(G. Sa.)
CORNELIA (2nd cent. B.C.), daughter of Scipio Africanus the Elder, mother of the Gracchi and of Sempronia, the wife of Scipio Africanus the Younger. On the death of her husband, refusing numerous offers of marriage, she devoted herself to the education of her twelve children. She was so devoted to her sons Tiberius and Gaius that it was even asserted that she was concerned in the death of her son-in-law Scipio, who by his achievements had eclipsed the fame of the Gracchi, and was said to have approved of the murder of Tiberius. When asked to show her jewels she presented her sons, and on her death a statue was erected to her memory inscribed, “Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi.” After the murder of her second son Gaius she retired to Misenum, where she devoted herself to Greek and Latin literature, and to the society of men of letters. She was a highly educated woman, and her letters were celebrated for their beauty of style. The genuineness of the two fragments of a letter from her to her son Gaius, printed in some editions of Cornelius Nepos, is disputed.
See L. Mercklin, De Corneliae vita (1844), of no great value; J. Sörgel, Cornelia, die Mutter der Gracchen (1868), a short popular sketch.
CORNELIUS, pope, was elected in 251 during the lull in the persecution of the emperor Decius. Two years afterwards, under the emperor Gallus, he was exiled to Centumcellae (Civita Vecchia), where he died. He was very intimate with St Cyprian, and is commemorated with him on the 16th of September, which is not, however, the anniversary of his death. He died in June 253.
CORNELIUS, CARL AUGUST PETER (1824-1874), German musician and poet, son of an actor at Wiesbaden, grandson of the engraver Ignaz Cornelius, and nephew of Cornelius the painter, was born at Mainz on the 24th of December 1824. In his childhood his bent was towards languages, but his musical gifts were carefully cultivated and he learned to sing and to play the violin. Cornelius the elder, anxious for his son to become an actor, himself taught the boy the elements of the art. These theatrical studies, however, were interrupted early by a visit paid by Peter Cornelius to England as second violin in the Mainz orchestra. On returning home young Cornelius made his stage debut as John Cook in Kean. But after two more appearances, as the lover in the comedy Das war Ich and as Perin in Moreto’s Donna Diana, he practically abandoned the stage for music, his idea being to become a comic opera composer. In 1843 his father died. Hitherto Cornelius’s musical studies had been unsystematic. Now opportunity served to remedy this, for his relative, Cornelius the painter, summoned him in 1844 to Berlin, and enabled him a year later to become a pupil of Siegfried Wilhelm Dehn (1799-1858), counterpoint and theory generally being worked at laboriously. After leaving Dehn, Cornelius proved his independence by writing a trio in A minor, a quartet in C, as well as two comic opera texts. In 1847 he returned to Dehn and immediately composed an enormous mass of music, including a second trio, 30 vocal canons, several sonatas, a Mass, a Stabat Mater; he also wrote a number of translations of old French poems, which are classics of their kind. In 1852 he first came in touch with Liszt, through his uncle’s instrumentality. At Weimar, whither he went in 1852, he heard Berlioz’s delightful Benvenuto Cellini, a work which ultimately exercised great influence over him. For the time, however, he devoted himself, on Liszt’s advice, to further Church compositions, the influence of the Church on him at that time being so great that he applied, but vainly, for a place in a Jesuit college. Still his mind was bent on the production of a comic opera, but the composition was long delayed by the work of translating the prefaces for Liszt’s symphonic poems and the texts of works by Berlioz and Rubinstein. Between October 1855 and September in the following year, Cornelius wrote the book of the Barbier von Bagdad, and on December 15, 1858, the opera was produced at Weimar under Liszt, and hissed off the stage. Thereupon Liszt resigned his post, and shortly afterwards Cornelius went to Vienna and Munich, and still later came very much under Wagner’s influence. Cornelius’s Cid was completed and produced at Weimar in 1865. For the last nine years of his life (1865-1874) Cornelius was occupied with his opera Gunlöd and other compositions, besides writing ably and abundantly on Wagner’s music-dramas. In 1867 he became teacher of rhetoric and harmony at the Musikschule, Munich, and married Berthe Jung. He died on the 26th of October 1874. Not the least of Cornelius’s many claims to fame was his remarkable versatility. Many of his original poems, as well as his translations from the French, rank high. Among his songs, special mention may be made of the lovely “Weihnachtslieder,” and of the “Vätergruft,” an unaccompanied vocal work for baritone solo and choir.
CORNELIUS, PETER VON (1784-1867), German painter, was born in Düsseldorf in 1784. His father, who was inspector of the Düsseldorf gallery, died in 1799, and the young Cornelius was stimulated to extraordinary exertions. In a letter to the Count Raczynski he says, “It fell to the lot of an elder brother and myself to watch over the interests of a numerous family. It was at this time that it was attempted to persuade my mother that it would be better for me to devote myself to the trade of a goldsmith than to continue to pursue painting—in the first place, in consequence of the time necessary to qualify me for the art, and in the next, because there were already so many painters. My dear mother, however, rejected all this advice, and I felt myself impelled onward by an uncontrollable enthusiasm, to which the confidence of my mother gave new strength, which was supported by the continual fear that I should be removed from the study of that art I loved so much.” His earliest work of importance was the decoration of the choir of the church of St Quirinus at Neuss. At the age of twenty-six he produced his designs from Faust. On October 14, 1811, he arrived in Rome, where he soon became one of the most promising of that brotherhood of young German painters which included Overbeck, Schadow, Veit, Schnorr and Ludwig Vogel (1788-1879),—a fraternity (some of whom selected a ruinous convent for their home) who were banded together for resolute study and mutual criticism. Out of this association came the men who, though they were ridiculed at the time, were destined to found a new German school of art.