n 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.

Piccinni was the very beau ideal of a father and a husband. He and his
wife, who was a singer of exquisite skill and a teacher of ability,
gave little home concerts, which were events. They and their many
children went through more vicissitudes than have fallen to the lot of
many musicians; but always they loved one another and their art, and
there always remains that picture which the Prince of Brunswick
stumbled upon, when he knocked at Piccinni's door, and found him
rocking the cradle of one of his children, while another tugged at his
coat in boisterous fun, and the mother beamed her enjoyment.

Hardly less ideal, though far more picturesque and dramatic, was the
romance of Mozart.

This goldenhearted genius was a composer at an age when many children
have not commenced to learn their ABC's; he was a virtuoso before the
time when most boys can be trusted with a blunt knife. Kissed and
fondled by great beauties, from the age of five, it is small wonder
that Mozart began to improvise upon the oldest theme in the world
precociously. His first recorded love affair is found in his letters at
the age of thirteen. He loved with the same radiant enthusiasm that he
gave to his music, and while some of his flirtations were of the utmost
frivolity, such as his hilarious courtship of his pretty cousin, the
"Baesle," he was capable of the completest altruism, and could turn
aside from the aristocracy to lavish his idolatry upon the
fifteen-year-old daughter of a poor music copyist, whose wife took in
boarders. For this girl, Aloysia Weber, he wanted to give up his own
career as a concert pianist; he wanted to give up the conquest he had
planned of Paris, and devote himself to the training of her voice, to
writing operas for her explo