Whilst in the wood Miss Lamont heard sounds of a band of violins drifting past her from the direction of the house. The sounds were very soft and intermittent, and were lower in pitch than bands of to-day. She could afterwards write down from memory about twelve bars, but without all the inner harmonies.
She ascertained immediately afterwards that no band had been playing out of doors that afternoon at Versailles. It was a cold, wet winter’s afternoon.
In March, 1907, the twelve bars were shown to a musical expert, who said (without having heard the story) that the bars could hardly belong to one another, but that the idiom dated from about 1780. He found a grammatical mistake in one bar. After hearing the story, he said that bands in the eighteenth century were lower in pitch than they are now. He suggested the name of Sacchini.
In March, 1908, Miss Lamont and a friend were told in Versailles that no bands had been allowed to play in the park in winter until 1907. They also ascertained that no music played at Versailles, or in the park, could have been heard at Trianon.
In the same month they searched through a great deal of unpublished music in the Conservatoire de Musique at Paris, and discovered that the twelve bars represented the chief motives of the light opera of the eighteenth century, excluding Rameau and his school, and that, as far as they could discover, nothing like them occurred in the opera of 1815 onward. They were found in Sacchini, Philidor, Monsigny, Grétry, and Pergolesi. Grammatical mistakes were found in Monsigny and Grétry.
Sacchini.
“Dardanus.” General likeness.
“Œdipe à Colone.” Number 6. Two bars intact in the key answering to that heard in 1902, allowing for the rise of a semi-tone, which had taken place since the eighteenth century. This was proved by later editions of operatic music, in which the songs were dropped a semi-tone to retain the original key.
Philidor in a collection of single airs (Rigaudons, 1767)—the cadence.
“Le Maréchal Ferrand”: repetition of single notes, the first bar of the melody, and many other hints of likeness.