by inspiration the dances of Mabille, without
having taken lessons therein.

And so the youth who goes to Paris to seek
his fortune is tempted to enjoy it before he has
earned it; he ravages the future before he
possesses the present. One day his heart fails
him. He has no longer the strength to decide
on a different starting-point. Madness
misleads him to the river-side. The low parapet
invites him. A dull sound in the water is heard,
and the stream flows on. After a while, the
Morgue exhibits one body more to the gaze of
the multitude.

SHAKESPEARE MUSIC.
IN THREE ACTS.
THIRD ACT. COMEDIE—PLAYS OF SENTIMENT—
SONGS.

THE comedies of Shakespeare have been less
frequented by the musician than his fantastic
plays, or those of passion and sentiment. Good
themes for unmixed mirth, set to dramatic
melody, are not easy to find. Very small is the
amount of purely comic operas which deserve
to last. In selecting their subjects, however,
the composers have ruled their proceedings with
a certain caprice. Not an eye—to instance from
Shakespeare—seems to have been turned
towards Taming the Shrew, clearly as the characters
are marked, and strong as are the situations;—
whereas Love's Labour Lost has been more than
once attempted, and, at the time being, has been
pressed by Parisian adapters into the service of
Mozart's music, to replace in his "Cosi fan
tutte" the utterly weak and monstrous story by
which so much of the beauty of so beautiful a
work has been damaged, if not destroyed.

Among all the comedies, the one most in
favour among the musicians has been The Merry
Wives of Windsor. The raciness of the story,
the excellent opportunity afforded for acting and
singing, without any great requirement of youth
and beauty in the heroines, the working out of
the broad mirth of the intrigue by the false
supernatural scenes round Herne's oak, the love
comedy of Anne and her suitors, are all so many
excellent temptations.—The first who yielded to
them was Salieri at Vienna, the master whose
name has undeservedly lain under a cloud, as
though he had been the cause, not merely of
Mozart's denied prosperity, but even (slander went
on to whisper) of his death. The tale of Salieri
having contrived, or attempted, to poison the
composer of Don Juan (which that facile and
credulous genius is said to have believed), still
lurks and simmers in by-places, on the charitable
hypothesis of there never being smoke without
fire, and some geographical superstition that
all Italians must be born poisoners! Nothing
that is known of Salieri justifies the malignant
anecdote. He appears to have been an amiable,
friendly man, not illiberal to other artists, trusted
by Gluck, grateful to Gassmann, who took
charge in part of his early education—speaking
a sort of polyglot dialect, and as fond as a child
of sweetmeats;—a composer of unquestioned
merit, forming one of the group of Italians to
which belong Cherubini, Spontini, and Muzio
Clementi, and best known by his setting of
Beaumarchais's Tarare. His Falstaff, produced
in Vienna, to Italian words, is only known by
one air, " La stessa stessissima," and that air
recollected for no remarkable beauty, but
because Beethoven treated it as a theme for
variation.

Far better has The Merry Wives been set for
Germany since Salieri's time, though by a
composer far inferior to himself, Nicolai. There is
no modern German comic opera of greater, if of
equal merit. Without any such originality
as Weber stamped on every bar of melody
that he wrote, the music is spirited and well
knit, never affected, never flagging; with a comic
humour, too sparingly to be enjoyed in light
German music. The voices are nicely handled,
the instrumentation is sprightly and solid, without
being overcharged. One passage merits
higher praise: the instrumental night-prelude
at the foot of Herne's oak, which is about as
good a picture in music as could be named. The
man who wrote this opera (only his second one,
the first having been a setting of Ivanhoe) might
have done much to revive lively German stage
music (at present in a deplorable plight of feebleness),
had he lived to follow out his career.

Then, there is our lively countryman, Mr.
Balfe—the composer among composers in being
into whose lap the largest number of capital
chances have been showered; no one, in our
recollection, having been so fortunate in his
singers. Think of having for Falstaff, Lablache;
for Fenton, Rubini; for Mrs. Ford, Grisi; for
Master Brook, Tamburini. " I hope here is a
play fitted." That Mr. Balfe takes his art
lightly, is part and parcel of his nature.
Occasionally, most happy as a melodist, always
writing for the voice that which is becoming to
sing, he has proved himself too easily
contented with a few happy strokes and attractive
touches, and to leave more of his work
imperfectly thought and wrought out, than the man
must do who desires that such work should live.
Perhaps in none of his operas, now numbering
some half a hundred, has he been more unequal
than in this particular one. It is hard to
forgive this inequality in one who is capable of
producing a piece of comic music so capital as the
trio of the Wives and Anne, where the effect of
unison, so intolerably abused by the modern
Italians (Signer Rossini began it in La Gazza
Ladra), is turned to the happiest, drollest,
possible account; but not a note beyond this,
from Mr. Balfe's Falstaff, is even already left
alive.

There is a setting of The Comedy of Errors,
operatically, as Gli Equivoci, by some Italian,
composer, but the name has escaped me. The
task was alike a hopeless and ridiculous one; the
very want of variety in the characters which
makes the embroilments of the buffoonery of the
play so hopelessly comical, must lead to a
corresponding monotony and confusion in the music,
if the play be set with intelligence.