The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1

As we come nearer to our own day, the documents concerning the personal lives of composers begin to multiply. Of the love of Bach we have only that tantalising allusion to the "...

"Though thou hast now offended like a man. Do not persever in it like a devil; Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul, If sin by custom grow not into nature."

"Such music by such a nigger!" exclaimed one prince. Another called him a Moor. And two others could not endure him at all. He was undersized and slender as well; and his legs w...

"No artist has ever penetrated further, for none has ever thrust the thorn of life deeper into his own heart, and won, by the surrender of it, his success and his immortality."

"I have made the acquaintance of an important celebrity, Mme. Dudevant, well known as George Sand; but I do not like her face; there is something in it that repels me."

It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as Mendelssohn lived up to his. His parents were prophets when they called him Felix, for his life was happy, th...

While Händel was in London at the height of his autocracy, he was visited by a composer named Gluck, whom we think of to-day as a revolutionist in music, and a man of the utmost...

Though it sounds strange to speak of the "invention" of opera, that is the word which may be applied to the work of Jacopo Peri and his friends. They, however, thought of it rat...

Johann Ambrosius Bach, the father of "the Father of Modern Music," had a twin brother, Johann Cristoph. They were astonishingly alike in mind and manner and mien. They suffered...

Two young and flamboyant musickers, boon companions, one twenty-two and the other eighteen, strike the town of Lübeck in 1703. They are drawn thither by a vacancy in the post of...

Almost exactly a century before Purcell died in England, there died in Italy, at Rome, a composer who has made his birthplace immortal, though his own name has almost been lost...

There are historians, sour and cynical, who have tried to contradict the truth of the life story of Stradella as Bourdelot tells it in his "Histoire de la Musique et de ses Effe...

If Lassus deserved the name of the Netherlandish Orpheus, Henry Purcell deserved the name his "loveing wife Frances Purcell" gave him when she published after his death a collec...

The Belgian historian, Van der Straeten, has illuminated the crowded shelves of his big work, "La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant Le XIXe Siècle," with various little instances of ro...

The very origins and traditions of the trade of music seem to enforce a certain versatility of emotion and experience. Apollo, the particular god of music, was not much of a lov...

Musicians as lovers! The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys that might be other fingers; the fid...

A contemporary of the Rizzio, so humble as a musician and so soaring in his intrigues, was the great Roland de Lattre, better known as Orland di Lassus or Orlandus Lassus, the "...

While, so far as the author knows, this is the first book on the subject, it is given, perhaps, especial novelty by the fact that advantage could be taken of much new material g...