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If Smetana owes anything to anybody it is to Mozart, whose form and system of orchestration his own occasionally recalls, but his music is so thoroughly saturated with the melodies and rhythms of Bohemia, that it is quite unnecessary to look for any source of inspiration other than the composer's own native land.
The success of the Triumphal Ode was so marked that the composer's fame reached foreign lands, and the city of Florence ordered from her the cantata, "Hymne
These are usually elaborated, thus changing their character, taking on new meaning with the growth and development of the idea in the composer's mind; when through with it, however, the thought appears fresh and spontaneous, such was his consummate art, as if it had never undergone any elaboration.
The power of music to satisfy and delight resides in the sensuous value of its material and in the character of its pattern as form, the balance and contrast of tonal relations, the folding and unfolding of themes, their development and progress to the final compelling unity-in-variety which constitutes its form and which in its own inherent and self-sufficing way is made the expression of the composer's emotion and musical idea.
He was at first too pleased even to sit down; he measured the great space from end to end, admiring again everything he had admired before and protesting afresh that no modern ingenuity not even his own, to which he did justice could create effects of such purity. The final touch in the picture before them was just the composer's ignorance. Mr.
The Handels of Breslau had for several generations been coppersmiths. Valentine Handel, the composer's grandfather, born in 1582, migrated to Halle, where two of his sons followed the same trade. His third son, George, born 1622, became a barber-surgeon. At the age of twenty he married the widow of the barber to whom he had been apprenticed; she was twelve years older than he was.
They commanded a most distinguished auditory, including the Lord-Lieutenant and his family, and were crowned with success in a pecuniary point of view, answering, and indeed exceeding, the composer's highest expectations.
This anteroom of the dying man, where every one of us hopelessly waited and watched, was like a guard-house or a camp. M. Gavard probably exaggerates the services of the Princess Czartoryska, but certainly forgets those of the composer's sister.
Seven years were now actively employed in producing operas for Vienna and Italian cities, which, without possessing great value, show the change which had begun to take place in this composer's theories of dramatic music. In Paris he had been struck with the operas of Rameau, in which the declamatory form was strongly marked.
The testimony of Dr. Véron, who was manager of the Grand Opera during the most of the composer's brilliant career, is of great interest, as illustrating this trait of Meyerbeer's composition. He tells us in his "Mémoires," before alluded to, that "Robert" was made and remade before its final production.
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