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For what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi? an ens rationale, which pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving creates it? The razor's edge becomes a saw to the armed vision; and the delicious melodies of Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of time should be a thousand times subtler than ours.
Beginning to write in the same year with Cimarosa, and even earlier than Mozart, and being the contemporary of Verdi and Wagner, he witnessed almost the origin of the two modern classical schools of France and Germany, their rise to perfection, and, if not their decline, the arrival of a time when criticism would usurp the place of creation, and when to propound new rules for art claims higher consideration than to act according to its ever unalterable principles.
Yet the same Viennese public, six years before, had actually hissed Mozart's "Nozze di Figaro," which shares with Rossini's "Il Barbiere" the greatest rank in comic opera, and has retained, to this day, its perennial freshness and interest. Cimarosa himself did not share the opinion of his admirers in respect to Mozart.
A still higher place must be assigned to another disciple and follower of the school perfected by Piccini, Dominic Cimarosa, born in Naples in 1754. His life down to his latter years was an uninterrupted flow of prosperity.
A few quiet streets, unbroken by shop-fronts and unfrequented by vehicles, lead up to that quarter; streets of low white-washed convent walls overtopped by trees, of silent palaces, of unpretending little houses of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, from behind whose iron window-gratings and blistered green shutters one expects even now, as one passes in the silence of the summer afternoons, to hear the faint jangle of some harpsichord-strummed minuet, the turns and sudden high notes of some long-forgotten song by Cimarosa or Paisiello.
These seasons were marked by the performance of the fine operas of Winter, of some of the masterpieces of Cimarosa, and by the first introduction into England of the music of Mozart, the "Clemenza di Tito," in which Mrs. Billington and Braham appeared, having been the earliest acquaintance of the English public with the greatest of the German operatic composers.
CIMAROSA has here combined the strength of German harmony with the grace which constitutes the charm of Italian melody. He is particularly famous for the brilliancy of his ideas, the fecundity of his genius, the richness of his style, and, above all, for the finish of his pictures. The certain effect of such a production is to eclipse every thing put in competition with it.
Although the most famous musicians of the day did not disdain occasionally to follow in the footsteps of Cimarosa, for the most part the task of purveying light operas for the smaller theatres of Italy fell into the hands of second and third rate composers.
During a period of four years spent at the imperial court of the North, Cimarosa produced nearly five hundred works, great and small, and only left the service of his magnificent patroness, who was no less passionately fond of art than she was great as a ruler and dissolute as a woman, because the severe climate affected his health, for he was a typical Italian in his temperament.
Fresh, graceful, and occasionally tender, it forms the happiest contrast to the grandiose nonsense which the composer was in the habit of turning out to suit the vitiated taste of the day, and is a convincing proof that if he had been permitted to exercise his talent in a congenial sphere, Donizetti would be entitled to rank with the most successful followers of Cimarosa and Paisiello, instead of being degraded to the rank of a mere purveyor to the manufacturers of barrel-organs.
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