especially beautiful. This kind of trill sounds to us
amateurishly ridiculous, while, on the contrary, the most admired rapid
trills of our best singers of today would probably have been called
"false shakes" a hundred and fifty years ago. Incidentally it may be
remarked that two hundred years ago people actually took pleasure in
trilling with the third instead of with the second; this, in the
eighteenth century, was only adhered to by bagpipers, while to our ear
it has become an absolute abomination and barbarity.

A hundred years ago it was considered very daring to perform an _adagio_
before the public in a concert hall. Contemporary musical authors utter
emphatic warnings against this experiment. A sustained, seriously
melancholy composition, dying away in quiet passion, was naturally just
as tiresome for the opulent merry company of those days as a fugue
composition is for the majority of our public. People sought to be
pleasantly incited by music, not thrillingly excited; therefore
comfortable slow tempo was demanded, but no _adagio_. If one did attempt
an _adagio_ in a gallant style of composition the player first had to
render it lively and amusing by all sorts of freely added adornments, by
means of passages and cadences, by improvised trills, _gruppettos_,
_pincements_, _battements_, _flattements_, _doubles_, etc. "In the
_adagio_," says Quantz, speaking of the mode of execution, "each note
must be, as it were, caressed." In the execution of our heroic _adagios_
it is rather required that each note shall be maltreated. From the
viewpoint of the historian of culture it is an important fact that the
first half of the eighteenth century had not yet acquired an ear for the
sentimental, feminine _adagio_. The _adagios_ of Bach and Haendel are all
of the masculine gender. And then what a remarkable alteration of the
musical ear took place, when, in the second half of the same century,
the soft-as-butter _adagios_ of the composers of the day all at once
caused every beautiful soul to melt with tender emotion! At the same
time that the Werther-Siegwart period starts in literature, the layman
acquired an ear for the _adagio_. How very slightly as yet has the
intimate concatenation between the development of music and that of
literature been investigated. The entire _Siegwart_ is indeed nothing
but a melting Pleyel _adagio_, translated into windy words. A
priceless passage in _Siegwart_ treats of the _adagio_. Siegwart a