(Orpheus was the favourite hero of early Italian Opera, or Lyrical Drama.  The Orfeo of Angelo Politiano was produced in 1475.  The Orfeo of Monteverde was performed at Venice in 1667.)

This man’s appearance was in keeping with the characteristics of his art.  The features were noble and striking, but worn and haggard, with black, careless locks tangled into a maze of curls, and a fixed, speculative, dreamy stare in his large and hollow eyes.  All his movements were peculiar, sudden, and abrupt, as the impulse seized him; and in gliding through the streets, or along the beach, he was heard laughing and talking to himself.  Withal, he was a harmless, guileless, gentle creature, and would share his mite with any idle lazzaroni, whom he often paused to contemplate as they lay lazily basking in the sun.  Yet was he thoroughly unsocial.  He formed no friends, flattered no patrons, resorted to none of the merry-makings so dear to the children of music and the South.  He and his art seemed alone suited to each other,—­both quaint, primitive, unworldly, irregular.  You could not separate the man from his music; it was himself.  Without it he was nothing, a mere machine!  WITH it, he was king over worlds of his own.  Poor man, he had little enough in this!  At a manufacturing town in England there is a gravestone on which the epitaph records “one Claudius Phillips, whose absolute contempt for riches, and inimitable performance on the violin, made him the admiration of all that knew him!” Logical conjunction of opposite eulogies!  In proportion, O Genius, to thy contempt for riches will be thy performance on thy violin!

Gaetano Pisani’s talents as a composer had been chiefly exhibited in music appropriate to this his favourite instrument, of all unquestionably the most various and royal in its resources and power over the passions.  As Shakespeare among poets is the Cremona among instruments.  Nevertheless, he had composed other pieces of larger ambition and wider accomplishment, and chief of these, his precious, his unpurchased, his unpublished, his unpublishable and imperishable opera of the “Siren.”  This great work had been the dream of his boyhood, the mistress of his manhood; in advancing age “it stood beside him like his youth.”  Vainly had he struggled to place it before the world.  Even bland, unjealous Paisiello, Maestro di Capella, shook his gentle head when the musician favoured him with a specimen of one of his most thrilling scenas.  And yet, Paisiello, though that music differs from all Durante taught thee to emulate, there may—­but patience, Gaetano Pisani! bide thy time, and keep thy violin in tune!