to her verbally”

This does not sound like the writing of a co in a letter a few days later, ”Pray to God that my opera may be successful”