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Dannreuther see Finck's "Wagner and his Works" that "Mozart's music and Mozart's orchestra are a perfect match; an equally perfect balance exists between Palestrina's choir and Palestrina's counterpoint, and I find a similar correspondence between Chopin's piano and some of his Etudes and Preludes I do not care for the Ladies' Chopin; there is too much of the Parisian salon in that, but he has given us many things which are above the salon."
These thoughts were strengthened by the result of a chance meeting one day, as he was walking home with his portfolio under his arm, with Johann Schenk, a scientific and thoroughly accomplished musician. Beethoven complained to him of the little advance he was making in counterpoint, and that Haydn never corrected his exercises or taught him anything.
Though a finished performer, he knew but little of counterpoint, and the more purely scientific side of his art had been neglected. That he applied himself with all the ardor of his nature to his studies we know. They were given precedence over everything else.
The art music of the time was polyphonic, that is, constructed by so interweaving melodies that harmonies resulted. Of solos in our modern sense nothing was known beyond the folk-songs, instinctive outpourings of the human heart, and these learned composers had merely used as pegs on which to hang their counterpoint.
It worked favorably for the external brilliancy of tone of this instrument, while gradually closing the ears of the dilettante and the musician to the charms of a simple but characteristic management of the voice in accordance with the rules of counterpoint.
W. S. Rockstro, was giving me lessons in medieval counterpoint; so I particularly noticed the music at divine service. The hymns were very silly, and of the usual Gounod-Barnby character.
Munt, and tap surreptitiously when the tunes come of course, not so as to disturb the others ; or like Helen, who can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music's flood; or like Margaret, who can only see the music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and holds the full score open on his knee; or like their cousin, Fraulein Mosebach, who remembers all the time that Beethoven is "echt Deutsch"; or like Fraulein Mosebach's young man, who can remember nothing but Fraulein Mosebach: in any case, the passion of your life becomes more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings.
He evidently regarded him as a very simple and provincial young musician, a notable organist indeed, and a master of such learned devices as counterpoint and fugue, but a dull composer, turning out endless arias and cantatas with no sense of the fashionable Italian taste. It was Mattheson, by his own account, who introduced Handel to the musical life of Hamburg.
He looked at it all for a minute or two as the south-west wind went past his ears, and played a strange tune on the innumerable stems of the bents and the hard-stalked blossoms, to which the bees sang counterpoint.
John Cormyn's on the last of the days, when Nesta was engaged to sing with her mother a duet of her own composition, the first public fruit of her lessons in counterpoint from rigid Herr Strauscher, who had said what he had said, in letting it pass: eulogy, coming from him. So Victor heard, and he doated am the surprise to come for him, in a boyish anticipation.
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