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The old minstrels used music as a means of giving accent and force to their poems; and now, as a means of spinning a web of tone which should not only be beautiful, but also give utterance to the feeling of the poem, composers went back to the method of the minstrels. Lawes carried this method as far as ever it has been, and probably can be, carried. When Milton said,
In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck. The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in the history of music.
Henry Chorley in his "Thirty Years' Musical Recollections," writing of the year 1851, says: "To a few hearers, since then grown into a European public, neither the warmest welcome nor the most bleak indifference could alter the conviction that among the composers who have appeared during the last twenty-five years, M. Gounod was the most promising one, as showing the greatest combination of sterling science, beauty of idea, freshness of fancy, and individuality.
In music, this boy of twelve years, born blind, utterly ignorant of a note, ignorant of every phase of so-called musical science, interprets severely classical composers with a clearness of conception in which he excels, and a skill in mechanism equal to that of our second-rate artists.
It is interesting as showing us that even a master cannot always render justice to another. Difference engenders hatred, as Stendhal would say. Can the record of criticism made by plastic artists show a generous Robert Schumann? Schumann discovered many composers from Chopin to Brahms and made their fortunes by his enthusiastic writing about them.
The Masses and Passion-music of the old composers were often written without hope of reward, entirely from love of the subject; they were impelled to it, either through religious ardor, or from the force of their artistic perceptions.
Puccini spends years searching for suitable librettos, as great composers have always done. When he finds a story that is worthy he turns it into an opera. But he will wait till he discovers the right kind of a plot. No wonder he has success.
He still has most musical enjoyment in listening to Bach and Handel. The former he has spoken of as one of the most "modern" of composers, and will point out that his works contain melodious passages that might be the musical thought of Franz Lehar or Leo Fall.
Besides being biographically important, the record of the master's likings and dislikings will teach a useful lesson to the critic and furnish some curious material for the psychological student. Highest among all the composers, living and dead, Chopin esteemed Mozart. Him he regarded as "the ideal type, the poet par excellence."
Yet some composers they have whose works will have more than an ephemeral fame, amongst whom may be cited Aubert, whose music is not only admired in France but throughout all Europe; another author of extreme merit is Onslow, whose productions are not so voluminous or so extensively known as those of Aubert, but possessing that intrinsic worth which will increase in estimation as it descends to posterity: the compositions of Halévy and Berlioz have also some degree of merit.
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