rds with which
Ernest Newman closes his book on "Gluck and the Opera." "The musician
speaks a language that is in its very essence more impermanent than the
speech of any other art. Painting, sculpture, architecture, and poetry
know no other foe than external nature, which may, indeed, destroy
their creations and blot out the memory of the artist. But the
musician's material is such that, however permanent may be the written
record of his work, it depends not upon this, but upon the permanency
in other men of the spirit that gave his music birth, whether it shall
live in the minds of future generations. Year after year the language
of the art grows richer and more complex, and work after work sinks
into ever-deepening oblivion, until music that once thrilled men with
delirious ecstasy becomes a dead thing, which here and there a student
looks back upon in a mood of scarcely tolerant antiquarianism. In the
temple of the art a hundred statues of the gods are overthrown; and a
hundred others stand with arrested lips and inarticulate tongues, pale
symbols of a vanished dominion which men no longer own. Yet here and
there, through the ghostly twilight, comes the sound of some clear
voice that has defied the courses of the years and the mutations of
taste; and we hear the rich canorous tones of Gluck, not, perhaps, with
all the vigour and the passion that once was theirs, but with the
mellowed splendour given by the touch of time. Alone among his fellows
he speaks our modern tongue, and chants the eternal passions of the
race. He was, indeed, as Sophie Arnould called him, 'The musician of
the soul;' and if we have added new strings to our lyre, and wrung from
them a more poignant eloquence than ever stirred within the heart of
Gluck, none the less do we perceive that music such as his comes to us
from the days when there were giants in the land."

MOZART.

It was in 1762 that Leopold Mozart, father of the two musical
prodigies, Maria Anna and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, first began to turn
to account his children's talent. Wolfgang was then six years old, and
his sister between four and five years older. By easy stages the
family journeyed to Vienna in the month of September, and it is told
that upon their arrival the wonderful boy-musician saved his father the
payment of customs duties. He made friends with the custom-house
officer, showed him his harpsichord, played him a minuet on his little
fiddle, and the