EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF A DILETTANTE.
[Concluded from [page 178].]
July 15th. I broke off with some calculations, and a remark of Mr. Madden, in his Infirmities of Genius, &c., concerning the longevity of musicians. I now extract what he says of the temperament and disposition of the same class of artists, though I do not agree with him either in his premises or conclusions.—‘Music,’ says Mr. M., ‘is to sensibility what language is to poetry—the mode of expressing enthusiastic sentiments and exciting agreeable sensations. The more imagination a composer is able to put into his music the more powerfully he appeals to the feelings. Sensibility is the soul of music, and pathos its most powerful attribute.
‘Pythagoras imagined that music was the soul of life itself, or that harmony was the sum total of the faculties, and the necessary result of the concert of these faculties and of the bodily functions.
‘Musical composition, then, demands extraordinary sensibility, an enthusiastic imagination, an instinctive taste rather than deep thought. The same qualities differently directed make the poet. Is it, then, to be wondered at that we should find the poets and the musical composers considerably shorter lived than the followers of all other learned or scientific pursuits, whose sensibility is not exercised by their studies, whose imaginations are not wearied by excessive application and enthusiasm. The term “genus irritabile” deserves to be transferred from the poetical to the musical tribe; for we take it that an enraged musician is a much more common spectacle than an irritated bard, and infinitely more rabid in his choler.
‘Generally speaking, musicians are the most intolerant of men to one another,—the most captious,—the best humoured when flattered, and the worst tempered at all other times. Music, like laudanum, appears to soothe the senses when used in moderation, but the continual employment of either flurries and excites the faculties, and often renders the best-natured men in the world, petulant, irritable, and violent.’
Of the short-lived composers, Cimarosa died of corpulency, no indication of an irritable state of mind; Lully, from an accident; Mozart was weakly from his birth; Pergolesi lost his life in consequence of a hemorrhage; Purcell, it is to be feared, from imprudent indulgencies in conviviality; and Weber, from hereditary consumption. Surely there is as much wear and tear of the body from excited imagination in poets and painters as in musicians; but the two former do not live so much in society, have not to breathe the foul air of theatres, to bear heated rooms; and, generally speaking, they are more cautious. As to the comparative professional jealousy of painters and musicians, the former themselves admit their possession of it in the greatest abundance. And with regard to temper, Mr. Madden must have founded his calculations on some two or three unhappy instances: had he drawn his inference from any general experience, it would have been widely different. Poets and painters have commonly more cultivated minds than musicians, and these may enable them better to control their emotions; thus what is suppressed is by an easy mistake supposed not to exist.
20th. The musical profession has lost a clever and highly respectable member in Mr. Philip Knapton, of York, who died in June last, at an early age. He was author of several popular compositions, both vocal and instrumental: among the former, the songs, ‘There be none of beauty’s daughters,’ and ‘When we two parted,’ will long prevent his name from being forgotten by those who were unacquainted with his personal merits.
26th. All who are interested in German literature have by this time read the Characteristics of Goethe, either in the original, or as admirably translated by Mrs. Austin; but many who have no leisure or no inclination to look into publications of the kind, are anxious to be acquainted with whatever relates to their own professional or favourite pursuit: hence admirers of music will be pleased to meet with the following notices concerning Zelter, who was not long since made known to this country by a memoir of him, and an air, published in the Harmonicon.
The intimacy of Zelter with Goethe was of the closest kind, as will appear from the following extract of a letter to Mrs. Austin from Prince Pückler-Muskau, dated June 25th, 1832. He says, ‘The celebrated composer Zelter, one of Goethe’s most intimate friends, has died at Berlin, literally of Goethe’s death. They wrote to each other regularly every week (the correspondence will soon be published). Zelter was in perfect health. But the first Saturday (the day on which he used to receive his letters) after Goethe’s death, he became dejected and silent: the second found him ill; and on the third, death softly led him to rejoin his immortal friend.’
