Dearest friend,—I hear my readers exclaim,—we perfectly perceive that you will never cease censuring; but do pray begin to bestow your praise too. Courteous readers of the Iris, the latter is more difficult than to leave off finding fault. You fancy perhaps I need only say the composer writes advantageously for the voice; really that would be one of the most barefaced fibs that I could be guilty of, according to my notion of what constitutes genuine song. True it is, that he writes for vocal caricature, for the very destruction of the vocal art, in which everything noble and beautiful stands a fair chance to be thus ruined. Although there may be found, here and there, singers who know how to transfer what is great and valuable in their art, even to such specimens of its degeneracy and abuse. And this indeed is the sole reason why the operas of such composers maintain their ground in Italy; they afford opportunities to a singer destitute of true feeling of showing his vocal volubility and execution, and of creating astonishment by such means; while to the great singer they present a field for compensating by his art, that which the brainless author was incapable of producing. But in the eye and ear of the true connoisseur, such productions must ever remain monsters. Bellini, and still worse Rossini, laugh at the idea of expressing words or feelings by means of music; inasmuch as the most insipid, commonplace ideas are often resorted to, to depict situations of the most intense interest. But let it not be thought, after all, that the composers or the public intend to forego this requisite expression. Far from it. The singer is expected to supply this desideratum, and thus coarse minds get hammered into them that which is insupportable to a cultivated taste; in the same manner as children or savages look upon a glaringly rouged and tinselled doll as a decided beauty, while to a cultivated eye the sight is revolting. In this doll, we no doubt trace the embryo of an attempt at the beautiful, as much as in Bellini’s finales, which, like the papier maché busts in barbers’ shops, with their full blown cheeks and inch deep rouge, are meant to represent loveliness.

Jam satis! But is there really nothing whatever to be praised? For the true judge in the art, nothing? Here and there we distinguish an evanescent bubble, as it were, of some little melodic beginning, which just proves that, as in the most obdurate being, the spark of what is good is not totally extinct,—so in the most perverted taste, and in a state of its greatest degeneracy, there will still lurk some remains of the feeling for the beautiful inherent in our nature. Of this kind are the Romance, however supported by the most clumsy harmony—the funeral dirge of the young maidens, &c. &c. But enough: were I to begin to enumerate the mere germs of what is good, I should have to do the same with the full-leaved, full-blossomed weeds, in which case, my critique would probably occupy the whole of the future numbers of the Iris for the remainder of the year.

REVIEW OF NEW MUSIC.

  1. ANTHEM, ‘Turn Thee again, O Lord!’ the GRESHAM PRIZE COMPOSITION (No. 2), composed by KELLOW J. PYE, of Exeter, Member of the Royal Academy of Music. (J. A. Novello.)
  2. CANTATA, The Orphan’s Ode to the Patriots, arranged, with accompaniments for the Piano-forte and Harp, by the LADY DUNSTAFFNAGE. The Music by HUMMEL.
  3. THE MONTHLY SACRED MINSTREL, edited by JOHN GOSS. Nos. 6 and 7. (Cramer, Addison, and Beale.)
  4. A COLLECTION OF TUNES, &c., adapted to the Hymns in use by the Wesleyan Methodist Societies, arranged in Classes, and designed for Choirs and Congregations, by THOMAS HAWKES, of Williton, Somerset, Land Agent. (Mason, Paternoster Row.)

Mr. Pye’s work is, in choir language, a full anthem with verse, for soprano, alto, two tenors, and a base, in three movements: the first, full, in D minor; the second verse, five voices, in F; and the third, a fugue in D major, full, for four voices. The whole, both design and execution, is in the orthodox style of the latter end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. Weldon and Croft have been the composer’s models, but only so far as regards manner; he has borrowed nothing, for though we cannot ascribe any positive originality to this anthem—not any absolutely new thought,—yet the author has made himself debtor to no one for a single passage that we can recognise. The first movement is decidedly the best, it evinces much musical learning without any of its pedantry: the fugue style is adopted for effect, not for display; the harmony is rich without being loaded, and the modulations are of that grave and becoming kind which characterises the works of the composers whom we have just named; but throughout the whole we feel a want of their melody. There is, however, more of this essential ingredient in the verse, though it is not over-abundant even here. The last movement is a fugue of two subjects, sufficiently worked to satisfy those who delight in composition that smells of the lamp, and not so laboured as to offend such as think music an art to be addressed to the ear, rather than the eye.

Mr. Pye, a very young artist, has done himself much honour by this composition. Will our choirs second his efforts, and encourage others to proceed in the same course, by immediately adopting his anthem? They ought, if they have any respect for talent, or if they consult the interests of cathedral establishments.

Neither the title-page nor an advertisement, added to a large list of subscribers, enable us to penetrate deep into the history of the Cantata No. 2, which we at first took for a sacred composition, but afterwards found to be an abominable mésalliance of religion and politics, beginning with a part of the fortieth chapter of the prophet Isaiah, and ending with such profitless lines as the following:—

‘A Cumberland, Eldon, pillars of the nation,

Newcastle, and a Mansfield, who nobly filled their station,