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On Palm Sunday, as the last light of a grey day faded away, the church dedicated to Saint Henry, standing austerely apart from the traffic of the streets, was filled with the sweet sadness of Pergolesi's "Stabat Mater."
At the age of eleven she appeared in public, singing the soprano part of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, and playing her own accompaniment on the organ. This interested the Empress Maria Theresa, who procured the best of teachers for her. She made such rapid progress in piano that at her first concert she was able to arouse the utmost enthusiasm by her expressive and sympathetic performance.
My essay attracted favourable comment, and Schlesinger asked me to write an article in praise of the arrangement made by the Russian General Lwoff of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, which I did as superficially as possible. On my own impulse I then wrote an essay in a still more amiable vein called Du metier du virtuose et de l'independance de la composition.
Has liberty of action kept pace with liberty of opinion? Are Americans as truly free to-day as they certainly were fifty years ago? In æsthetics do we surpass Phidias and Praxiteles, Raphael and Michael Angelo? Is our music more perfect than Pergolesi's or Mozart's? Can we exhibit any marvels of architecture that excel the glory of Philæ, Athens, Pæstum, and Agra?
It was thus that the melancholy stanzas of that chef d'oeuvre of sadness and sorrow, the Stabat-Mater, were composed for a little convent in which one of Pergolesi's sisters resided.
Browning to Vallombrosa, and the one incident most clearly remembered is that of Browning's seating himself at the organ in the chapel, and playing some Gregorian chant, perhaps, or hymn of Pergolesi's.
This honour was accorded to Pergolesi's 'La Serva Padrona, in 1734, and the great success which it met with everywhere soon caused numberless imitations to spring up, so that in a few years opera buffa in Italy was launched upon a career of triumph. Founded as it was in avowed imitation of the tragedy of the Greeks, opera had never deigned to touch modern life at any point.
Diderot was also a warm partisan of the Italians. Pergolesi's beautiful music having been murdered by the French orchestra players at the Grand Opera-House, Diderot proposed for it the following witty and laconic inscription: "Hic Marsyas Apollinem."* * Here Marsyas flayed Apollo.
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