e style of the Neapolitan musician was not on the
whole pleasing to ears grown nice and euphuistic in the more dulcet
melodies of the day; and faults and extravagances easily discernible,
and often to appearance wilful, served the critics for an excuse for
their distaste. Fortunately, or the poor musician might have starved,
he was not only a composer, but also an excellent practical performer,
especially on the violin, and by that instrument he earned a decent
subsistence as one of the orchestra at the Great Theatre of San Carlo.
Here formal and appointed tasks necessarily kept his eccentric fancies
in tolerable check, though it is recorded that no less than five times
he had been deposed from his desk for having shocked the conoscenti,
and thrown the whole band into confusion, by impromptu variations of so
frantic and startling a nature that one might well have imagined that
the harpies or witches who inspired his compositions had clawed hold of
his instrument.

The impossibility, however, to find any one of equal excellence as a
performer (that is to say, in his more lucid and orderly moments) had
forced his reinstalment, and he had now, for the most part, reconciled
himself to the narrow sphere of his appointed adagios or allegros. The
audience, too, aware of his propensity, were quick to perceive the least
deviation from the text; and if he wandered for a moment, which
might also be detected by the eye as well as the ear, in some strange
contortion of visage, and some ominous flourish of his bow, a gentle and
admonitory murmur recalled the musician from his Elysium or his Tartarus
to the sober regions of his desk. Then he would start as if from a
dream, cast a hurried, frightened, apologetic glance around, and, with
a crestfallen, humbled air, draw his rebellious instrument back to the
beaten track of the glib monotony. But at home he would make himself
amends for this reluctant drudgery. And there, grasping the unhappy
violin with ferocious fingers, he would pour forth, often till the
morning rose, strange, wild measures that would startle the early
fisherman on the shore below with a superstitious awe, and make him
cross himself as if mermaid or sprite had wailed no earthly music in his
ear.

(*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 app