"Well, General," continued the composer, "I have come to place myself at your majesty's orders."
"I must really beg you," continued Napoleon, "not to address me in this manner."
"Forgive me, General," answered Paisiello, "but I cannot give up the habit I have contracted in addressing sovereigns who, compared with you, seem but pigmies. However, I will not forget your commands, sire; and if I have been unfortunate enough to offend, I must throw myself upon your Majesty's indulgence."
EXPRESSION IN MUSIC.
Paisiello received ten thousand francs for the mass he wrote for Napoleon's coronation. Each of the masses for the imperial chapel brought him one thousand francs. Not much, certainly; but then it must be remembered that he produced as many as fourteen in two years. They were for the most part made up of pieces of church music, which the maestro had written for Italy, and when this fruitful source failed him, he had recourse to his numerous serious and comic operas. Thus, an air from the Nittetti was made to do duty as a Gloria, another from the Scuffiera as an Agnus Dei. Music depends so much upon association that, doubtless, only those persons who had already heard these melodies on the stage, found them at all inappropriate in a church. Figaro's air in the Barber of Seville would certainly not sound well in a mass; but there are plenty of love songs, songs expressive of despair (if not of too violent a kind), songs, in short, of a sentimental and slightly passionate cast, which only require to be united to religious words to be at once and thereby endowed with a religious character. Gluck, himself, who is supposed by many to have believed that music was capable of conveying absolute, definite ideas, borrowed pieces from his old Italian operas to introduce into the scores he was writing, on entirely different subjects, for the Académie Royale of Paris. Thus, he has employed an air from his Telemacco in the introduction to the overture of Iphigénie en Aulide. The chorus in the latter work, Que d'attraits que de majesté, is founded on the air, Al mio spirto, in the same composer's Clemenza di Tito. The overture to Gluck's Telemacco became that of his Armide. Music serves admirably to heighten the effect of a dramatic situation, or to give force and intensity to the expression of words; but the same music may often be allied with equal advantage to words of very different shades of meaning. Thus, the same melody will depict equally well the rage of a baffled conspirator, the jealousy of an injured and most respectable husband, and various other kinds of agitation; the grief of lovers about to part, the joy of lovers at meeting again, and other emotions of a tender nature; the despondency of a man firmly bent on suicide, the calm devotion of a pious woman entering a convent, and other feelings of a solemn class. The signification we discover in music also depends much upon the circumstances under which it is heard, and to some extent also on the mood we are in when hearing it.
TWO PASTICCIOS.
Under the republic, consulate, and empire, music did not flourish in France, and not even the imperial Spontini and Cherubini, in spite of the almost European reputation they for some time enjoyed, produced any works which will bear comparison with the masterpieces of their successors, Rossini, Auber, and Meyerbeer. During the dark artistic period which separates the fall of the monarchy from the restoration, a few interesting works were produced at the Opera Comique; but until Napoleon's advent to power, France neglected more than ever the music of Italy, and did worse than neglect that of Germany, for, in 1793, the directors of the Academy brought out a version of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, in five acts, without recitative and with all the prose dialogue of Beaumarchais introduced. In 1806, too, a pasticcio by Kalkbrenner, formed out of the music of Mozart's Don Juan, with improvements and additions by Kalkbrenner himself, was performed at the same theatre. Both these medleys met with the fate which might have been anticipated for them.
CHAPTER XIV.
OPERA IN ITALY, GERMANY AND RUSSIA, DURING AND IN CONNECTION WITH THE REPUBLICAN AND NAPOLEONIC WARS. PAISIELLO, PAER, CIMAROSA, MOZART. THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO. DON GIOVANNI.
NOTHING shows better the effect on art of the long continental wars at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century than the fact that Mozart's two greatest works, written for Vienna and Prague immediately before the French Revolution, did not become known in England and France until about a quarter of a century after their production. Fortunate Austria, before the great break up of European territories and dynasties, possessed the two first musical capitals in Europe. Opera had already declined in Berlin, and its history, even under the direction of the flute-playing Frederic, possesses little interest for English readers after the departure or rather flight of Madame Mara. Italy was still the great nursery of music, but her maestri composed their greatest works for foreign theatres, and many of them were attached to foreign courts. Thus, Paisiello wrote his Barbiere di Siviglia for St. Petersburgh, whither he had been invited by the Empress Catherine, and where he was succeeded by Cimarosa. Cimarosa, again, on his return from St. Petersburgh, wrote his masterpiece, Il Matrimonio Segretto, for the Emperor Leopold II., at Vienna. Of the Opera at Stockholm, we have heard nothing since the time of Queen Christina. The Dresden Opera, which, in the days of Handel, was the first in Europe, still maintained its pre-eminence at the beginning of the second half of the eighteenth century, when Rousseau published his "Musical Dictionary," and described at length the composition of its admirable orchestra. But the state and the resources of the kings of Saxony declined with the power of Poland, and the Dresden Opera, though, thanks to the taste which presided at the court, its performances were still excellent, had quite lost its peculiar celebrity long before Napoleon came, and carried away its last remaining glories in the shape of the composer, Paer, and Madame Paer and Brizzi, its two principal singers.