De Wert had gone to Italy as a boy, and you might be after blaming those soft Italian skies for his amorous troubles.  But then you’ll encounter such a life as that of Palestrina spent altogether in Italy.  He married young.  Her name was Lucrezia, and their life seems to have been one of ideal devotion.  She bore him four sons, and stood by him in all his troubles, brightening the twilight of poverty, adorning that high noon of his glory, when the Pope himself turned to Palestrina, and implored him to reform and rescue the whole music of the Church from its corruptions.  It was well that Lucrezia could offer him solace, for unwittingly she had once brought him his direst distress.  When he was recovered and well, a better post was offered him, and things ran smoothly till, twenty-five years later, Lucrezia died, leaving him broken-hearted with only one worthless son to embitter the last fourteen years of his widowed life.  His most poignantly impressive motets seem to have been written under the anguish of Lucrezia’s death.  The finest of them is his setting of the words: 

  “By the River of Babylon we have set us down and wept,
  Remembering Thee, oh, Zion;
  Upon the willows we have hung our harps,”

which, as E.H.  Pember says, “may well have represented to himself, the heart-broken composer, mourning by the banks of the Tiber, for the lost wife whom he had loved so long.”

Close upon so noble a life, artistic and personal, comes the career of Georges de la Hele, who, being a priest, gave up his lucrative benefice to wed the woman he wished.

And yet again with disconcerting effect comes the story of Ambrosio de Cotes, who was a gambler and a drunkard, who kept a mistress, and was rebuked publicly for howling indecent refrains to the tunes in church.  Which of these is fairly typical as a musician?

Then comes the most notable man in all English music, Harry Purcell, who wrote the best love-songs that ever melted the reserve of his race.  He must have been a good husband, and his married life a happy one, seeing how ardent his wife was for his memory, and how she celebrated him in a memorial volume, as the Orpheus of Great Britain, and how eager she was that the two sons that survived out of their six children, should be trained to music.

And speaking of types, what shall we say of this cloud of witnesses, bearing the most honoured name in music, the name of Bach?

There were more than twenty-five Bachs, who made themselves names as makers of harmony, and they earned themselves almost as great names as family makers; all except Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who was as lacking in virtue as he was abundant in virtuosity.  He was notoriously immoral, and yet the greatest organist of his time, as his father had been before him; and it was this father, Johann Sebastian Bach, who by his life and preeminence in music, offers the biggest obstacle to any theory about the immoral influences of the art.  For surely, if he, who is generally called the greatest of musicians, led a life of hardly equalled domesticity, it will not be easy to claim that music has an unsettling effect upon society.  And yet there are his great rivals, Handel and Beethoven, whose careers are in the remotest possible contrast.