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Updated: May 1, 2025
It was October weather; the stone-grey sky was full of larks, the leaden mirror of the Thames brightened with autumnal foliage, and the fallen leaves of the chestnuts chirped under the composer's footing. There is no time of the year in England more courageous; and Jimson, though he was not without his troubles, whistled as he went. A little above Padwick the river lies very solitary.
While thus occupied, he turned to the piano, and casually glanced at a piece of music lying open upon it. Some words of writing at the top expressed that it was the composer's original copy, presented by him, Christopher Julian, to the author of the song.
These wonderful scales begin thus: in the last scene of the opera. They were an afterthought of the composer's. They did not appear in the original score of the scene, as the autograph shows, but were written in after the music had once been completed. They are crowded into the staves in tiny notes which sometimes extend from one measure into the next.
We are tempted to go further, almost in defiance, and say that music need not be definite, even despite the composer's intent. In other words, if the tonal poet designs and has in mind a group of graphic figures, he may nevertheless achieve a work where the real value and beauty lie in a certain interlinear humor and poetry, where the labels can in some degree be disregarded.
His father, Johann von Beethoven, was a tenor singer in the Electoral Chapel of the Archbishop of Cologne, at Bonn, and his mother, Maria Magdalena, was a daughter of the head cook at the castle of Ehrenbreitstein. The Beethoven family originally came from Louvain, in Belgium; but the composer's grandfather had settled in Bonn, first as a singer, and afterward as Capellmeister to the court.
Next to Wagner's own genius, which would eventually have fought its way into the open, the influence that first brought Wagner some degree of recognition was Franz Liszt. His assistance to Wagner at this stage in that composer's career cannot be overestimated. He was his tonic in despair, his solace in his darkest hours.
His first opera, 'Der Bärenhäuter' , was fairly successful, principally owing to a fantastic and semi-comic libretto. 'Herzog Wildfang' and 'Der Kobold' failed completely, nor does his latest work, 'Bruder Lustig' , raise very sanguine hopes as to its young composer's future career.
He must have so complete a mastery of his materials and working forces that his imagination may be influenced unimpeded by the emanations from the composer's imagination which animate the moving forms he commands.
He had the same gift of sympathetic expression, of throwing his feeling into his voice, and using its modulations to accompany and convey every shade of meaning, that a great composer has when he puts music to a poem, or a great executant when he renders at once the composer's and the poet's thought. That the voice should so seldom have failed him was wonderful.
I tell you, my reader, it was a trying ordeal, and I hardly know how I got through it, but I did in some sort of fashion. Costa, I may explain, made it a rigid rule never to conduct a living composer's music; consequently, he would have nothing to do with the performance even of my small trio. I found, however, a good friend in M. Sainton, the leader of the band.
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