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Updated: May 26, 2025
Under Professor Hill she took a single course of harmony, but in all the important subjects of counterpoint, fugue, musical form, and instrumentation, she carried on her work entirely alone. Among the tasks she set for herself was the translation of the books on orchestration by Berlioz and Gevaert. Another consisted in memorizing Bach fugues and rewriting them with a voice on each staff.
As a matter of fact, the Rendell girls had claim to one great distinction promiscuous accomplishments had been discarded in their case, and each had been brought up to do some one thing well. Maud was musical, and practised scales two hours a day as a preliminary before settling down for another two or three hours of sonatas and fugues.
Not that they are hard in a modern way: Bach knew nothing of harmonics, pizzicati, scales in octaves and tenths. But his counterpoint, his fugues to play them well when the principal theme is sometimes in the outer voices, sometimes in the inner voices, or moving from one to the other is supremely difficult!
She believed that Canon Wilton had given the organist a hint that he would have an attentive hearer, for he was playing one of Bach's greatest preludes and fugues. Father Robertson stayed on in his place. All the rest of the small congregation drifted away through the archway in the rood-screen and down the steps to the nave.
The story of his being refused at the Milan Conservatory, and afterward amazing the authorities by his speed in composing fugues, is too well known to need repetition. After his Milan studies, we find him back at Busseto, in love with Barezzi's daughter Margherita.
Last night she did not close her eyes, did not even undress; and the hall clock was striking three this morning when I heard her open the piano and play one of those dismal, frantic, wailing things she calls 'fugues, that make the hair rise on my head and every inch of my flesh creep as if a stranger were treading on my grave.
Even Tchaikowsky, who was a good deal of an intellectualist himself, and dubbed "perfect," in a characteristically servile letter, every one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimsky composed in the course of a single month, complained that the latter "worshiped technique" and that his work was "Full of contrapuntal tricks and all the signs of a sterile pedantry."
The bass solo is better; the final chorus brings us back to the high plane. In spite of Berlioz' famous parody on the "Amen" fugues, in the "Damnation of Faust," Shelley has used the word over a score of times in succession to finish his work. But altogether the work is one of maturity of feeling and expression, and it is a notable contribution to American sacred music.
She had no dramatic or vocal ambition, though she had musical taste and sang and played fairly well, especially at sight. Strangely enough, she had an unusual fondness for fugues and made Mozart write down many of his improvisations. The gossips of Vienna lost no time in construing his renewal of friendship with the Webers.
When the time came to write fugues he could write them with a certain degree of power. But his aim was not writing fugues any more than an architect's aim is painting in water-colours. Water-colours are very useful to architects, and they make use of them; but because they do not rival Turner or David Cox it does not follow that they are not masters of the art of architecture.
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