The great poet mentions his early acquaintance with his friend,—who was divided between that which was then his profession, and that which he wished it to be—in the following energetic language:—‘With Zelter, too, my connexion became nearer; during his fortnight’s visit we had mutually become much more intimate, in both an artistical and moral sense. He found himself in a strange dilemma between a business[88] which he had inherited, exercised from youth up, and mastered, and which secured to him a maintenance, and an innate, powerful, resistless passion for art, which unfolded the whole riches of the world of sound out of his own soul,—carrying on the one, carried along by the other,—possessing in the one an acquired dexterity, in the other striving after a dexterity yet to be acquired: he stood not, like Hercules, on the boundary between what was to be embraced and what to be shunned; but he was drawn hither and thither by two muses equally worthy of his homage; one of whom had already possession of him, the other wished to win him to herself. With his honest, sturdy, citizen-like earnestness, he was as much impressed with the necessity of moral culture as that is akin to, nay, embodied with, æsthetic—and the existence of perfection in the one, and not in the other, is not to be thought of.’—(Tag-und-Jahres Hefte, 1803.)
The correspondence of these two friends, which it is supposed will occupy many volumes, is preparing for the press, and anxiously expected by the lovers of genius, who, in Germany, may be said to include nearly all the adult population.
August 5th. In a work just published, under the title of—‘Exposition of the False Medium excluding Men of Genius from the Public,’ is a direct charge against the musical manager of a theatre, which, if not met by a contradiction, will certainly be believed, and not much to the glory of the party concerned. If true, the only apology to be offered is, that this is the true country of Mammon; nowhere is pelf so eagerly grasped at; notwithstanding which, nowhere are so ostentatiously displayed the outward signs of a religion which makes the contempt of riches, or in fact downright poverty, the condition on which future happiness is to depend.
6th. Three more delightful volumes of Horace Walpole’s letters, addressed nearly a century ago to Sir Horace Mann, have just been published by Lord Dover, who only lived to see the work out!
The noble author, in a letter dated October 8th, 1741, thus mentions an inclination in the public of that period to put down the Italian opera. It is curious to remark the time of its opening. In those days people went into the country in the spring, and returned to town in the autumn. What Hottentots!
‘The Opera begins,’ he tells his friend, ‘the day after the King’s birth-day. The directors have already laid out great sums. They talk of a mob to silence the operas, as they did the French players, which will be more difficult; for here half the young noblemen in town are engaged, and they will not be so easily persuaded to humour the taste of the mobility: in short, they have already retained several eminent lawyers from the Bear Garden (boxers) to plead their defence.’ In a letter dated May 24th, 1743, he thus speaks of Handel’s first oratorio.—‘Handel has set up an oratorio against the operas, and succeeds. He has hired all the goddesses from farces, and the singers of Roast Beef from between the acts at both theatres, with a man with one note in his voice, and a girl without ever a one; and so they sing, and make brave hallelujahs; and the good company encore the recitative (!) if it happens to have any cadence like what they call a tune.’ The song alluded to is ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ which the galleries used always to call for between the acts. As to recitatives having ‘any cadence like what they call a tune,’ I must confess that I do not understand what is meant: unless, which is possible, the satirical writer means to insinuate that the public of his day could not distinguish between recitative and air.
In another letter of the same year, he writes,—
‘We are next Tuesday to have the Miserere of Rome. It must be curious! the finest piece of vocal music in the world to be performed by three good voices, and forty bad ones, from Oxford, Canterbury, and the farces!’ From this it appears that the chorus singers of his day were brought from the country choirs to London; the metropolis, even with the assistance of the chorus from the theatre, (the ‘farces’) could not furnish forty voices!
In March, 1746, Horace Walpole thus speaks of the Italian opera, and of Gluck, the celebrated composer:—
‘The opera flourishes more than in any latter years; the composer is Gluck, a German; he is to have a benefit, at which he is to play on a set of drinking-glasses, which he modulates with water. I think I have heard you speak of having seen some such thing.’
The Chevalier Gluck exhibiting on the musical glasses! There must be a mistake in this; some other person, surely, was engaged by the great composer for this purpose.
