Early in last month, SIGNOR GIUSEPPE DEVILLE, who for many years had been a useful performer at the King’s Theatre, was found dead in his chamber, owing, it appeared upon examination, to apoplexy. He first arrived in this country in 1816; afterwards was engaged at the Théâtre Italien in Paris; then went to St. Petersburg, where he sang during three or four seasons at the Italian Opera in that city, and subsequently returned and settled in London. Though never much distinguished as a singer, Signor Deville was highly valued for the regularity and zeal with which he performed his professional duties; while his high sense of honour, his generous nature, and the benevolence of his disposition, made him respected by all to whom he was known, and loved by the few with whom he lived on terms of intimacy. The newspapers have represented that he died in the possession of a large sum of money, but erroneously: though not expensive in himself, he was too liberal-minded, too kind to such of his countrymen as needed assistance, to be able to save much of his income. In fact when his funeral and other expenses are defrayed, very little will be left to transmit to his nearest of kin, who are residing in Italy.
REVIEW OF NEW MUSIC.
EIGHT SONGS, by BARRY CORNWALL and the CHEVALIER NEUKOMM. (Cramer, Addison, and Beale.)
OUR pages during the last two years will attest how often and how successfully the poet who writes under the above name, and the musician who composes in his own, have combined their talents: ‘The Sea,’ and ‘David’s Lament for Absalom,’ are sufficient, had those authors produced nothing else in union, to float them together down the stream of time, and will assist in proving that the age which certainly brought forth a good deal of trash,—as all ages have done, and will continue to do,—also gave birth to what is, without other evidence, quite sufficient to rescue it from a sweeping charge of false taste and inability. Those canzonets, difficult as they are to ordinary amateurs, are now in almost every house where a musical instrument is to be found, and are sung, especially the first, by all who are blessed with a voice, and by some who possess scarcely any at all.
Barry Cornwall, the pseudonyme adopted by one of the most distinguished of the really good lyric poets of the day, last year published a delightful little volume of ‘English Songs, and other small Poems,’ a fact so well known in the world of literature and taste, that we should not have repeated it here, but for the purpose of showing the connexion of that work with the present. The Chevalier Neukomm had set some of the songs before they appeared in print; and the eight now before us are among the hundred and seventy, or thereabouts, contained in the volume mentioned.
Great success naturally leads to further efforts, and the applause which attended the two songs above-named, has tempted the composer to write perhaps rather too fast. The most fertile fancy, like the richest soil, must be allowed time to recruit: the mind that creates needs fallows as much as the earth which produces. A want of a little of this restorative appears in the songs now under notice. There is no absence of exertion,—certainly no want of whatever science or labour can yield; but we do not meet with those evidences of the inventive faculty that are so strong in the compositions to which we have alluded. We know full well that he who always expects works of equal value from the same pen must infallibly be disappointed, and slightly touch upon a comparison only in order to make our opinion more accurately understood by our readers.
The first of the set, ‘The happy hours,’ is in two movements; the last partly in three-eight time, and partly in six-eight, is rather common. At page 3, however, is a redeeming modulation from C to A
