MISS TYTLER'S "MUSICAL COMPOSERS AND THEIR WORKS."*

THAT the Greeks, pre-eminent as they prove themselves to have been in poetry, sculpture, and architecture, should have left us -without an echo of the music to which they were so devoted, is one of the sorest losses that !Esthetics have had to suffer. For, like those Sister Arts, with what utter joy, what supreme strength must

• Musical Composers and their Works, for the Use of Schools and Students in Music. By Sarah Tytler. London: Daldy, lebtster, and Co.

not Music have been repaid by the heroic race whom her delicacy so refined, her pathos so impenetrated ! The modern music of Pagan peoples does not indicate past or point to future excellence, and we must look to the influence of Christianity for the origin and development of the present art, unless indeed it be conceded that some of our European national airs are, if not actually Pagan, modified from Pagan forma. Such national airs may be called the ballad literature of music, and it would be an interesting study to seek in such music the popular characteristics which have inspired it. But we are not now concerned with Music, whose origin and authorship is obscure, but with the work and biographies of the great race of Musical Composers, from Palestrina down to Richard Wagner. The authoress of the book before us, Sarah Tytler, does not undertake to supply us with separate and complete biographies of all these distinguished composers, although she has struck the key-notes in the lives of the least distinguished musicians, and endeavoured "to bring out the human element" in her sketches of Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Moscheles, "with all the skill in her power."

Art, which in succeeding ages has found continuous expression, though in altered forms, through sculpture, architecture, and painting, has, at last, in music delivered herself of her most catholic utterance. Before the time of Palestrina, 1524 to 1594, not a little fine church music had been written ; but our modern music cannot be placed earlier than the year 1400, that which went before it being greatly wanting in variety and finish, though occasionally full of massive and even solemn power. The difference between the ancient and modern systems caused by the construction of the definitions major and minor, leading to the perfect cadence, took place at the close of the six- teenth century, up to which date the earlier appears still to have competed with the later system ; but Giovanni da Palestrina, although rather the herald of the great modern composers than one of them, is generally looked upon by the Germans as the father of modern cultivated music, and his Improperia, composed for Pius IV., in 1560, when he was thirty-six years of age, has been given in the Pontifical Chapel on every Good Friday since that date. He effected a reformation in church music, was the founder of a celebrated musical school in Rome, and left behind him many masses, offertories, and litanies, &c., besides some volumes of madri- gals. John Bull, an English musician of note in his day, and the supposed author of our National Anthem ; Orlando Gibbons, the author, in conjunction with Bull and another, of a Music Book for the Virginal ; and Henry Purcell, whose music Mr. Bawds considers "to stand between the past and the future," were the leading English composers of this. transition period, and the two Scarlatti, father and son, and Alessandro Stradella, were the exponents of the Italian music of the day. Purcell and Stradella met with strange deaths. The former, who was too fond of "staying out o' nights," at a tavern bearing his name, where glees and catches were performed by his friends, fell into consumption, " in consequence of having been shut out of his own house on an inclement night by Mrs. Purcell's orders, given to the servants, that he should not be let in after midnight." Stradella ran away with a pupil loved by a Venetian nobleman, who pursued the young couple with murderous revenge. After repeated attempts on their lives had been unsuccessfully made, their bedroom was invaded one night by hired assassins, and husband and wife brutally murdered.

But with Johann Sebastian Bach commences what we may call the great German classical school of music, which for 150 years has exercised an increasing influence in Europe. Bach was the most remarkable member of perhaps the most musical family on record, which from 1625 to 1760 seemed to have followed no call- ing but that of music. Of Lutheran origin, they were as zealous for the faith as for the music of their forefathers, but their music was by no means of an entirely religious character. The Thirty Years' War, which found its ablest musical exponent in Bach, lent fresh breadth and vigour to German national music, and no com- poser was better qualified to express the noblest spirit of his age than the single-minded, indefatigable musician of Eisenach. As the authoress well describes him, "neither ambitious nor covetous he was never led to sacrifice his principles and his true tastes to a wide-spread but shallow and often vicious applause. He substituted for the somewhat narrow, formal religious music of Germany a music in which foreign air and sunshine, together with warlike struggles and bloody campaigns, had played their part," yet although displaying a thorough mastery of his sub- ject and the most unexampled grasp of detail, Bach was not well known, except amongst the best professional musicians of his own day, and was not conceded his true position amongst Ger- man composers until his great successor, Mendelssohn, made him as well known as he deserved to be. Twice married, and the father of twenty children, the patriarch Bach closed his career with the same unambitious, yet ardent devotion to his art that had characterised the whole of his life.

Handel's history and the story of his struggles in this country are so well known, that we need not recapitulate them. Defeated by the Italian masters of the day in Opera through the opposition of an organised clique, he turned to Oratorio, and there, as it proved, gave the highest expression to his genius. The Milton of music, after a life of energetic struggle he produced his noblest of sacred epics, the "Messiah." "I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb," exclaimed Beethoven of Handel Gliick, after Handel had said of him that he knew no more of counterpoint than his cook, wisely gave up the attempt to rival Handel's success in London. Returning to Germany, he devoted himself to orchestration, and the elevation of the emotional as opposed to the scientific in music. Simplicity is his greatest charm, and has made him immortal. In character he is described as "though confident and irascible not egotistic or ungenerous ; severe and conscientious as a composer, he was reserved and self-sufficing, numbering few, but those firm, friends." Haydn, the son of a cartwright and a cook, who respectively played the organ and the harp, gave early indications of musical genius ; but was expelled from the choir in which he sang for cutting off the end of a brother singer's wig, and turned houseleas and penniless into the streets of Vienna, but with his invariable good-fortune was offered bed, board, and a harpsichord in the house of a wig-maker named Keller, who pro- bably supposed from his escapade that he would become a useful member of the household. His surmise proved true, for though he

did not take to his trade, he married the wig-maker's daughter. Not that this was a happy match, for in spite of his extreme

amiability, Haydn on entering the household of Prince Esterhazy made an arrangement by which his cantankerous wife shared her husband's income without his society. The writer gives this sketch of his life in the Esterhazy Court :—" Operas were per- formed twice a week for which Haydn was expected, as

a rule, to supply the score ; he had to direct an orchestral concert

every afternoon, for which he was also bound to furnish the pieces.

