On this day, however, he pretended to be angry at his guest for refusing the choice liqueur.  In a burlesque rage, he seized the glass, drained it at a gulp, and jokingly begged the guests not to tell his wife.  She came back to the room to say that the carriage was ready.  Frau von Gluck and the guests left him for half an hour, and he bade them a cheerful farewell.  Fifteen minutes later his third stroke of apoplexy attacked him, and his horrified wife returning found him unconscious.  In a few hours he was dead.  This wife, with whom he lived so congenially, and whose money gave him even more luxury than his operatic success could have procured,—­indeed, the very house he died in she had bought for eleven thousand florins,—­outlived him less than three years, dying March 12, 1800, at the age of seventy-one.  She was buried near him, and her tomb, built by her nephew, has the following epitaph: 

“Here rests in peace, near her husband, Maria Anne, Edle von Gluck, born Pergin.  She was a good Christian, and without ostentation a mother to the poor.  She was loved and cherished by all who knew her.”

ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR

During the fierce battles Gluck fought in Paris, one of his most ardent partisans was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician in a small way, wrote songs, an enormously successful opera, “Le Devin du Village,” and other musical works, besides making an attempt to reform musical notation, and writing a dictionary of music.  The world, however, does not accept him as a musician but as a writer, and his numerous and curious love affairs are told in so much detail in his immortal “Confessions,” that I cannot attempt to treat them here.  Vandam, in his book on “Great Amours,” dissects Rousseau’s heart ruthlessly.  For his ability to do this, he must thank Rousseau most, for the unequalled frankness of his own biography, Francis Greble, dissecting “Rousseau’s first love,” has neatly dubbed him “the Great High Priest of those who kiss and tell.”

THE AMIABLE PICCINNI

In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck.

The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni’s name is a byword in the history of music.  We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, a man of no mean talent, whose misfortune and not whose fault it was, that he was not a genius of the first order.