id of my
severity--although this severity was tempered.

One day one of the parish vicars undertook to instruct me on this point.
He told me that the Madeleine audiences were composed in the main of
wealthy people who attended the Opera-Comique frequently, and formed
musical tastes which ought to be respected.

"Monsieur l'abbe," I replied, "when I hear from the pulpit the language
of opera-comique, I will play music appropriate to it, and not before!"

CHAPTER XI

JOSEPH HAYDN AND THE "SEVEN WORDS"

Joseph Haydn, that great musician, the father of the symphony and of all
modern music, has been neglected. We are too prone to forget that
concerts are, in a sense, museums in which the older schools of music
should be represented. Music is something besides a source of sensuous
pleasure and keen emotion, and this resource, precious as it is, is only
a chance corner in the wide realm of musical art. He who does not get
absolute pleasure from a simple series of well-constructed chords,
beautiful only in their arrangement, is not really fond of music. The
same is true of the one who does not prefer the first prelude of the
_Wohltemperirte Klavier_, played without gradations, just as the author
wrote it for the harpsichord, to the same prelude embellished with an
impassioned melody; or who does not prefer a popular melody of character
or a Gregorian chant without any accompaniment to a series of dissonant
and pretentious chords.

The directors of great concerts should love music themselves and should
lead the public to appreciate it. They should not allow the masters to
be forgotten, for their only fault was that they were not born in our
times and they never dreamed of attempting to satisfy the tastes of an
unborn generation. Above all, the directors should grant recognition to
masters like Joseph Haydn who were in advance of their own times and who
seem now and then to belong to our own.

The only examples of Joseph Haydn's immense work that the present
generation knows are two or three symphonies, rarely and perfunctorily
performed. This is the same as saying that we do not know him at all. No
musician was ever more prolific or showed a greater wealth of
imagination. When we examine this mine of jewels, we are astonished to
find at every step a gem which we would have attributed to the invention
of some modern or other. We are dazzled by their rays, and where we
expect black-and-whites we find pastels grown