MARTIN LUTHER

If we cannot omit these troubadours, how can we overlook Martin Luther, whose musical attainments the skeptics are wont to minimise, as others deny his claim to that magnificent ejaculation:  “Who loves not wine, women, and song remains a fool his whole life long.”  No one claims that Luther wrote his own compositions, but that he dictated them to trained musicians who wrote down, and then wrote up such melodies as he played upon the flute.  But whatsoever may be the truth of his position as a composer, no one can deny him either a passion for music or a domestic romance.  The runaway monk told the truth, when he said:  “I married a runaway nun.”

When he was forty-one, with his connivance, a number of nuns fled, or were abducted, from a convent.  One of them, Catherina von Bora, found an asylum in Luther’s own home.  After looking about for a good husband for her, at the end of a year he married her himself.  She was then twenty-six years old.  The married life of the jovial reformer was happy; but when he died, he left her so poor that she was obliged to take in boarders, until she met her death by the same means that had brought her marriage,—­a runaway.

BRITISHERS

The earlier English composers have not been without their heart interests.  We have already pried into Purcell’s romance.  Old John Bull, at the age of forty-four, could give up his professorship to marry “Elizabeth Walker, of the Strand, maiden, being about twenty-four, daughter of ——­ Walker, citizen of London, deceased, she attending upon the Right Honourable Lady Marchioness of Winchester.”  Four years later, he became the chief of the prince’s music, with the splendid salary of L40 a year.

Sir William Sterndale loved a Mary Wood, and wrote an overture called “Marie des Bois,” and after this atrocious pun, married the poor girl in 1844, and they lived happily ever after, or at least for thirty years after.

Those other oldsters, Blow, Byrd, and Playford, were married men; and Arne, the composer of “Rule Britannia,” married, at the age of twenty-six, Cecilia Young, an eminent singer in Haendel’s company, and the daughter of an organist.  She continued to sing, and he to write music for her.  At the age of sixty-eight he died, singing a hallelujah.  Whether she echoed his sentiments we are not told, but she lived seventeen years longer.

Balfe married a German singer, Rosen, who afterward sang in some of his operas.

One of the few other British composers who attained distinction was John Field, who, like Balfe, was Dublin-born.  He was the inventor of Chopin’s Nocturne.  The story is told that he had a pupil from whom he could not collect his bills.  Finally in sheer despair he proposed, and, when she accepted him, found his only revenge in telling everybody he met that he had only married her to escape the necessity of