GUITAR AND PIANO-FORTE.
‘Jadis régnait en Normandie,’ from MEYERBEER’s Robert, arranged as a Duet by M. NEULAND. Op. 13. (Chappell.)
DUETS for these instruments are getting more and more into use, and M. Neuland is well qualified to make arrangements of this kind, as the present shows, which is a very excellent adaptation of the original, clever, and popular air in an opera which will be better understood in England a few years hence than it has yet been.
EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF A DILETTANTE.
[Concluded from [page 178].]
July 15th. I broke off with some calculations, and a remark of Mr. Madden, in his Infirmities of Genius, &c., concerning the longevity of musicians. I now extract what he says of the temperament and disposition of the same class of artists, though I do not agree with him either in his premises or conclusions.—‘Music,’ says Mr. M., ‘is to sensibility what language is to poetry—the mode of expressing enthusiastic sentiments and exciting agreeable sensations. The more imagination a composer is able to put into his music the more powerfully he appeals to the feelings. Sensibility is the soul of music, and pathos its most powerful attribute.
‘Pythagoras imagined that music was the soul of life itself, or that harmony was the sum total of the faculties, and the necessary result of the concert of these faculties and of the bodily functions.
‘Musical composition, then, demands extraordinary sensibility, an enthusiastic imagination, an instinctive taste rather than deep thought. The same qualities differently directed make the poet. Is it, then, to be wondered at that we should find the poets and the musical composers considerably shorter lived than the followers of all other learned or scientific pursuits, whose sensibility is not exercised by their studies, whose imaginations are not wearied by excessive application and enthusiasm. The term “genus irritabile” deserves to be transferred from the poetical to the musical tribe; for we take it that an enraged musician is a much more common spectacle than an irritated bard, and infinitely more rabid in his choler.
‘Generally speaking, musicians are the most intolerant of men to one another,—the most captious,—the best humoured when flattered, and the worst tempered at all other times. Music, like laudanum, appears to soothe the senses when used in moderation, but the continual employment of either flurries and excites the faculties, and often renders the best-natured men in the world, petulant, irritable, and violent.’
Of the short-lived composers, Cimarosa died of corpulency, no indication of an irritable state of mind; Lully, from an accident; Mozart was weakly from his birth; Pergolesi lost his life in consequence of a hemorrhage; Purcell, it is to be feared, from imprudent indulgencies in conviviality; and Weber, from hereditary consumption. Surely there is as much wear and tear of the body from excited imagination in poets and painters as in musicians; but the two former do not live so much in society, have not to breathe the foul air of theatres, to bear heated rooms; and, generally speaking, they are more cautious. As to the comparative professional jealousy of painters and musicians, the former themselves admit their possession of it in the greatest abundance. And with regard to temper, Mr. Madden must have founded his calculations on some two or three unhappy instances: had he drawn his inference from any general experience, it would have been widely different. Poets and painters have commonly more cultivated minds than musicians, and these may enable them better to control their emotions; thus what is suppressed is by an easy mistake supposed not to exist.