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"After three years' study I left Joachim and went to Paris. Liszt had given me letters of introduction to various French artists, among them Saint-Saëns. One evening I happened to hear Léonard play Corelli's La Folia in the Salle Pleyel, and the liquid clarity and beauty of his tone so impressed me that I decided I must study with him. I played for him and he accepted me as a pupil.
Tamara noticed that amused, whimsical, mocking gleam in the Cossack's great eyes, but Millicent went gaily on, unconscious of anything but herself. "I mean those mythical, strange sort of devils who come to earth, you know, and and make love to ladies a sort of Satan like in Marie Corelli's lovely book. You remember, Tamara, the one you were so funny about, laughing when you read it."
In 1712 Corelli's concertos were beautifully engraved at Amsterdam, but the composer only survived the publication a few weeks. A beautiful statue, bearing the inscription "Corelli princeps musicorum," was erected to his memory, adjacent that honoring the memory of Raffaelle in the Pantheon. He accumulated a considerable fortune, and left a valuable collection of pictures.
Corelli's compositions are recognized to-day as types of musical purity and freshness, and the great number of distinguished pupils who graduated from his teaching relate him closely with all the distinguished violinists even down to the present day. In Corelli's younger days the church had a stronger claim on musicians than the theatre or concert-room.
Corelli's compositions are remarkable for delicate taste and pleasing melodies and harmonies. He must be considered as the author of the greatest improvement which violin music underwent at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
If I were annoyed with anybody I should be annoyed with myself for having given such a handle to the world's ill-nature. Accepting Miss Corelli's disclaimer, one is still forced to the conclusion that she has fallen into a serious indiscretion.
As the king had commanded the piece, the least he could have done would have been to have waited till it was finished. "If they play at Naples, they are not very polite there," poor Corelli must have thought! Another unfortunate mishap also occurred to him there, if we are to believe the dictum of Geminiani, one of Corelli's pupils, who had preceded him at Naples.
But Weber's "last waltz" and Corelli's gavottes are not the music one would naturally select for musical chairs; and when the strains continue uninterrupted for five or ten-minutes, during the whole of which time the company is perambulating round and round an array of empty chairs, the effect is somewhat monotonous.
Miss Corelli's method of capturing the public mind is not a trick which anybody else might copy. It is the result of a real, though perilous, gift of nature a gift which she possesses in something of a superlative degree. Nobody could pretend to such a gift and succeed by virtue of the pretence. Miss Corelli is, at least, quite serious in the belief that she is a woman of genius.
There is reason in the profitable denunciation of a wicked world, as well as in the roasting of eggs. But Miss Corelli has hit the public hard, and it is the self-imposed task of the present writer to find out, as far as in him lies, why and how she has done this. Miss Corelli's force is hysteric, but it is sometimes very real. A self-approving hysteria can do fine things under given conditions.
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