Every morning he had to greet his master at his reception with a fresh sheet of composition," and in addition, to supply "an inexhaustible fund of music for water-parties, birth-days, im- promptu concerts and dances. Haydn's admirers are persuaded that the incessant practice was good for him, but great and sound equanimity and contentment of temperament, and almost limitless fertility of composition, must all have come into action, else the very abundance of the practice would have swamped even so buoyant and robust a man as Haydn ;" and "it is said that Haydn's fame, while still unknown to himself, and while he continued to live with perfect satisfaction as a simple retainer in the dignified privacy of the Esterhazy household, had spread over Europe, and now he was called upon to write symphonies for Paris concerts, now to compose music for the solemn celebration of the Passion at Cadiz," until he was finally carried off by Salaman, the violinist, to compose for London concerts. The lives and letters of Beethoven, Mozart, and Mendelssohn are so well known through recent publications, that we need not follow them in detail.

With regard to Beethoven's genius, the writer quotes the fol- lowing characteristic anecdote from the Athenaeum: " He above all enjoined those who undertook to play his works to have some poetry in their nature. ' Read Shakespeare,' was once the counsel given to an aspirant." His character, that of a daringgenius, stood in need of careful training in youth and watchful self-government in manhood; but he was unfortunately the son of a profligate father, who utterly neglected his mental and moral training, and his imprac- ticable temper and morbid jealousy made him in after-life the tool of designing relatives, and considering the adverse influences from within and without that he had to encounter, we can only wonder that he retained to the last so much of his natural magnanimity and childlike faith in human nature.

Mozart, Weber, and Mendelssohn had all the educa- tional advantages in childhood and early youth which were denied to Beethoven,—which, if it caused the bent of their genius to be less self-reliant, made their lives more cheerful and content. No doubt, the early forcing of Mozart's talents told upon his sensitive organisation. His improvident habits, too, and anxious solicitude about his delicate wife's health did much to hasten his end. But on the whole,

Mozart's life was a happy one. Even upon her own showing we cannot think Miss Tytler fairly estimates the character of Con- stanze Mozart Indeed, she at times attack her with an asperity that would be unwarrantable, even if Constanze had proved herself a much worse wife than she did. Her husband's unbusiness-like nature would have tried stronger women sorely. "His invalid wife, for whom he procured every comfort," to quote Miss Tytler, may well have objected to his purse being "always open to his friends." And we fancy it would require more than "a weak, indolent, exacting little woman " to submit with good grace to such "a prescription " as this, which Mozart placed beside his wife's bed one morning to be read by her on waking :—" Good morning, my darling wife ! I hope that you slept well, that you were undisturbed, that you will not rise too early, that you will not catch cold, nor stoop too much, nor overstrain yourself, nor scold your servants, nor stumble over the threshold of the adjoining room. Spare yourself all household worries till 1 am back. May no- evil befall you!" What housekeeper, to say nothing of a quick- tempered and ailing one, would stand such interference from her lord and master ? Mozart was, no doubt, a husband as injudicious as he was affectionate, and if any of his wife's love " flew out at the window " for a time when " poverty came in at the door " Mozart's extravagance had opened to it, it certainly all returned with his last illness, through which she nursed him most fondly. And though she married again eighteen years afterwards, it was to the publication of the Memoirs of her first husband that she devoted her declining years.

Miss Tytler also attacks Bettina von Arnim, though with leas bitterness. But we imagine that the best reply to Miss Tytler'a hostility to those two ladies is that Herr Schindler, who it is to be presumed was more behind the scenes of musical life in Germany than our authoress, wished Beethoven a wife like Mozart's Constanze, and that Goethe and Beethoven were agreed in their affection for Bettina. Miss Tytler is also unfortunately prejudiced in her attack upon the Italian school of music, and Rossini, its chief exponent. Had she even contented herself with pointing out what was crude and careless, sentimental or sensational in the maestro's music, without giving his higher qualities the credit they deserve, we might have excused her, on the ground of her vehement attachment for the German school. But Miss Tytler adds to this the unfortunate error of a bitter and quite uncalled-for onslaught on Rossini's private character. Such criticism invariably meets with its own punishment, and unless Miss Tytler has the good-sense to tone down this and other anti-Italian passages in her book, she will prove the un- willing benefactress of the school of music to which she is so- opposed.

Space forbids us following Miss Tytler through her briefer notices of Weber, Meyerbeer, Bellini, Chopin, Schubert, Schu- mann, &c. Although containing the fault of partisanship, and betraying traces of hurried workmanship at its close, where cotemporary composers are rather unceremoniously treated, her book is no mere pleasant compilation of musical reminis- cences. Her lives of the German composers are always effective and often extremely graphic studies. If at times too impetuous, she is always honest of purpose, and her pages overflow with agreeable anecdote and happy illustration of character.