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She had already attained a professorship of harmony in the Conservatoire, and published many valuable organ works, besides pieces for piano and other instruments. Several masses by her remained in manuscript. Among the song composers of the eighteenth century belongs Mme. de Travenet, whose romances and chansons, with piano or harp, became very popular.
Oh, how many and many a time have I desired to be nearer you, that I might converse and discuss with your Reverence! I live in a country where music has very little success, though, exclusive of those who have forsaken us, we have still admirable professors, and more particularly composers of great solidity, knowledge, and taste. We are rather badly off at the theatre from the want of actors.
There can be no doubt that the conditions were all highly favorable to the manufacture of great instruments. There were many composers of genius and numerous orchestras scattered over Italy, Germany, and France, and there must have been a demand for bow instruments of a high order.
Linda learned to recognize some of the composers. Pansy liked best the modern waltzes; Judith insisted that Richard Strauss was incomparable; but Linda developed an overwhelming preference for Gluck.
As a town-mouse well acquainted with the latest songs by the most fashionable composers they are women for the most part Kim had a distinct advantage over men from a little fruit-village behind Saharunpore, but he let that advantage be inferred. At noon they turned aside to eat, and the meal was good, plentiful, and well-served on plates of clean leaves, in decency, out of drift of the dust.
In Beethoven's time and long before, the aristocracy led lives of easy, complacent enjoyment, dabbling in art, patronizing music and the composers, seemingly with no prevision that the musicians whom they attached to their train, and who in the cases of Mozart and Haydn were at times treated but little better than lackeys, were destined by the irony of fate to occupy places in the temple of fame, which would be denied themselves.
And the almost incredible sensitiveness of Chopin has been illustrated in the memoirs of George Sand. An unusually emotional nature being thus the general characteristic of musical composers, we have in it just the agency required for the development of recitative and song.
But the music written since their time has forced upon the hearer a more and more passive rôle. The composers arrogated to themselves, to varying extents, the greater part of the activity; insisted upon giving all, of doing the larger share of the labor. The old intimacy was lost; with Wagner the intellectual game of the leit-motif system was substituted for the creative exercise.
Yet even the greatest composers cannot always command new thoughts at will, and it is therefore of interest to note what devices some of them resorted to rouse their dormant faculties.
I have spoken of this old music as an expression of love; and this, in the face of the emotional effects of certain modern composers, may make some persons smile. Perhaps I should rather have said that this old music expresses, above everything else, the lovable; for does not eminent beauty inevitably awaken love, either as respect or tenderness; the lovable, loveliness?
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