fiddler.  After she died, the father invited him into the family, only to be told that the invitation was too late.  The other woman, a lady of high degree, offered herself as a substitute for his career, only to be declined with thanks and possibly with a formal statement that “rejection implied no lack of merit.”  Seeing that these things happened in the eighteenth century, I need not add that both women were romantic enough to go into a decline, and die beautifully.

Whatever food music may have been to Haendel’s greatness, there was another food that rivalled it in his esteem; and that food was the symphonic poetry of the cook.  For Haendel was almost equally famous both as a composer and a digester.  In this he was rivalled by the father of French opera, Lully, who was a gourmand, in spite of the fact that he spent his early life as a kitchen boy.  He led his wife a miserable existence on account of his hot temper, his brutality, and his excesses in solid and liquid food.  After him came Rameau, who, like Stradivari, fell in love with a widow while he was still in his teens and she well out of hers.  He did not wed, however, until he was forty-three, and then he wed an eighteen-year-old girl, who was, they say, a very good woman, and who did her best to make her husband very happy.  But he was taciturn, and rarely spoke even to his own family, and spent on them almost less money than words.  Another opera composer of the time was Reinhard Keiser.  He married a woman who, with her wealth and her voice, rescued his operatic ventures from bankruptcy.  These make a rather sordid and unromantic group.

But again there stalks forth, to confound all our theories, the superb figure of Gluck, who fell in love but once, and then for all time, with Maria Anna Pergin, who loved him, and whose mother approved of him, but whose purse-proud father despised him for a musician.  The lovers accepted the rebuff as a temporary sorrow only, and Providence, like a playright, removed the stern parent in the next act.  Gluck flew back from Italy to Vienna to his betrothed, “with whom to his death he dwelt in happiest wedlock.”  She went with him on his triumphal tours, and spent her wealth in charities.  They had no children of their own, but adopted a niece.  The devoted wife used to play his accompaniment as he sang his own music, and when he died he took especial pains that she should be his sole and exclusive heir, even leaving it to her pleasure whether or not his brothers and sisters should have anything at all.

Plainly we should be thinking that music has a purifying, ennobling, and substantial effect upon society, if only Gluck’s friend and partisan, the successful composer and immortal writer, Jean Jacques Rousseau, would not intrude upon the picture with his faun-like paganisms and magnificently shameless “Confessions.”

Jostling elbows with him comes Gluck’s chiefest rival, Piccinni, one of the most beautiful characters in history, a man who could wage a mortal combat in art, without bitterness toward his bitter rivals.  He could, when Gluck died, strive to organise a memorial festival in his honour, and when his other rival, Sacchini, was taken from the arena by death, he could deliver the funeral eulogy.  This Sacchini, by the bye, was a reckless voluptuary, who seems never to have married.