[By J. Halbig. Plaster. 1846. Executed for King Ludwig.]
326. Peter Cornelius. Painter.
[Born at Düsseldorf, in Prussia, 1787. Still living.]
A renowned painter of the later German school. He studied under Langer, a disciple of the old school, who made enormous efforts to suppress the romantic tendencies of his pupil, to check his imagination, and to restrain his boldness. By a visit to Italy, however, Cornelius confirmed the bent of his genius, and rendered the good intentions of Herr Langer of no avail. His indomitable perseverance, hard study, and rare gifts, soon enabled him to outstrip all rivalry. Whilst still young he was invited to direct at Düsseldorf the School of Painting, which has proved itself one of the most careful and successful nursing-mothers of Art in Germany. In 1819, engaged by the King of Bavaria to decorate the Museum of Sculpture then constructing at Munich. The subjects painted by Cornelius in fresco for this Museum from the heroic myths of Homer and Hesiod, are conceived with a rich imagination, and executed with superior power. His cartoons illustrating the old “Nibelungen-Lied,” and the “Faust” of Goethe, are equally remarkable. In 1825, appointed Director of the Academy of Painting at Munich. In 1841, summoned to Berlin by the King of Prussia, for whom Cornelius designed the “Shield of Faith,” presented by his Majesty to his godson, the Prince of Wales. Cornelius paints with the passionate sensibility and delicate perception of a true poet. His copious imagination is never at fault, and his ability to produce is as striking as his faculty of conception. Yet he never oversteps the modesty of nature, or the confines of true art. He is the worthy leader of a daily increasing school in Germany, which attempts, and not unsuccessfully, to unite in art earnestness of thought, activity, boldness, and freedom.
[By E. Hähnel. Plaster. 1852. In the possession of the artist. This was the study for the head of the large statue of Cornelius which Hähnel was commissioned to execute for the new museum at Dresden, and which stands on the outside, amongst the artists of Germany.]
327. Christoph Gluck. Musician.
[Born in the early part of the 18th century. Died at Vienna, 1787.]
The great merit of Gluck is that he emancipated music from the trammels of conventionalism and false taste, and made it the exponent and minister of poetry and the drama. Gluck, invited to London in 1745 to celebrate in music the butcheries of the Duke of Cumberland, found that the operas represented there were mere concerts, for which the drama was a pretext. Sound was everything, meaning nothing. His own music was set to words with which it had no connexion, and, torn from its original context, lost all its effect. This fact led him to the discovery of the great principle which is the key to the rest of his life: viz., that music is not merely a pleasant arrangement of sounds intended to gratify the ear, but a subsidiary language, able to exalt and strengthen the emotions, raised by the measure and force of the spoken language to which it is allied. In 1761, he composed his opera of “Alceste,” as an illustration of his idea. It was followed in 1762 and 1763 by “Paris and Helena” and “Orpheus.” In 1779, he composed the “Iphigenia in Tauride,” the greatest of his works. Wieland has happily expressed Gluck’s claim upon our respect in a sentence. “He preferred,” he says, “the Muses to the Syrens.” His works are not so much operas, in the ordinary sense of the term, as poems, in which music is employed for producing and sustaining emotion. Off the stage Gluck was nothing, but upon it the musician was himself a poet. The manners of Gluck, like those of Beethoven and Handel, were rough and blunt. He was large in person; and his habits were indolent and somewhat sensual. The bust discloses the man.
[From the Terracotta, by Houdon. In the musical collection of the Royal Library at Berlin. The only bust taken from the life.]
327A. Christoph Gluck. Musician.