aps we
rather neglect Italian music of the early part of last century. Once, at
Casale-Monferrato, I heard a travelling company do _I Puritani_; they did
it extremely well, and I thought the music charming, especially one
sparkling little tune sung by Sir Giorgio to warn Sir Riccardo that if he
should see a couple of fantasmas they would be those of Elvira and Lord
Arturo. Alfio may have been thinking of the maxim, "Ars est celare
artem," and may have meant to say that Bellini had shown himself a more
learned contrapuntist than (say) Bach, by concealing his contrapuntal
skill more effectually than Bach had managed to conceal his in the _Mass
in B minor_. While my hair was being cut I examined the polka with
interest; it was quite carefully done, the bass was figured all through
and the discords were all resolved in the orthodox manner; after the shop
was shut he came over to the albergo and played it to us on the piano in
the salon. I should say it was a very good polka, as polkas go, and
certainly more in the manner of the Catanian maestro than in that of the
Leipzig cantor.

"And what about Alfio?" I asked. "Did he also marry a bad woman?"

Then Peppino told me the story of the Figlio di Etna. He called him this
because he came from a village on the slopes of the volcano, where his
parents kept a small inn, the Albergo Mongibello, and where also lived
his cousin Maria, to whom he was engaged. In the days when he used to
talk to me about his counterpoint, Alfio was about twenty-four, and
always so exceedingly cheerful and full of his music that no one would
have suspected that his private life was being carried on in an inferno,
yet so it was; a widow had fallen in love with him, and had insisted on
his living with her. "And look here," said Peppino, "the bad day for
Alfio was the day when he went to the house of the widow." He was too
much galantuomo to resist; he had not forgotten Maria but he thought she
could wait, and besides, he was at first flattered by the widow's
attentions and amused by the novelty of the situation; but he never cared
for the widow, and soon his chains became unbearable. As Peppino said,
"There don't be some word to tell the infernalness it is when you are
loved by the woman you hate." He exercised his contrapuntal ingenuity by
devising schemes for circumventing this troublesome passage in the canto
fermo of his life without breaking any of the rules, and finally hit upon
the devi