No. 2 is a very pretty volume of lithographed songs, thin enough to carry in the pocket, and with neat cover and gilt leaves, producible in any lady’s drawing-room; and all this at a less price than two songs of the ordinary kind! We confess that the smallness of the characters calls on the eye for unusual exertion; and the singer and accompanyist, if in the dual number, must sit in the closest possible contact if they mean to see a single note or word.

Of these songs, the best are, The Promise, in the Scottish style, by J. P. Clarke; The Night Flower, by T. Macfarlane; ‘The Midnight Dream,’ by John Thomson, Esq., a very superior composition; and The Proud Lover, by R. Webster. The poetry of the songs is unaffected, and some of it remarkable for tenderness, if not for any higher quality; and, at all events, the publication is certainly worth the moderate, the hardly remunerating price set on it.

PIANO-FORTE.

  1. Souvenir du Pré aux Clercs, FANTASIA, composé par F. KALKBRENNER, Op. 119. (Goulding and Co.)
  2. Souvenir de HEROLD, Fantasia, par C. CHAULIEU. Op. 151. (Goulding and Co.)

BOTH of these are remembrances of M. Herold, the lately-deceased French composer, and made up, we believe, chiefly of airs from his operas.

The first, though requiring considerable powers of execution, is good music; difficulty is not the author’s object. Some parts are very beautiful, others ingenious; but we most condemn the hateful run of semitones in thirds, foolishly introduced, at page 8, in deference to a vicious fashion.

M. Chaulieu has produced some clever and many pleasing things for the piano-forte, which have always been noticed by us in terms of due approbation. Though not an original or vigorous composer, he has generally been a rational one. But all at once his judgment seems to have abandoned him,—a fit of pedantic foppery has seized him! Will it be credited that a composer in the nineteenth century, a musician not under restraint, not actually in a strait waistcoat, can have attempted to retrograde a century and a half, by introducing, in a piece written for the piano-forte only, the contra-tenor clef? He has not only employed this, most freely, in the present fantasia, but written it with 8va. alta over the notes, as if the same meaning could not have been expressed infinitely better by the usual clef, even admitting that the C clef were still in use! If such folly as this is countenanced, we shall soon go back to six-line staves, to the treble clef on the first line, and the mean on the fifth,—to musical darkness and barbarism. Surely the London publisher, Mr. D’Almaine, could not have been aware of this mad freak, or exquisite piece of musical coxcombry, or his common sense would have prompted him immediately to restore sanity to the notation of this work, which, in its present state, cannot have the least chance of sale.

  1. GROSSES CONCERT-STUCK, (Pièce de Concert,) Op. 47, composé par MAYSEDER, arrangé pour le Piano-forte par CHARLES CZERNY. (Wessel and Co.)
  2. RONDEAU MIGNON, No. 7, sur l’air ‘Non più andrai’ de MOZART, composé pour le Piano-forte par FRED. KULAU. (Wessel and Co.)

THE subject of No. 1 has frequently, in one shape or other, come under our notice; it has all the frothy gaiety of the author, and not a trait that gives it the slightest chance of being remembered beyond the fleeing hour. M. Czerny, as might have been expected, has not palliated any of its defects, but rather aggravated them, by a succession of restless, unrelated, senseless passages.