Piccinni was the very beau ideal of a father and a husband.  He and his wife, who was a singer of exquisite skill and a teacher of ability, gave little home concerts, which were events.  They and their many children went through more vicissitudes than have fallen to the lot of many musicians; but always they loved one another and their art, and there always remains that picture which the Prince of Brunswick stumbled upon, when he knocked at Piccinni’s door, and found him rocking the cradle of one of his children, while another tugged at his coat in boisterous fun, and the mother beamed her enjoyment.

Hardly less ideal, though far more picturesque and dramatic, was the romance of Mozart.

This goldenhearted genius was a composer at an age when many children have not commenced to learn their ABC’s; he was a virtuoso before the time when most boys can be trusted with a blunt knife.  Kissed and fondled by great beauties, from the age of five, it is small wonder that Mozart began to improvise upon the oldest theme in the world precociously.  His first recorded love affair is found in his letters at the age of thirteen.  He loved with the same radiant enthusiasm that he gave to his music, and while some of his flirtations were of the utmost frivolity, such as his hilarious courtship of his pretty cousin, the “Baesle,” he was capable of the completest altruism, and could turn aside from the aristocracy to lavish his idolatry upon the fifteen-year-old daughter of a poor music copyist, whose wife took in boarders.  For this girl, Aloysia Weber, he wanted to give up his own career as a concert pianist; he wanted to give up the conquest he had planned of Paris, and devote himself to the training of her voice, to writing operas for her exploitation, and to journeying in Italy for the production of these operas and the promulgation of her talents.  Yet after breaking his heart, as he supposed, for the gifted and fickle woman who became a successful prima donna,—­after losing her, he did that most impossible thing which could never happen in real fiction, and sought his consolation in the arms and in the heart of Aloysia’s younger sister, who was not especially pretty, and was only modestly musical.  But her name was Constanze, and she lived up to it.

Constanze could always read to him, and tell him stories as he liked to have her do while he composed, and she could cut up his meat for him lest in his absent-mindedness he carve off one of his valuable fingers.  And when she was ill, as she frequently was, there could be no gentler nurse than he.  Besides, when winter was upon them, it was no winter of discontent, for if the fire gave out and the fuel could not be afforded, could they not always waltz together?