MUSICAL NOTES.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XCIX, Issue 11558, 20 April 1898, Page 6

MUSICAL NOTES.

" Cantbebubt Times.” The Doke of Coburgrecently for a Strad. It is reported that Mr Barton M’Gncldn -contemplates turning Ms - attention to the comic operastage. There is some hope that Mrs Best,widow of the famous Liverpool organist,, may "receive a pension from tire Civil List in recognition of her husband’s services. A hitherto unknown notebook, in which Mozart jotted down melodies and motifs as they occurred to him when a boy, has been discovered. It came from London in 1764. Yerdi has been busy for some time in Milan, going through early psalms £ind other church music of Ms composition. It is supposed that he intends to publish them shortly. The Art Circle ’of Palermo, Italy, ia offering a prize of 2QOO frhncs,,ahout i'Bo, for a one-act musical comedy, wither without chorus. The-competition, howeveivis restricted to Italian composers over?, thirty-five years old. Fran Cosima Wagner has in her possession, according'to Wagner’s friend Herr Heckel, four unpublished completed plays by her husband, entitled Luther, Frederick the Great, Hans Sachs’ Second Marriage and Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. M. Jules Massenet, the French composer, whose opera, Sapho, has just met with such success in Paris, is of an extremely nervous temperament, and never attends the performance of his own operas. He claims that he really loves nothing but his cigars. Heinrich Botel, famous years ago as a tenor of tremendous robustness, is still living in Berlin, and journals of that city recently announced Ms appearance at three operatic evenings, in wMch he was to sing, in JZ Trovatore, Le Postilion de LongjmmaM, and Fra Diavolo. Karl Sontag, the younger brother of the famous singer, Henrietta Sontag; recently celebrated Ms seventieth birthday. He is an actor, and has won much success in Germany as a comedian; he has also appeared in America successfully. He ia he author of several plays. The London cables announce the appointment of Mr,Frederick Levan, of the Chapel Royal, St James’, to the Adelaide Conservatorium of Mhsio as Professor of Singing. Mr Sevan. is already known in Australia by his song, "The Flight of Ages,” wMch has been mnehisung here. Madame Christine Nilsson -has a-chsixm-ing house at Madrid, where she novrresides. She has had the walls ot her bedroom papered with leaves of music. from the operas in which she has .sung, whale’the dining-room is papered with. receiptßctbills collected by the prima donna in various parts of the world. When Handel undertook, in a--crowded church, to play the dismissal on . a fine organ, the congregation was .so-entranced that no one stirred, till at length the regular organist impatiently waved Handel' out of his seat at the insteumeiit > "Youcannot disperse a congregation. See how soon I can disperse them."” Wagner was at first condemned uGounod’s Faust was hissed on the opening night; Bizet died, it was said, heartbroken by the abuse which the critics gave to Ms Carmen ; the-critics sneered at Madame Melba on her debut; Mascagni' was greeted with-seorn, yet his CavaUeria Rusticana became one of the most successful works of modemcomposition; Reginald de Koven had a hard fight; Sousa’s El Gapitan was mocked in the newspapers. A Russian prince who is fond of Verdi’s music has spent .£I2OO to enable himself to hear Mgolettp whenever he pleases in hia palace at St Petersburg. The opera is acted by life-sized puppets whose acting ia regulated by machinery, and the singing is done by phonograph. The owner has secured phonographic reproductions-o:E the principal parts as sung by £he principal artists of Europe, and changes his cast Jo suit himself. After putting’ the cylinders in place the ownerpresses-a button.and the opera proceeds automatically, so says L’lndepmdance Beige, Yerdi has been chosen honorary president of the competition of'ltalian bands, which will he held during July at the National Exhibition at Turin. That sounds rather like trying work for an old gentleman, but he will have the assis-

tance of Leoncavallo, Boito, Mascagni, Puccini, Massenet, Saint-Saens, Sonsogno, Ricordi and others when it comes to deciding which is the best. Italy will send one hundred bands to the competition, and of these twenty-four will be military in character. Mascagni is shortly to make a tour of Germany with the-orchestra of La Scala, which consists of one hundred and twenty men. Wagner’s step-father was named Goyer, and until almost grown, Wagner himself went by that name. Geyer wanted to make a painter of young Richard, but the' latter could never learn to draw. His gift for music was first suspected from his learning to play bits from Der Freischuts. His first determination, made before he was ten, was to be a poet, and by the time he was eleven, he had written a tragedy in five acts. , Forty-two of the characters died by various violent means during the first four acts, and he found'himself compelled to bring-about a dozen of them back as ghosts,.in order to keep the fifth, act moving to a proper-conclusion. Edward Greig, the. Scandinavian composer, was horn in 1843 at the queer old Norwegian city of Bergen, with its picturesque houses built close by the North Sea. He appears to have inherited his talent (says a writer in Temple Bar ) from his mother, who gave him his musical education up to the age,of fifteen; sheimibued him with a true love of his art, and, doubtless with her, he first dived into the rich storehouse of Scsmdinavianliterafcure, with its Eddas of Norwegian and Icehndio heroes and all its old sagas and myths,.so calculated to inspire the - imagination of a budding musician; for, as some one has pertinently remarked, “a poet need not necessarily be a musician, but a musician mast necessarily be a poet.” In -1858, at the instigation of the-clever but eocejitrio violinist Bomemann (better known as “Ole Bull”) he was sentto Leipzig, then* veritable musical Mecca to the student; he further studied at Copenhagen, with Gade and Hartmann, but he was most-of all influenced in his national tendencies by coming into contact with the gifted Rikard Nordraak, who during his short career gave such unusual evidences of power as to make his premature death a serious loss to the musical world. Greig is in close sympathy with the contemporary leaders of ■ Scandinavian literature, and is, moreover, a very patriotic mam