"Rusignuolo," an exceedingly fluty bird-song.

From Florence, Nevin went to Venice, where he lived in an old _casa_
on the Grand Canal, opposite the Browning palazzo, and near the house
where Wagner wrote "Tristan und Isolde." One day his man, Guido, took
a day off, and brought to Venice an Italian sweetheart, who had lived
a few miles from the old dream-city and had never visited it. The day
these two spent gondoliering through the waterways, where romance
hides in every nook, is imaginatively narrated in tone in Nevin's
suite, "Un Giorno in Venezia," a book more handsomely published even
than the others of his works, which have been among the earliest to
throw off the disgraceful weeds of type and design formerly worn by
native compositions.

The Venetian suite gains a distinctly Italian color from its
ingenuously sweet harmonies in thirds and sixths, and its frankly
lyric nature, and "The Day in Venice" begins logically with the dawn,
which is ushered in with pink and stealthy harmonies, then "The
Gondoliers" have a morning mood of gaiety that makes a charming
composition. There is a "Canzone Amorosa" of deep fervor, with
interjections of "Io t'amo!" and "Amore" (which has the excellent
authority of Beethoven's Sonata, op. 81, with its "Lebe wohl"). The
suite ends deliciously with a night scene in Venice, beginning with a
choral "Ave Maria," and ending with a campanella of the utmost
delicacy.

After a year in Venice Nevin made Paris his home for a year,
returning to America then, where he has since remained.

Though he has dabbled somewhat in orchestration, he has been wisely
devoting his genius, with an almost Chopin-like singleness of mind, to
songs and piano pieces. His piano works are what would be called
_morceaux_. He has never written a sonata, or anything approaching the
classical forms, nearer than a gavotte or two. He is very modern in
his harmonies, the favorite colors on his palette being the warmer
keys, which are constantly blended enharmonically. He "swims in a sea
of tone," being particularly fond of those suspensions and inversions
in which the intervals of the second clash passionately, strongly
compelling resolution. For all his gracefulness and lyricism, he makes
a sturdy and constant use of dissonance; in his song "Herbstgefuehl"
the dissonance is fearlessly defiant of conventions.

[Music:

... Rose
Loeset lebenssatt.
Sich, das letzte lose,
Bleiche Blumenblatt.
G