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There was to be no function at the theaters that day and she was thinking of going to the park called Theresienwiese, at the foot of the statue of Bavaria, to see the Tyrolese fair and to listen to the folk-songs.
And so she sang, on and on, hour after hour, hymns and chansons, folk-songs and bits from comic operas, songs of the boulevards alternating with the Tantum ergo and the O Filii et Filiæ. It mattered little what she sang.
"It seems that this Hungarian's speciality is playing the waltzes and folk-songs of his own country, which is certainly not anything great; but his successes are not obtained with the violin, but among the women. The ladies in London fight for him. His game is to pass himself off as a fallen man, depraved, worn-out.
But what was this pain in the face and words of one so young, so eager and alive? Was it the melancholy of her race, the thing one got in old folk-songs? Or was it a new and special kind of melancholy, engendered in mining-camps in the far West of America? The girl's countenance was as intriguing as her words. Her grey eyes were set under sharply defined dark brows, which did not match her hair.
It has chorales, marches, folk-songs, duets, quintets, ensembles, and choruses, and yet the composer does not lose sight of his theories; for here we observe as characteristic a use of motives and as skilful a combination of them as can be found in any of his works.
The art music of the time was polyphonic, that is, constructed by so interweaving melodies that harmonies resulted. Of solos in our modern sense nothing was known beyond the folk-songs, instinctive outpourings of the human heart, and these learned composers had merely used as pegs on which to hang their counterpoint.
Like the Sultana in his symphonic poem, he "drew on the poets for their verses, on the folk-songs for their words, and intermingled tales and adventures one with another."
His songs and poems are loved by the peasants, and used at all their festivals. He wrote songs "that would make bare legs skip at sound of them," and, "like a bird in the greenwood, he would sing for the country-folk." So successfully did he write these folk-songs, that "bare legs" do skip at the sound of them even to-day at every festivity.
The Indian Queen contains the recitative "Ye twice ten hundred deities" and the song "By the croaking of the toad." Purcell's forms are not highly organised. There are fugues, canons, exercises on a ground-bass, and many numbers are dances planned in much the same way as other people's dances, and songs differing only in their quality from folk-songs.
For his inspiration, as well as many of his actual themes, Haydn went to his native folk-dances and folk-songs; he brought in the fresh air from the wilds, and the now dusty contrapuntalism was blown out never again to return.
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