But a few months later in the same year, the same writer is in another story. The anecdote is curious for half a dozen reasons:—
‘Lord Middlesex[89] took the opportunity of a rivalship between his own mistress, the Nardi, and the Violetta, (a German, afterwards Mrs. Garrick,) the finest and most admired dancer in the world, to involve the whole menage of the opera in the quarrel, and has paid nobody; but like a true lord of the treasury, has shut up his own exchequer. The principal man-dancer was arrested for debt; to the composer his lordship gave a bad note, not payable in two years, besides amercing him entirely three hundred pounds, on pretence of his siding with the Violetta.’
9th. The annexed advertisement—for such it undoubtedly is—appears in the Morning Post of to-day. This paper would never have inserted it unless paid for, I am convinced:—
‘Bochsa, with Mr. and Mrs. R. Bishop, Phillips, and Mori, is going in a few days to Leamington and Malvern, and to the Isle of Wight, to give some concerts, under the patronage of their Royal Highnesses the Duchess of Kent and the Princess Victoria. The success which that distinguished harpist met with last season in the provinces, while exhibiting his new harp effects, has perhaps induced him to try the experiment again.’
Mr. and Mrs. Bishop, Mr. H. Phillips, and Mr. Mori, must feel highly dignified, and equally gratified, at being thus announced as the train of M. Bochsa,—as his tail!—to use a term applied, rather vulgarly, to a small parliamentary party; and the Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria will not, I should suppose, be very well pleased at such use being made of their names.
11th. In the Observer of this date is the following paragraph:—
‘It has been a mystery to many how Laporte has been able, under such accumulating losses, to carry on his season to its present termination, by which the subscribers, if we mistake not, are losers by several nights. It seems now generally admitted that he has paid scarcely anybody in full—that he has disbursed as far as his means by subscription and the takings at the doors went, and that his performers, giving him credit for good intentions, as well as for a large sum of money, have agreed to take bills at long dates, to be paid (if he can) out of the receipts of next season. This arrangement presumes that Laporte will continue his speculations at the King’s Theatre next season, which, we have some reason to know, may be questionable.’
I doubt the reality of M. Laporte’s great losses, though the losses of the subscribers, in almost every way, admit of no doubt.
18th. The Sunday evening performances of entirely sacred music at the Apollonicon Rooms in St. Martin’s Lane, have been stopped, by order of the Bishop of London, on the plea of money being taken for admission. Does not the poor curate serve two or three churches on a Sunday for money?—do not many public singers exercise their callings in various churches on a Sunday for profit?—In fact, do not the whole of the clergy labour more or less on that day with a view to gain? And is it not better that people should listen to sacred music on a Sabbath evening, after every place of worship is closed, than be compelled to wander about the streets for amusement, or be driven into places where drinking is a necessary condition of their admittance? Surely our bishops, some of them at least, have not read the History of Puritanism, or else they have read unprofitably. Do they not know that should ‘over-righteousness’ once more gain the ascendancy in this country, episcopacy would be the earliest of its victims?
25th. It appears from the Spectator of this day, that The Deluge, an oratorio composed by F. Schneider, was rehearsed on the 19th at the Hanover-square Rooms, preparatory to its performance at the ensuing festival at Norwich. The writer of the notice, a good critic, says, it ‘more than realizes our anticipations of its excellence: it combines the choral grandeur of the school of Bach and Handel with the instrumental richness of Haydn. The Deluge is a subject which affords an ample field for musical expression, and admits of every variety of vocal and instrumental combination. The parts which particularly struck us were,—a double chorus in E flat; a song, in which the instruments describe the rushing and roaring of the waters; a chorus in C, terminating with a fugue on two subjects; a terzetto in A; and the concluding chorus.’
Compositions of this class, when really excellent, ought to be the grand, nay almost the only, object of all musical festivals, considering the great vocal and instrumental force now usually assembled on such occasions; and they would actually cost less to perform than a train of vapid Italian airs of the living school—of the school of Mercadante, Bellini, &c., which, if they must be heard, would succeed much better—that is, would produce less intolerable effect, accompanied by a piano-forte, violoncello, flute, and horn, than by the finest band that can be assembled. The power of the orchestra, like the physical strength of a mob, only increases the evil when badly employed.